Scientists Finally Captured the Baby Kraken Alive — And It Rewrote Marine Biology

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]A world locked away under snow and ice, so hostile and inaccessible. Deep in the icy waters live creatures so strange and so huge that they can truly be called monstrous. For 100 years, the largest invertebrate on Earth refused to be seen alive. Every textbook chapter, every museum placard, every documentary segment was built from corpses pulled out of whale stomachs and fishing nets.

[00:00:28]Then, 600 m under the Southern Ocean, a camera caught something nobody was supposed to ever film, a baby kraken, almost transparent, arms extended, watching the lights with eyes too large for its body. The footage did not just close a 100-year gap. It quietly broke parts of marine biology that scientists thought were settled. And what the camera actually showed is stranger than the wait.

[00:00:52]Studied only from the dead.

[00:00:54]In the deep cold waters surrounding the Antarctic continent, in a habitat stretching through the Southern Ocean and into the deep waters of the South Atlantic and South Pacific, lives an animal that marine biology has spent the past century studying almost entirely from the dead, the colossal squid, Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni.

[00:01:14]The species was formally described in 1925 from a single damaged specimen pulled from the stomach of a sperm whale processed at a whaling station in the South Shetland Islands. 40 years ago, a Soviet research vessel hauled on board a massive squid heavier than any found before.

[00:01:33]>> That whale had eaten the squid in the dark somewhere in the Southern Ocean, swallowed it whole, and carried the fragments back into a fishery that processed the whale and recovered, almost as an afterthought, the two arms that would name a new genus.

[00:01:46]In a workroom somewhere in London, the biologist Guy Coburn [music] Robson laid two damaged arms on a workbench. They did not belong to anything in the [music] existing taxonomy.

[00:01:57]The arms bore rotating hooks instead of the suction cups that defined the rest of the squid family. He stared at them long enough to understand he was looking at a new genus.

[00:02:07]He named the new species, [music] deposited the specimens, and published the description in the proceedings of the Zoological Society of London. The world had a new animal on paper. It would not see one alive for another 100 years.

[00:02:20]Every additional specimen that came into scientific possession after that arrived in essentially the same way. Dead.

[00:02:27]Pulled up in the bycatch of longline fishing operations targeting Patagonian toothfish.

[00:02:33]Washed ashore on Antarctic beaches.

[00:02:35]Recovered from the stomach contents of the sperm whales that hunt them at depth. Some specimens were partial. Some were whole. Some were photographed dying on the decks of fishing boats in the moments after they had been hauled from water that was killing them by the act of removal. Think about what that means for a field. Every measurement of this animal was a measurement of a corpse.

[00:02:56]Every estimate of how it moved was extrapolated from muscle attachments on tissue that would [music] never move again.

[00:03:03]Every guess at its color was made from skin that had been bleached or darkened by the chemistry of preservation. The colossal squid's biology was [music] reconstructed the way archaeologists reconstruct an extinct creature from fragments, [music] from inference, from a careful arrangement of what the dead could be made to suggest about the living. Except this animal was not extinct. It was alive down there the entire time, refusing to be observed.

[00:03:28]Stay with this for a minute.

[00:03:30]Decade after decade, the technology to dive deeper, see farther, and stay longer kept advancing. The squid kept refusing to be seen. Not in 1950.

[00:03:42]Not in 1985, when the wreck of the Titanic was located and filmed at depths that should have been beyond reach.

[00:03:50]Not in 2000. Not in 2010, not in 2020. A hundred years of refusal. [music] And then, a routine biological survey switched on a camera that was not looking for it.

[00:04:03]The routine dive.

[00:04:05]In March of 2025, [music] a research expedition aboard the vessel Falkor two deployed the remotely operated vehicle Sebastian [music] into deep water off the South Sandwich Islands. Witnessing this first encounter, documented as the Schmidt Ocean Institute's remotely vehicle Sebastian descended through the water >> a volcanic archipelago in the South Atlantic, approximately 1500 km east-southeast of South Georgia. Some of the most remote ocean territory on Earth. Few research vessels operate this far [music] south, and fewer still carry deep-water ROVs capable of sustained [music] work at the depths where the colossal squid lives. The team came from the Schmidt Ocean Institute, a privately funded oceanographic organization founded in 2009 by Wendy and Eric Schmidt, operating research vessels in regions that receive almost no systematic scientific attention.

[00:04:59]The expedition's primary objectives did not include searching for Mesonychoteuthis.

