Ikigai Daily
Menu
WonderOcean ecosystem fact

In March 2025, researchers filmed a live colossal squid in its natural deep-sea habitat for the first time: a transparent juvenile about 30 cm long.

Schmidt Ocean Institute (2025)

OceanScience

The story behind the card

Schmidt Ocean Institute's remotely operated vehicle SuBastian recorded the juvenile at about 600 m depth near the South Sandwich Islands in the South Atlantic on 9 March 2025, a hundred years after the species was first described. The colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni) is a different species from the better-known giant squid: shorter, but much heavier. The largest specimen ever weighed, caught in the Ross Sea in 2007, was 495 kilograms, making it the heaviest known invertebrate, and its eyes, about 27 cm across, are the largest measured in any animal. Until 2025 the species was known only from remains in the stomachs of whales and seabirds and from dying adults hauled up by fishing boats.

Türkçe oku
Devasa kalamar, doğal ortamında, derin denizde ilk kez Mart 2025'te canlı olarak görüntülendi: yaklaşık 30 santimetre boyunda, neredeyse saydam bir yavru.
Schmidt Okyanus Enstitüsü (2025)

Görüntüyü 9 Mart 2025'te Schmidt Okyanus Enstitüsü'nün uzaktan kumandalı sualtı aracı SuBastian, Güney Atlantik'teki Güney Sandwich Adaları açıklarında, yaklaşık 600 metre derinlikte çekti. Türün bilim dünyasına tanıtılmasının üzerinden tam yüz yıl geçmişti. Devasa kalamar (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni), daha çok bilinen dev kalamardan ayrı bir türdür: Boyu daha kısa, ama çok daha ağırdır. Bugüne dek tartılan en büyük örnek 2007'de Ross Denizi'nde yakalandı ve 495 kilogramdı; bu da onu bilinen en ağır omurgasız yapıyor. Yaklaşık 27 santimlik gözleri, ölçülmüş en büyük hayvan gözleridir. 2025'e kadar bu kalamar yalnızca balinaların ve deniz kuşlarının midesinden çıkan kalıntılardan ve balıkçıların ölmek üzereyken yüzeye çektiği yetişkinlerden tanınıyordu.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Colossal squid
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

WonderScience

A dead whale that sinks to the deep seafloor can feed a succession of animals and microbes for decades, becoming a rich island of food where food is scarce.

Scientists call such a carcass a 'whale fall', and it is used up in stages. First, scavengers such as sleeper sharks strip most of the soft tissue over a period of months to about two years. Next, worms, crustaceans and other small animals colonise the bones and the surrounding mud, which the remains have enriched. In the longest stage, which can last decades, bacteria break down the fats inside the bones and release hydrogen sulphide; other bacteria draw energy from this chemical, and mussels and clams that carry such bacteria inside them live on it, in a food chain that does not depend on sunlight. Bone-eating Osedax worms, discovered on a whale fall off California in 2002, bore into the bones with the help of bacteria that digest them.

Ikigai DailyRead card
StillnessScience

Kelp forests grow in cool coastal seas from giant brown algae, not plants, and shelter a great variety of fish, invertebrates, seals and sea otters.

Kelp are large brown algae. Instead of roots they have a grip-like base called a holdfast, and gas-filled bulbs hold their fronds up towards the light. Giant kelp can grow up to about 60 centimetres a day and reach more than 30 metres, forming a canopy at the surface like the treetops of a forest. Kelp forests grow along cool coasts from California and Chile to South Africa, Australia and Norway. In the North Pacific, sea otters help protect them by eating sea urchins, which graze on kelp. Where otters were hunted out for their fur, urchins multiplied and stripped forests down to bare rock, leaving what are called urchin barrens.

NOAA Ocean ServiceRead card
WonderScience

Corals are tiny reef-building animals; on some nights, whole colonies release eggs and sperm into the sea at once.

Scientists call this mass spawning. On Australia's Great Barrier Reef it usually happens between October and December, a few nights after a full moon, once the water has warmed; the release starts after dark, and many species spawn within the same short window. Divers describe the water filling with drifting pink and orange bundles, like snow falling upwards. Releasing everything at once gives predators far more eggs than they can eat, and raises the chance that eggs and sperm from different colonies meet. Fertilised eggs become larvae that drift for days or weeks before settling on the reef to start new corals. Researchers are now studying whether warming seas are disrupting this timing.

NOAA Ocean ServiceRead card
WonderOcean

When a giant iceberg broke away from Antarctica in 2025, scientists rushed in and filmed a thriving world of life on the seafloor that had been sealed under ice for centuries.

The iceberg, called A-84, broke off the George VI Ice Shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula in January 2025. It covered about 510 square km, roughly the size of Chicago, and uncovered seabed that had been roofed by floating ice for centuries. Soon after, the Schmidt Ocean Institute's research ship Falkor (too) arrived and sent down its underwater robot SuBastian. It found large corals and sponges, icefish, giant sea spiders, octopuses and a ghostly phantom jellyfish. Some animals were so big that they must have been growing there for decades, perhaps centuries, which surprised scientists who had expected little life without sunlight. Ocean currents probably carry food in under the ice.

Schmidt Ocean Institute (2025)Read card
WonderOcean

Rig sharks, small sharks from New Zealand waters, make sharp clicking sounds when they are handled. Recorded in 2025, it was the first documented case of a shark producing sound on its own.

Many bony fish grunt or drum using their swim bladder, a gas-filled sac that sharks do not have, so sharks were long assumed to be silent. A team led by marine biologist Carolin Nieder, working at the University of Auckland, recorded young rig sharks in tanks and found that they clicked when gently held. The clicks seem to come from the shark snapping its flat, overlapping teeth together rather than from a special sound-making organ. What they are for is still unknown; one idea is that they are a startle response to being grabbed. The findings were published in the journal Royal Society Open Science in March 2025, and researchers now want to know whether other sharks make sounds too.

Royal Society Open Science (2025)Read card
Next card in the archiveA comet from another star system, named 3I/ATLAS, was discovered in July 2025: only the third object from interstellar space ever seen passing through our Solar System.Read next →