The Giant Squid

The Kraken: when myth encounters science

“…Subsequent marine research began using new methods to capture animals, including trawling nets, but few were the giant squids captured at sea. This even led some authors (Roper, Boss, 1982) to question whether squids were able to avoid capture somehow. In any case, all the recovered animals were dying or already dead (and in a bad state of preservation); in the worst cases, only parts of the animal, like a tentacle fragment, were recovered.…”

“…Until the 1940s, it was common practice to describe a new species whenever a new fragment was found, as Steenstrup, Verrill and others had done. This is why the descriptions were never accompanied by clear diagnoses to distinguish among the many species (Clarke, 1966;Roper, Boss, 1982;Roeleveld, 2000). Thus, the family's taxonomy remains messy to this day, in large part due to the scarcity of well-preserved material and the logistical difficulty of conducting a comparative study with such huge animals.…”

“…A handful of authors have risked issuing some opinions regarding the group's taxonomy, but none have conducted any proper revisionary work. Some believe that few of the current species are valid: for Roper and Boss (1982), for instance, the genus only has three valid species: A. dux from the North Atlantic, A. japonica from the North Pacific, and A. sanctipauli from the southern hemisphere. Others (Aldrich, 1991;Förch, 1998;Roeleveld, 2000) claim that all the genus diversity can be accommodated in a single species of variable morphology, namely A. dux.…”

“…The coloring of Architeuthis goes from dark red to brown, but it very likely shares with other squids the ability to instantly change color (Roper, Boss, 1982;Aldrich, 1991). The giant squid's eyes are the largest in the animal kingdom, but are proportionally small when compared with other cephalopods (Roeleveld, Lipinski, 1991).…”

“…Architeuthis, the single genus of the family Architeuthidae, has about 20 species, many precariously described, usually based only on tentacle fragments (Figure 10), beaks ( Figure 11) or other body parts (Clarke, 1966(Clarke, , 1968Roper, Boss, 1982;Roeleveld, 2000). Until the 1940s, it was common practice to describe a new species whenever a new fragment was found, as Steenstrup, Verrill and others had done.…”