[00:05:04]The probability of an encounter, by every prior estimate the field had ever produced, was effectively negligible.

[00:05:11]Think about that for a second. They were not looking. The animal had refused to be looked at for a century. The math said, "No."

[00:05:19]Sebastian descended through the water column. The high-definition cameras were rolling, recording deep-sea fauna for biological surveys, doing exactly what they were designed to do on any other dive. The depth gauge climbed past 400 m, past 500. The water at that depth is roughly 2° above freezing, dark in a way no surface darkness can match, pressurized to the point where any air-filled body would collapse instantly. Sebastian was built for those conditions.

[00:05:49]The team in the control room was watching screens that showed mostly empty water, the kind of footage deep-sea biologists scroll through for hours [music] waiting for something to drift past. The lights pushed out into the dark, and something pale was waiting in the beam.

[00:06:04]The kraken was real.

[00:06:06]Before the colossal squid had a scientific name, before marine biology existed as a formal discipline, human cultures around the North Atlantic had already been telling stories about something enormous in the water.

[00:06:18]The kraken. The monster appears in Norse sagas and Icelandic folklore dating back centuries. Sailors described an animal so vast it could be mistaken for an island, a creature that rose from the depths to drag ships beneath the waves.

[00:06:33]For centuries, the scientific establishment dismissed the stories as sailor superstition. Giant cephalopods were considered impossible violations of basic biological constraints on invertebrate body size.

[00:06:46]Then, the specimens started arriving. In 1853, a large cephalopod washed ashore in Denmark, [music] providing tissue that could be measured rather than mythologized.

[00:06:57]In the 1870s, multiple giant squid strandings occurred in Newfoundland, providing specimens that could not be dismissed.

[00:07:04]Fishermen pulled bodies onto beaches.

[00:07:07]Naturalists arrived to examine them.

[00:07:09]Photographs were taken. Measurements were recorded. The giant squid, Architeuthis Dux, was formally accepted into the scientific record. Centuries of folklore turned out to have a real animal at the bottom of them.

[00:07:23]The sailors who described tentacles wrapping around hulls had been describing something that existed, a creature that lived at depths human technology could not yet reach, that surfaced rarely enough to seem supernatural, that left evidence of itself only in fragments.

[00:07:39]The kraken was real, >> [music] >> or at least real enough. But here's the thing most people get wrong. The colossal squid is not the same animal as the giant squid. Architeuthis dux, the giant squid, is longer. Total length can exceed 13 m from mantle to tentacle tip.

[00:07:56]Maximum weight, 250 to 275 kg.

[00:08:01]Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, the colossal squid, is heavier, more massive, >> [music] >> mantle thicker. Maximum weight, 500 to 700 kg.

[00:08:12]By mass, the colossal squid is the largest invertebrate on Earth. No insect, no mollusk, no crustacean approaches [music] its weight. And in 1925, when Robson stood over those two damaged arms recovered from a sperm whale's stomach, he understood that the giant squid was not alone. There was something else in the water, something heavier. He paused before he wrote the new genus name.

[00:08:35]If 100 years of waiting for one piece of footage sounds insane to you, hit subscribe, because what the camera actually caught is stranger than the wait. What was in the frame?

[00:08:46]The animal in the Sebastian footage is a juvenile. Mantle length approximately 30 cm.

[00:08:53]A baby kraken suspended in the water column, arms extended, body oriented in a posture nobody had ever seen in a living specimen. And then the surprises started arriving in sequence. First surprise, the glass body. The juvenile was almost transparent. Adult colossal squid, based on the preserved specimens that had been studied for decades, are heavily pigmented dark reddish-brown mantles, substantial coloration throughout. The baby in the footage was glass-like. The body was glass.

[00:09:24]The transparency revealed internal structures that had never been visible in dead specimens.

[00:09:30]The arrangement of organs, the distribution of chromatophores, the architecture of a body that had only ever been studied after death rendered it opaque. Transparency is a known characteristic of the Cranchiidae family, the glass squids.

[00:09:44]But knowing a juvenile should be transparent [music] is not the same as watching light pass through one in real time, through tissue that contains one of the most sophisticated nervous systems in the invertebrate kingdom.

[00:09:55]The transparency itself is a survival strategy. In the open water column with no rocks to hide behind and no kelp to disappear into, the only camouflage available is to not be there at all.

