Earlier today, the New York Post reported that the first ever video of a live giant squid have been released. Japanese zoologist Tsunemi Kubodera led the documentary team lucky enough to capture the creature in its natural habitat. Kubodera's team shot the footage last July near the Ogasawara islands.
"Many people have tried to capture an image of a giant squid alive in its natural habit, whether that's researchers or film crews. But they all failed. These are the first ever images of a real live giant squid," Kubodera told Reuters.
This wasn't the first time the zoologist from Japan's National Museum of Nature and Science encountered the squid. He captured still images of a living squid in 2005, and also managed to carch one using a baited line. "I've seen a lot of giant squid specimens in my time,” he said, “but mainly those were hauled out of the ocean. This was the first time for me to see, with my own eyes, a giant squid swimming in its deep sea habitat. It was stunning, I couldn't have dreamt that it would be so beautiful.”
Kubodera led a 40 day-long expedition and employed a submersible vessel equipped with specialized lights designed not to alert the creature in order to get his footage. He accompanied a camera man and the vessel's pilot 2,000 feet below the ocean's surface where they released the bait: a 3ft diamond squid.
"If you try and approach making a load of noise, using a bright white light, then the squid don't come anywhere near you. That was our basic thinking. So we sat there in the pitch black, using a near-infrared light invisible even to the human eye, waiting for the giant squid to approach," Kubodera said.
The giant squid he and his team captured on film was 10ft. long, small for the species standards. The largest of the species ever hauled out of the ocean measured a whopping 60ft. The footage is slated to air on the Japanese network NHK on Jan. 13, and on Discovery Channel on Jan. 27.
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