Giant Squid footage on History Channel

[Clem]

Well, it does look like they got footage of a really big squid, but the fellow they had estimating its size seemed to proceed with some dubious asumptions, in particular a quick smear of light which he took to be the squid's eye and used as a fixed reference point when determining the distance from the "eye" to the buccal. The video expert guesstimating size indicated 60ft if a Humbolt, 108 ft if Archi. (This may be a personal prejudice, but when someone gives an unrounded estimate I tend to snark. "At approximately 9:34pm..." etc., etc.)

Whatever it was, it looked very big, quite long-armed and rather slow-moving in its brief appearance. Pretty sure I got a glimpse of tentacles, which appeared short or semi-retracted. Look forward to hearing what the rest of us think once we've got some decent stills to look at.

Cheers,
Clem

 

[WhiteKiboko]

i thought the same thing.....

now we now why they kept harping on Superhumboldts...

 

[Clem]

I'm admittedly a sucker for big USOs (unidentified squid objects), but the hype about the "monster" tended to obscure the very real achievement of the expedition, which was the succesful deployment, operation and recovery of the first squidcam. Bravo, gents and ladies!

 

[monty]

First commercial break thoughts:

I see what you mean about the werewolf eye.

I also think they could have used some feedback on the narration-- rhodopsin is "little known"?

I pretty much hate all the computer animation, but that's probably 'cause I'm a snob. The "diving with the camera" animation has it swimming like a dolphin. And the fins and funnel are all wrong... particularly when seen side-by-side with all of gonetobaja and crew's great real footage!

 

[OB]

Suspense not good for ole' ticker

 

[monty]

er, ok, so Scott says he has problems with squids getting their beaks around his forearms. Wouldn't that require the beak to be around 2-3 times bigger than Mesonychoteuthis?

And yes, I see Dr. Steve in a lab coat in a few of the Architeuthis pics.

Bummer about the -> stuff, Dale... I hate it when that happens, and I've never had somebody put it into a documentary... Cousteau's editors were apparently kinder in editing that sort of stuff out.

In general, I like your dialogue quite a bit, though, by the way.

The camera squid's a real beauty, and seemed pretty relaxed, all things considered.

I guess my bottom line is about like Hanlon's-- it's big. it's a squid. The image is so noisy I don't think depth of field is too useful because the focus is hard to see. Of course, there's not really any referents... but I didn't think the eye reflection was where I'd expect it to be relative to the arm crown we can see, so I think the base assumption that using that dimension is questionable.

I wasn't able to get mythTV working enough to record it, but I did record it on our crappy DVR. I don't know how to get it off in a digital format, though.

I want to freeze-frame and look at the footage a few more times, but my take is that the "eye to beak" measurement would both involve an unnatural contortion and would not be proportional to the size of the arms for squid I can think of... the eyes are usually straight out from the brain, with the two eyes and the beak forming about an equilateral triangle, right?

I know they were wanting to toss out hypotheses about species, but it got a little silly... Mesonychoteuthis would be rather far afield from its usual stomping ground. However, it seems silly that Moroteuthis wasn't proposed-- the Humboldts have been up in its territory, so maybe it doesn't mind going south occasionally... or is it known that far south? Nixon & Young say it's "north pacific" as well as antactic. I didn't know that it was known to eat sea urchins off the bottom, though (also from Nixon & Young)-- that's interesting.

Anyway, in going back and re-watching in slow-mo and such, I don't see any way that the eye could be that far from the mouth with the arms in that orientation. I just can't make it work. I don't know what that reflection is, but I'm convinced it's not the eye of the squid that belongs to those arms.

More in a sec.

 

[monty]

Here's my take from the peanut gallery:

This is my "poor man's screenshot" (snapshot of the TV) of one of the few frames they used for the "eye" business. Those who didn't see the video will have to take my word for it that the spread arms are there for a number of frames, and are pretty much acting like a squid, since I know in the single frame they're really fuzzy.



Here's an annotated version, with the arrow showing the spot where the measurements assume the reflection from the eye is, and the * being approximately where I think the eye ought to be for any reasonable squid with arms where the arms are.



I'm not making this up, here's another photo (likely taken by Dale, 'cause I got it off of the Sea of Demons trailer, although I flipped it horizontally to make my point.) The arms are in a similar configuration. Notice where the eye is. Also notice the length of the arms compared to the ones in the shot of the giant one, which gives some proportionality to it. In any large squid I'm aware of, the distance to the eye is from the arm crown is far shorter than the length of the arms. Like 10% of the distance. If that spot is the eye, either it has a huge head and tiny arms, or it's in some really weird posture, where it's just flaring the end 20-30% of the arms, but even if that's true, then measuring the center of the flare isn't measuring the distance to the beak.