[00:10:07]A transparent body refracts light without casting a clear shadow, presents almost no silhouette to a predator looking up toward the surface, and gives a hunter scanning from below almost nothing to lock onto.

[00:10:20]The baby kraken in the footage was not just glass for the sake of being glass.

[00:10:25]It was glass because being glass is how a 30-cm juvenile survives in water full of things that would eat it. That assumption is now footage. That is the first thing the textbooks lost.

[00:10:36]Second surprise, not a slow giant. The animal moved.

[00:10:40]Dead specimens cannot demonstrate locomotion.

[00:10:43]Every prior extrapolation about how colossal squid move had been based on fin shape, muscle attachment, and body proportions, features that suggested capabilities but could not confirm them.

[00:10:56]The footage showed actual movement, fin undulations, jet propulsion, the coordination of arms and tentacles as the baby maneuvered through the water column.

[00:11:06]Watch any documentary made before March 2025 and the animation of the colossal squid will look ponderous, almost reluctant, a slow, heavy creature drifting through the dark waiting for prey to come close enough to grab.

[00:11:20]That model came from the only data anyone had, body mass, mantle thickness, the assumption that something this large at depth would conserve [music] energy by moving as little as possible. Every one of those animations was wrong.

[00:11:33]It was not lumbering. It was not the sluggish ambush predator the bulk of adult specimens had implied.

[00:11:39]It was active, maneuverable, graceful in a way no preserved specimen could ever look.

[00:11:45]The largest invertebrate on Earth in juvenile form was not waiting for prey to drift past. It was hunting. Third, surprise hooks in motion.

[00:11:54]The colossal squid's tentacle clubs are its most distinctive anatomical feature.

[00:12:00]The characteristic Robson identified in 1925 as marking a new genus.

[00:12:06]Where other squid bear suction cups, the colossal squid has rotating hooks.

[00:12:10]Sharp, swiveling structures that grip and hold prey with mechanical efficiency suction alone cannot achieve. The genus name Mesonychoteuthis means middle hook squid. Until March 2025, nobody had ever seen those hooks deployed in life.

[00:12:26]The footage showed them in action articulating, positioning, working as the animal moved. Anatomy that had been theoretical for 100 years became kinematics in real time. They were weapons.

[00:12:37]Not metaphorical weapons, actual weapons. Structures evolved specifically for capturing and holding prey in an environment where escape means survival and capture means death. The sperm whales that hunt colossal squid at depth bear circular scars from those hooks on their skin visible for years afterward.

[00:12:56]Evidence of battles fought in absolute darkness at crushing pressure. Whalers have documented those scars for centuries without knowing what was making them.

[00:13:04]Each circular mark on a sperm whale's flank is a record of an encounter that happened a thousand meters down between two animals, neither of which the whaler ever saw fight. The footage gave science its first look at the animal that inflicts those wounds. Fourth, surprise eyes that watch for whales. And then there are the eyes. Colossal squid have the largest eyes of any animal known to have ever existed, larger than the giant squid, larger than any whale, larger than the great ichthyosaurs of the Mesozoic era that reached lengths of over 20 m. The eyes can exceed 27 cm in diameter, roughly the size of a soccer ball, mounted on either side of an animal's head in waters where no sunlight reaches.

[00:13:48]Here's where it gets stranger. In 2012, Dan-Eric Nilsson and Eric Warrant published a paper in Current Biology that solved the mystery of why those eyes exist.

[00:13:59]They worked through the optics, pupil size, focal length, photon collection capacity of the retina at depth, and realized the eyes are not optimized for hunting prey. They are optimized for detecting predators.

[00:14:12]That distinction matters. An eye built for hunting would be tuned [music] to small, fast, nearby targets. The colossal squid's eye is tuned for something else entirely.

[00:14:22]At the depths where colossal squid [music] live, hundreds of meters below the surface, in water where no sunlight penetrates, the only light comes from bioluminescence.

[00:14:32]Marine organisms produce their own light through chemical reactions, creating a constant dim glow throughout the deep ocean. When a sperm whale descends toward a colossal squid, the whale's body triggers bioluminescent flashes in the organisms it disturbs.

[00:14:48]The whale creates a glowing silhouette, a cascade of light that betrays its approach. The colossal squid's enormous eyes are specifically adapted to detect that signal.

[00:14:58]They are predator detection systems, biological early warning devices that allow the squid to perceive an approaching whale at distances that provide time to escape.

[00:15:08]Imagine evolving an organ the size of a soccer ball in absolute [music] darkness for the sole purpose of seeing a 50-ton predator before it sees you.

