Elusive deep-sea squid caught on camera for the first time: Watch
An elusive deep-sea squid species was caught on camera for the first time ever in a major breakthrough.
National Geographic, on June 10, revealed the "history-making sighting" of a massive, three-foot long deep-sea squid, which has never before been seen alive, saying the first-ever video footage of the Gonatus antarcticus was captured "on Christmas Day by the Schmidt Ocean Institute's research vessel, the R/V Falkor (too)." Schmidt Ocean Institute, a nonprofit organization, is focused on ocean research, discovery, and knowledge.
The "surprise moment" was "caught on camera via the research vessel's remotely operated vehicle (ROV), SuBastian," in the Southern Ocean, National Geographic said in a press release.
Manuel Novillo, a postdoctoral researcher at Argentina's Instituto de Diversidad y Ecología Animal, who was aboard the ship, told NatGeo the expedition wasn't even meant to be in the area that day. But adverse weather conditions and treacherous sea ice forced them to choose a new site at the outer edge of the Powell Basin, instead of inside the "unexplored abyssal plain," which has a depth of approximately 9,800 feet.
On Christmas morning, as Novillo watched a live video feed of the expedition's remote vehicle, SuBastian, traveling 7,000 feet through the ocean's depth towards the seabed, he spotted a shadow which caught his attention. Novilla asked the pilot to get closer and 'voila, it appeared,' he told NatGeo.
'What are the odds?' Novillo said about the experience. 'We were not supposed to be there and not at that precise moment.
Prior to the sighting, the Gonatus antarcticus was only known from carcasses in fishing nets or when the squids' beaks were found in the stomach of fished marine animals, NatGeo said.
Watch: Young colossal squid captured on video in its natural habitat for the first time
Alex Hayward, senior lecturer at the University of Exeter in England, told National Geographic that deep-sea squids have good eyesight and usually avoid the lights of a research vessel, making it impossible to spot them.
'We want to see them, but they probably don't want to see us most of the time,' she told the publication.
The Gonatus antarcticus squid, which has a red and bluish appearance and is characterized by a large single central hook on each tentacle club, is found only in the frigid waters around Antarctica, according to NatGeo. It was spotted at a depth of approximately 2152 meters in the Southern Ocean's Weddell Sea. Researchers, however, have not been able to confirm the squid's sex or age from the footage.
Novillo told the publication that the squid released a small cloud of greenish ink as it was spotted, perhaps startled by the vehicle. The squid also had scratches on its arms and fresh-looking sucker marks on its mantle, hinting at some kind of recent predation attempt that it may have managed to escape.
During the expedition, the research team also mapped several previously unexplored sites throughout the Southern Ocean and collected various samples of sediment, water, and biota for research purposes, NatGeo said. Part of the expedition was to examine the impact of climate and environmental change in and around the Weddell Sea, "an area prioritized for marine protection and one of the few near-pristine ecosystems on the planet."
Earlier, in March, crew members on board a research vessel operated by Schmidt Ocean Institute in the South Atlantic Ocean recorded a video of the world's largest squid species. The nearly one-foot-long juvenile colossal squid was spotted floating at a depth of approximately 1968 feet below the waters around the South Sandwich Islands, a volcanic archipelago located between the tip of South America and Antarctica.
