Diving instructors recounted that the 2.5-meter marine animal appeared weak and had slow movements. Although they are often seen off the coast of Japan, encounters with live giant squid are rare.
2 Japanese divers recently managed to capture images of a rare encounter with a 2.5-meter-long giant squid swimming off the western coast of their country’s archipelago.
Yosuke Tanaka and his wife Miki, dive instructors in Toyooka, Hyogo department, were warned by a fishing tackle seller that he had seen the giant squid near the surface in a bay.
“A huge squid”
The pair, who described their encounter in a dive service blog, set off in search of the mollusk near a rocky shore, where there was a lot of seaweed: “It was there, a huge squid,” Tanaka explained.
“It didn’t have the agile movements of many fish and sea creatures. Its tentacles and fins were moving very slowly,” he said.
The squid appeared weak and some of its skin seemed to be coming off its body, the diver noted.
The size of the animal and its enormous eyes were surprising, and he admitted that he felt “terrified” because it had “very thick arms; if they caught me, I wouldn’t be able to escape.”
I could grow so much more
After 30 minutes, the marine animal was lost to sight in the depths of the ocean. Giant squids are known to live in the waters near Japan and sometimes end up on its shores, but it is very rare to see them alive in the sea.
According to specialists, this 2.5-meter giant squid was relatively “small.” According to Jon Ablett, an expert on molluscs and cephalopods at the Natural History Museum in London, a giant squid can measure almost 12 meters.
“The colossal squid, Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, is thought to be (even) larger in terms of mass and possibly also in length than the giant squid, although no one has found such a mature specimen,” Ablett told Newsweek.