Anyway, I think the distance estimates are just kooky. And I think some of it's a bit played up-- comparing the 4 or 5 videos I've seen involving Scott diving with squids, it seems like every time there's some new armor that's needed to prevent certain death, or whatever. I'm sure it's no fun to be bitten by a 6 foot squid, but the video makes it out like attaching the camera to the squid was a new, scary, and really dangerous task, requiring special new armor and stuff... I don't mean to downplay the dangers of diving with big squids, but it seems like the hazards aren't portrayed consistently across all the videos...

Those details aside, though, I thought it was a great show. Ellis was pretty good about debunking the exaggerations, and Hanlon seemed to have said a lot of good stuff, although their editing seemed snip stuff out of context a bit.

 

[daviddickinson]

Is that flash more likely the light catching the edge of the fin? From the pictures, that's the immediate impression it gives me...but that's without seeing it moving...

 

[OB]

My thoughts EXACTLY; if anyone's claiming to see an eye reflecting, that's a load of moo poo...

I'll stick with a 1.5 meter ML

 

[monty]

Well, in all fairness, most cephs trying to be cryptic in inky darkness have their eyes show up more than other body parts. It seems odd that there would be a specular highlight off a fin, where seeing retinas is not so uncommon (think of a cat's eyes glowing at night when it's looking toward you standing under the porch light from out in the darkness.) Humboldts do, though, seem to have deliberate reflective colors for signaling; the flashing they do contrasts between reflective white leucophores (I assume) and reddish dark ('cause there's little red light down there) chromatophores, and they seem to be very active in using that flashing to communicate and/or startle prey or predators. So maybe the squid was in "bright white" during those frames. Still, Dosidicus are usually diffuse, scattering light in all directions like matte paint, not specular, making a shiny spot like metal or glossy paint. And that spot sure looks like a mirror-like reflection off something.

Of course, there's not any reason I can see to think it can't be the reflection off the eye of another random small squid lurking in the inky blackness, where the only thing that gives enough reflection from those LEDs is the eye. That dot is only visible for a few frames, so even if it's a different squid than the visible arms, there's no reason to think it's connected to the same animal, IMHO. But I agree that it's about where I'd expect the fins to be, if it is attached to the visible arms of the big squid.

Another thought, which maybe Dale can shed some light on since he's seen the footage without the dramatic edits, is that if it was really a squid with arms a foot in diameter or whatever they said, that would suggest that the animal is quite far away from the camera, given the field of view (which is pretty wide, given the weird distortions of things near the edge of images when they come in close to bite the camera.) Let's pretend it's a 45 degree field of view, and that the tentacle subtends less than 5% of the video frame (note that I made both of those numbers up, so they're maybe accurate to a factor of 2 either way, but this is back-of-the-envelope.) So, if the arm is one foot across, and that's 5% of the 45 degree field of view, then the animal is in a plane that's more than 20 feet high as seen through a 45 degree arc. This is consistent with the number on the "expert's" screen that the squid is about 25 feet away from the camera (because 10/tan(pi/8) is about 25 if anyone wants to check by trig). This is the expected result, since I'm using his assumptions as a starting point.

The question I'd ask in looking at the raw video are:

what do smaller squids look like in these lighting conditions at that distance?

unfortunately, changing camera direction doesn't give any parallax information to get distance, so even though the big squid is occluded by the mantle of the camera squid at some point, that doesn't give distance or size information, and because the light source is at the camera, we can't see the shadow of the camera squid on the big squid.

Still, I'd be inclined to say that a squid as the sort of extreme guesses would not be that well lit by the lights of the camera. It looks like the visibility there is pretty good for diving, and I assume it's a low-light camera since it's so grainy, but those little LEDs can't possibly be all that bright. Particularly since the light has to go to the squid, get scattered off the white arms (so most of it won't be going back toward the camera, 'cause it's not a mirror-like squid) and then come back to the camera, so that's 50 feet of attenuation by water plus whatever the fractional reflection of the squid arms is.

Dale, in what you remember of the dive conditions, if you were on a night dive with only the camera as your light source, what would you expect the effective visibility for seeing a white thing would be? I know my nice dive light (which died from a battery leak, RIP) was a halogen 8 D cell thing that looked a whole lot brighter than those LEDs, and I wouldn't count on seeing much at 25 feet with it... and my dive light is also much more of a spot, while the LEDs have to be spread over a wide cone to get the whole camera field of view. And because LEDs have a more limited spectrum, they probably have less energy per perceived brightness, so I would expect them to fall off faster in the water than a bright incandescent like a halogen. But I think Dale's impression of the LEDs on the actual camera is far more trustworthy than my possibly-dubious rough calculations.

edit: a pure experimental version that could be done if the guy with the camera wanted to would be just to do a night dive in similar visibility conditions and make a white dummy target with a size scale, and see what the camera sees as you swim away from it. Of course, that assumes that the visibility is the same at 1000 feet on the day of the squidcam as it is at 30 feet or wherever/whenever the experiment is done.