[00:15:17]That is the ecological pressure the colossal squid lives under. The whales are coming. The eyes are watching.

[00:15:24]Even the baby in the footage, at 30 cm mantle length, already had eyes too large for its body. Already watching.

[00:15:31]The woman who confirmed it, at Auckland University of Technology, Dr. Kat Bolstad watched the clip frame by frame on her laptop. She had spent her career studying this animal from preserved tissue corpses fished out of the Ross Sea. Partial specimens recovered from sperm whale stomachs.

[00:15:49]Glass jars holding flesh that had been dead for hours by the time it reached her. She had never seen one move.

[00:15:57]Bolstad is one of the leading figures in modern colossal squid research.

[00:16:01]She has examined specimens, published taxonomic analyses, >> [music] >> and spent years pushing the field's understanding forward against the limit of dead tissue. Every paper she had written, every measurement she had ever taken, came from something that was no longer alive. When the footage came in, she watched it.

[00:16:19]Then she watched it again.

[00:16:21]Then she made the call. It was Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni. The first live observation, 100 years after Robson laid those two arms on a workbench in London.

[00:16:32]The genus he had named in 1925 finally had a face, and the person making that confirmation was a researcher who had spent her professional life waiting for exactly this.

[00:16:43]Live footage allows measurements that preserved specimens cannot [music] provide. It reveals postures and behaviors that death eliminates. It captures coloration, movement, and interaction that decomposition erases.

[00:16:55][music] The transparency is now documented, not inferred. The movement is now observed, not extrapolated. The hook deployment is now filmed, not reconstructed from anatomy.

[00:17:08]Every museum placard describing this species as a slow ambush predator with reddish-brown adult coloration just became an artifact of the era when scientists only [music] had corpses to work with. Larger than any adult on record, the juvenile in the footage had a mantle length of approximately 30 cm.

[00:17:26]The largest colossal squid specimen ever recovered, a 495 kg female captured by New Zealand fisherman in the Ross Sea in February 2007, is on display at Te Papa Tongarewa, the Museum of New Zealand in Wellington.

[00:17:43]That specimen was considered exceptional, the current ceiling, the biggest one anyone had ever measured.

[00:17:48]When the 2007 female arrived in Wellington, scientists treated her as a once-in-a-generation find.

[00:17:55]Frozen, transported, slowly thawed, examined, measured, and prepared for permanent display. Visitors still line [music] up to see her. She is the public face of the species, the standard against which every other specimen has been compared for nearly two decades.

[00:18:12]Now, scale the 2025 baby forward. Based on growth rates inferred from other cephalopod species and the proportions visible in the live footage, the adult that this juvenile would become would substantially exceed previous size estimates.

[00:18:28]The 2007 specimen may not have been close to maximum size. The colossal squid may grow larger than anyone thought. It grows larger than that. How much larger is now an open question. If the size scaling holds, the species may reach weights approaching 1 metric ton.

[00:18:45]The largest invertebrate on Earth may be considerably larger than the largest invertebrate science has ever physically held.

[00:18:52]A 1-ton colossal squid would mean every previous estimate of this species >> [music] >> was capped by sampling bias, by the simple fact that the biggest individuals are also the ones least likely to get caught in fishing gear, least likely to wash up dead on a beach, least likely to be eaten by a sperm whale and ejected partially digested into the historical record. The biggest ones [music] may simply be the ones that have never been seen at all. And if the baby is already this strange, what does the adult look like in motion?

[00:19:22]Why it took a hundred years. The gap between naming and observation, 1925 to 2025, [music] is the longest such gap for any large marine species in modern zoological history.

[00:19:35]Across that century, two world wars were fought, the atomic bomb was invented, humans walked on the moon, the internet was built, and the human genome was mapped. [music] Through all of it, the largest invertebrate on Earth stayed invisible.

[00:19:48]For comparison, the giant squid was first photographed alive in 2004 by Japanese marine biologist Tsunemi Kubodera, who captured still images of a living Architeuthis.

[00:20:00]Video footage followed in 2012 and 2013.

[00:20:04]The colossal squid waited another decade beyond that. The delay reflects the difficulty of the observation. The giant squid inhabits deep waters worldwide.

[00:20:14]The colossal squid is confined to the Southern Ocean, accessible only during limited seasonal windows, far from the research infrastructure that supports most deep-sea exploration. Colder, deeper, more remote, the encounters are unpredictable. The technology required for sustained deep-sea observation at these latitudes has only recently become capable of the task. Even now, the operating window is narrow.