Saman Shafiq is a trending news reporter for USA TODAY. Reach her at sshafiq@gannett.com and follow her on X and Instagram @saman_shafiq7.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Deep-sea squid species caught on camera for the first time: Watch
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Photograph by Matthew Irving, Nat Geo Image Collection (Top) (Left) and Photograph by Mark Fisher, Nat Geo Image Collection (Bottom) (Right) In the world of mountaineering, there's no regulatory body governing monitoring performance-enhancing drugs, but the style of a climber's ascent still holds reputational cache. Ever since Messner and Habeler's 1978 expedition proved that even the highest mountain on Earth could be climbed without supplemental oxygen, not using it has become an essential part of pushing the limits of the human body in high altitude. Called alpine style, this form of mountaineering—embraced by elite climbers—prizes climbs done without medical aids, fixed lines, or large support teams. In contrast, a 30-year boom in commercial expeditions has focused on making the mountains more accessible to less experienced climbers, with hundreds of feet of fixed ropes, large amounts of supplemental oxygen, and the support of Sherpas. 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Hermann Buhl in 1953, after summiting Nanga Parba, the ninth highest mountain in world, located in Pakistan. Under the influence of the drug pervitin, a stimulant similar to methamphetamine, Buhl was able to push on to the summit after the rest of his team was forced to return to camp, making Buhl the first and only person to make a solo-ascent of an 8,000 meter peak. Photograph by Touring Club Italiano/Marka/UniversalA view of Nanga Parbat as seen from Jammu & Kashmir, 1933. Photograph by Royal Air Force/Royal'If you use supplemental oxygen continuously, oxygen delivery to tissues is maintained. You will not develop altitude illness, and exercise performance will not be affected,' explains Martin Burtscher, a long-time researcher in the field of high-altitude medicine and retired professor at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. 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Photograph by Renan Ozturk, Nat Geo Image Collection Before he became an advocate of xenon, Furtenbach had experimented with having clients sleep at home in tents with reduced oxygen and training with limited oxygen to help simulate the acclimatization process. That shortened the ascent time to three weeks. Knowing this, Fries, the anaesthesiologist, approached Furtenbach back in 2019 with the idea of using xenon and its erythropoietin production ability to accelerate acclimatisation even further. When confronted with limited oxygen at high altitude, the human body gradually releases erythropoietin after several weeks of acclimatisation, as a climber makes rounds up and down the mountain, slowly gaining altitude. Fries, who spent 15 years researching different effects of xenon while working at Aachen University's hospital in Germany, theorized that a one-time low-dose administration of the gas could produce the same results in a matter of days. Fries also contends that xenon can prevent high-altitude sickness due, in part, to its positive effect on the blood vessels that connect the heart and lungs. Furtenbach first tested xenon on himself in 2020 while climbing Argentina's 22,831-foot Aconcagua and, two years later, on Everest. Both times, he says, he felt strong and fast, and didn't experience any negative side effects. Then he crafted a plan for including xenon in the expeditions offered by his self-titled company, Furtenbach Adventures, which facilitates climbs up Everest and other famous mountains. The decision to offer xenon to clients, he says, was done to make climbing safer. 'The fewer rotations you have to do on the mountain, the safer the expedition becomes,' he argues. (Furtenbach also thinks shorter trips could help curtail the large amounts of garbage long expeditions leave behind.) For the first-ever xenon 'powered' expedition, he chose four British clients, who boasted a combination of high-altitude climbing experience and military training. After ten weeks of pre-acclimatisation at home, sleeping and training with limited oxygen, they received a low dose of xenon in a German hospital and two weeks later embarked from London on their five-day-long ascent. No immediate serious side effects from the xenon treatment were observed by Furtenbach or the members of the expedition. The price of the climb was 150,000 euros a person. Furtenbach declined to specify how much xenon, an expensive gas, added to this total. Climbing rope is a ubiquitous tool amongst mountaineers, and learning how to safely build anchors and belay are essential skills. However, on some mountains, ropes may be pre-anchored and left in place for the entirety of the season to aid less experienced climbers. Left, the first Nepali female to climb Manaslu studies ice anchors in a climbing class. Right, a mountaineer descends to camp III during an attempt to summit Hkakabo Razi, said to be Southeast Asia's tallest mountain. Photograph by Aaron Huey, Nat Geo Image Collection (Top) (Left) and Photograph by Renan Ozturk, Nat Geo Image Collection (Bottom) (Right) Not everyone with high-altitude expertise is convinced that xenon is the best way to quickly climb Everest. Some experts argued that a one-week ascent might be possible without a miracle drug like xenon, if only the climbers would use a high enough flow of oxygen right from the bottom. 