Out of the north Atlantic depths

ANOTHER LIFE: Up to last Sunday's Force 10, the depressions spiralling up the Atlantic from behind the television weatherman had been benign enough, raising only modest terraces of breakers at the shore. The prudent side of me, watching the rusty roof on the woodshed, has been quite relieved; the wild-eyed beachcomber, however, has felt rather cheated with such meagre sweepings of the ocean.

Spoiled, in my time, by exotic corpses among the dead whales and turtles of the world, I hunger for something worth getting out the tape-measure, camera and reference books for. News of a marine event off Scotland last month has suggested a wholly splendid candidate - Architeuthis, the giant squid.

On a rough, dark night west of St Kilda, the Fraserburgh trawler, Marina Polaris, hauled its net from a depth of 770 metres with a few tons of blue ling, black scabbard and deep-sea weirdos such as ratfish. As the cod-end of the net came up the ramp, something large and white, the size of a dolphin, gleamed in the deck-lights.

It was only a middle-sized giant squid, drained of colour and missing its two long tentacles, but what was left measured more than three metres from the fins to the end of the arms. Once pickled in formalin, it will be put on display at the National Marine Aquarium in Plymouth. As it happened, the aquarium had just bought an animatronic giant squid for a new tank of marvels, "The Abyss", having settled for plastic in place of impossible flesh.

Well, all right - an Architeuthis hauled up from the North Atlantic depths is a long way from one arriving, with or without tentacles, on the sands of Thallabawn. But the record, ancient and modern, offers just enough facts to nourish my fantasy.

Out on the horizon is the long, low shape of Inishbofin where, in 1875, an Architeuthis with 30-foot tentacles was washed ashore and duly recorded as a "gigantic squid" by the naturalist Alexander More. Indeed, the earliest record in these islands was of a beast washed ashore alive on the Dingle Peninsula in 1673, a time when tales of the Kraken (Norwegian for sea monster) were already long established among mariners.

But one can leap to the present for evidence that the Kraken is alive and well and living in some numbers within a few days' drift of Thallabawn.

In 1995, the Marine Institute had survey scientists aboard the M.F.V. Sionnainn, trawling the sea-bed west of the Aran Islands and at the Porcupine Bank at depths of about 300 metres. It brought up two separate Architeuthis, in April and June, both of modest size, but all in one piece. In each squid, the mantle, or "body", was about a metre long, with tentacles almost six metres long, and the weight was around 26 kilos. A third squid, brought up by a Galway trawler from 110 metres, was much the same size and weight.

Mere tadpoles, perhaps, compared with Jules Verne's monster in 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, or even the largest Architeuthis on record in the North Atlantic, a carcass recovered off Newfoundland's Grand Banks measuring 57 feet overall and weighing one ton.

The average torpedo-shaped biggie has eight thick arms up to three metres in length and tentacles that reach 10 metres or more. These whip out to grab prey with sucker-covered pads and haul it back to the sucker-lined arms, which in turn wrap the food within reach of a sharp and powerful, parrot-like beak with its barbed tongue: there's no escape.

IN such large specimens, the eyes are the size of a human head: the largest in the animal kingdom. They are structured much like our own, evolving independently, and gaze with the same unblinking intelligence many scientists have remarked in its fellow cephalopod, the octopus.

Since the early Dingle specimen, only about 200 giant squid have been recovered worldwide, most of them badly damaged or decayed. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the scientific literature swelled with descriptions of different Architeuthis species, often based on body parts, from tentacles to beaks. Even today, the taxonomy of the group is considered chaotic.

Many of these bits and pieces were taken, part-digested, from the stomachs of sperm whales, the giant squid's chief ocean enemy, whose battles in the deep with Architeuthis, emitting clouds of ink, often leave them scarred with small sucker-wounds.

The squid's hard, chitinous beak, in particular, stays intact. Some were taken, for example, from sperm whales brought into the whaling station at Belmullet in the early 1900s, and the big one which drifted in, dead, to Thallabawn, in 1949, undoubtedly had squid beaks in its belly.

As the drive for new fish species for human food extends to the depths of the continental slope, the number of giant squid trawled up in passing, as it were, seems bound to grow.

They are quite inedible for humans, having a high ammonia content, but will, no doubt, provide pickled attractions at our burgeoning west coast aquaria. In such disturbance of the deeps, dead (and possibly net-marked) squid seem highly likely to end up as flotsam: the last to strand around these islands drifted in at Newburgh, in Scotland, in January 1998 - a female slightly bigger than our recent west-coast specimens.

The physical data for biologists will continue to grow, but what actually happens in the deep-ocean lives of Architeuthis seems likely to remain guesswork for some long time, even in the age of Jules Verne submersibles. In 1999, an expedition, backed by the Smithsonian Institution and involving a BBC television unit, spent weeks exploring the Kaikoua Canyon, off New Zealand, with a one-man submersible making dives to 670 metres.

Inside was the Smithsonian's giant squid expert, Dr Clyde Roper, who hoped the sperm whales diving nearby would serve as "marine hound-dogs" to flush out Architeuthis, and perhaps stage heroic struggles in front of his video camera. Alas, the monsters never showed - this while deep-sea trawlers captured no fewer than six of them in the depths beside the South Island.

Now you know why the BBC's mesmerising Blue Planet series was missing its most elusive star.