 

[erich orser]

Just caught this on DVR - I was working, then sleeping - and I have to go with Monty on this, in fact, he's pretty much said everything I was thinking, particularly about the relative position of the "eye" reflection from the arms being all wrong. However, I don't think this was a Humboldt. We were looking at a much bigger squid of some kind. The arms just seemed a little too long and thin to be dosidicus gigas. Of course I might be mistaken, but I second the suggestion that this might have been M. Robusta. Only really large squid I can think of that lives anywhere near Baja, although Architeuthis debris has been taken from the Channel Islands areas of Southern California.

Regardless, and no matter what the producers/editors did with the finished product, full props and congratulations to Dale and Scott for their end of things. Truly impressive achievement, gentlemen!

 

[OB]

Hear, hear!

 

[Reconman]

Hi every one, I've got some interesting screen caps from the preview for the giant squid episode that just aired. After reading Monty's post regarding the position of the squids "eye" and looking at some pics of real squids and realizing how wrong the history channel was, I decided to look at the online footage to see if I could find some indicator of the squids true size. Now before I post the pics I would just like every one to know that I'm no video expert and I'm certainly no squid expert. I've just always been very interested in squid, especially when it comes to giant squid. I believe the screen caps I have taken show the actual eye of the squid for two reasons: One because the round, white object is always on the same spot of the squid when visible and Two because it's in a position that would be relative to the squid's tentacles. The pics aren't posted according to their appearance in the clip, I just saved them all at once, just in case some one was wondering. I'll post the pictures in the following order: First picture will be a normal screen capture, the second will be the same screen capture but will have red markings indicating where I believe certain things are.

*Please forgive me if I use the incorrect anatomy terms, I've never really "studied" squid before*

Pic 1 -

The red arrow indicates what I believe to be the squid's eye, the red curve indicates where I think the head stops and the body starts.

Pic 2 -

Pic 3 -

Pic 4 -

If you'll notice in the above pic, the "eye" has "disappeared". But you'll also notice that the end of the head/ start of the body (indicated by the red curve) has gotten closer to the squid's tentacles. This most likely indactes the squid has bent it's self upwards, making the tentacles raise as the head dips below.

Pic 5 -

This picture is the same as the previous photo, but I added some lighting in hopes of getting better visibility.

Pic 6 -

Again, I indicate what I believe to be the eye with a red arrow and a red curve for the start of the body. But you'll notice that there is a red line running parallel with the squid. This line indicates the possible end of the head, in terms of it's width.

Pic 7 -

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hopefully these screen captures can gives us a better idea of the squid's actual size. Of course, I could be completely wrong (which there's a big chance I am), but I'm still very curious as to what other's think about the screen captures and my "analysis" of them.

 

[monty]

Reconman! Thanks for the screen captures-- they're much better than my snapshot. Do you have the ability to make a movie or two showing the "big squid" footage, and also maybe some of the footage from the squidcam showing the smaller squids? Particularly if there's a shot showing how fast one of the smaller squids that attacks the camera fades out to the same shade of grey as the big one... 'cause then we could compare how big that one is at the same "brightness" and assume that it's at the same distance as the big one...

I certainly think your theory is believable, and it's in the right area for the eye. An initial thought was that squids almost always use their statocysts to keep their eyes level, but then I realized we have no way to judge if the camera is rotated away from level, so that doesn't tell us much about whether the frame has anything to do with gravity.

So, sure, that, pretty much where I'd expect the eye to be. Whether the fuzzy blob you point at is the eye or not, I couldn't say, but it's a much more believable candidate for it than the one the show used, IMHO.

On the other hand, I'd expect Dale, Scott, Dr. Hanlon, and Richard Ellis to all know much more about squid anatomy than I do, so I'm mildly surprised that either they didn't run the logic past any of these folks... although I guess Dale said he hadn't seen the footage, so maybe they didn't go revisit any of them after interviewing the camera guy and the video expert guy, who seem to be the ones who actually made crazy-big estimates.

 

[Reconman]

Thanks for the feedback, Monty! I do have a few programs that will be able to record the streamed footage, but I've got to mess with the settings in order for the recording to play back smoothly. Once I've got a smooth recording, I'll be sure to post a link to it! I also noticed that the camera footage has the smaller squids in color, but the "giant squid" is in a "gray mode". I'm sure it's because it's so deep down but at the same 1,000 foot mark, they still show colored squid that are closer to the camera... Is it possible that the bigger squid is that far from the camera that the light is barely reaching it??? I don't know but it seems like the analyst skipped or looked over some major things.