'If you have a big flow of oxygen, you don't need to work as hard to acclimatise. From an oxygen perspective, you're not going to the summit of Everest, but much lower,' says Mike Grocott, professor of anaesthesia and critical care at the University of Southampton in England and expert on the physiology of hypoxia. This theory, too, was tested this May when Ukraine-born Andrew Ushakov stated that he climbed to the top of Everest in a little less than four days after leaving New York. To achieve this, he used supplemental oxygen and trained in low-oxygen conditions. A team from the Elite Exped company guided Ushakov to the top. He says he used oxygen as soon as he started his ascent from the base camp, starting with a flow of 0.5 liters per minute and slowly increasing it to three to four liters per minute, which he used on the summit day. The xenon team, Furtenbach says, didn't start using oxygen until they reached 19,700 feet, continuing from there with a usual flow of 1 to 2 litres per minute. Higher flow was used only above 26,000 feet. This theoretically means xenon could indeed have some effect on the acclimatisation process, beyond supplemental oxygen. Still, without peer-reviewed studies, it's hard to conclude that the xenon made a difference, warns Peter Hackett, a high-altitude researcher and professor at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. 'My question is—why the big rush,' he says. 'These ascents reveal that Everest's challenge is now all about dealing with hypoxia and not really climbing.' For some climbers, no extra help wanted Climbers who abstain from performance-boosting drugs and supplemental oxygen see xenon as just another departure from the purest, and thereby most elite, form of climbing. The Piolet d'Or, the most coveted mountaineering award, perhaps best exemplifies the most prestigious climbing styles. The award currently doesn't consider ascents done with supplemental oxygen or fixed lines, giving the spotlight to imaginative and innovative new routes, doing more with less, and building on experience. One of the winning teams of last year's Piolet d'Or, American climbers Matt Cornell, Jackson Marvell, and Alan Rousseau, spent seven days charting a new route up the steep north face of Jannu in Nepal. To pack lightly, they shared a single sleeping bag. 'Alpinism without the factor of the unknown is only the plain physical activity,' says Slovenian climbing legend Marko Prezelj, four-time winner of Piolet d'Or. 'If somebody prepares the mountain for you by putting in fixed lines and you climb together with 500 people, there is nothing unknown.' The Everest massif from Camp I on Pumori. Photograph by Cory Richards, Nat Geo Image Collection Famous American alpinist Steve House, best known for his bold 'alpine style' first ascent on the Rupal face of Nanga Parbat in 2005, sees alpinism as a process of stripping away excesses to get closer to the experience. 'There is nothing inherently wrong with the ascents done with supplemental oxygen and xenon, but we need to understand these climbs as tourism, not alpinism,' says House. And Mingma Gyalje Sherpa, the first Nepali to climb all 14 of the world's 8,000-meter peaks without supplemental oxygen and founder of the Nepal-based guiding company Imagine Nepal, says there should be a limit to what tour companies offer. He thinks that the traditional way of doing proper acclimatisation is more valuable. 'I would always suggest to clients to do at least one rotation on the mountain up to Camp 2, before the summit push, so they can understand their body at high altitude. We also don't take clients without previous experience,' he says. But even if assisted climbs and medical aids become more common, Alpenglow Expeditions' Ballinger thinks there will always be an interest in unassisted alpine climbing. 'There are endless new route opportunities for alpinism in the Himalaya. And I don't think the fact that we have commercial guiding on a handful of routes on the world's most popular mountains gets in the way of the cutting-edge side of the sport,' says Ballinger. Peter Hackett, the high-altitude researcher, is less optimistic. 'The improved access, safety, and success on Everest have led to a new 'generation' of high-altitude tourists with high ambition but little climbing experience, and more money than time,' he says. 'It's all about— how I can bag this summit and miss as little work as possible.'