[00:20:40]>> [music] >> Antarctic seasons restrict when vessels can safely work in those waters.

[00:20:45]Storms in the Drake Passage can shut down operations for days. Ice movement around the South Sandwich Islands forces ships to reposition.

[00:20:54]Every dive is a calculated bet against weather, equipment limits, and the simple statistical odds of pointing a camera at the right cubic meter of ocean at the right moment.

[00:21:04]The Schmidt Ocean Institute pulled it off in March 2025 because the conditions aligned. Most of the time they do not.

[00:21:12]The Schmidt Ocean Institute's footage was not the result of a targeted search.

[00:21:17]It was an opportunistic encounter during a routine biological survey.

[00:21:21]>> [music] >> A reminder that even with advanced technology, deep-sea observation remains dependent on chance. The squid happened to be there. Sebastian happened to be there. The cameras were rolling.

[00:21:33]A century of waiting ended in a few minutes of footage. A few minutes of high-definition video recorded almost by accident on a routine survey undid 100 years of working from corpses. Which raises a harder question, how much of what is actually down there have we still not seen? The ocean we have not searched. The Southern Ocean is the least explored major ocean basin on Earth.

[00:21:55]The waters around Antarctica are protected by the Antarctic Treaty System, limiting commercial exploitation, but also limiting the research presence that might produce more opportunistic observations like this one.

[00:22:07]The colossal squid's habitat overlaps with the toothfish fisheries that have provided most historical specimens, but those fisheries target different depths and different seasons than research expeditions.

[00:22:19]The animals that end up in nets are not the animals you would observe alive.

[00:22:23]They are the ones unlucky enough to get tangled in gear set for something else.

[00:22:27]>> [music] >> The 2025 footage came from one small patch of the South Sandwich Islands.

[00:22:33]The species full range extends around the entire Antarctic continent through millions of square kilometers of deep water that have never been surveyed by any remotely [music] operated vehicle.

[00:22:44]Put that in scale.

[00:22:46]The amount of Southern Ocean that has been observed by deep-sea cameras is a rounding error against the amount that has not. Most of the colossal squid's habitat has never had a single high-definition camera lowered into it.

[00:22:58]So, what else is down there? How many colossal squid inhabit the Southern Ocean? How large do the largest individuals actually grow? What behaviors occur at depths Sebastian has not yet reached? What other species, entire species, not just unfilmed individuals, are still hiding in the patches of water nobody has searched?

[00:23:17]The footage answered a few questions. It opened many more. What the camera showed us.

[00:23:23]The Kraken mythology imagined a monster, an active predator that sought out human victims and dragged ships [music] into the dark. The colossal squid is not that.

[00:23:32]It is an animal at the top of its size class, a predator in its own ecological niche, a creature [music] that lives its entire life in absolute darkness at crushing pressure, hunting and being hunted in an environment we can barely access.

[00:23:46]But the mythology was not entirely wrong. Something enormous was living in the deep water. Something with tentacles. Something the sailors who told stories around North Atlantic fires had glimpsed in fragments. A washed-up carcass. A tentacle in a whale's stomach. A shape in the water that disappeared before it could be clearly seen.

[00:24:07]The Kraken was real. It just took a century of marine biology to confirm it.

[00:24:12]For 100 years, this species existed in science only as specimens. Dead tissue.

[00:24:18]Preserved remains. Fragments recovered from the stomachs of whales that had hunted it [music] in the dark. Now there is footage.

[00:24:25]Now there is a living animal on video.

[00:24:27]The largest invertebrate on Earth is no longer a reconstruction. It is a recording. And the recording shows that the body is transparent. The locomotion is active. The hooks are weapons in motion. And the eyes are watching for predators we cannot see. Robson named [music] it from two arms on a workbench in 1925.

[00:24:46]Bolstad confirmed it from a video clip in 2025.

[00:24:50]The loop closed in a single afternoon, 100 years after it opened. Two scientists, two centuries, one species and a hundred years of marine biology that will now have to be quietly rewritten chapter by chapter to match what the camera saw.

[00:25:05]And somewhere in the Southern Ocean, in the deep cold waters around Antarctica, the colossal squid continues to do what it has always done. Invisible, enormous, watching.

[00:25:16]The baby in the footage will grow. The eyes will grow with it. The hooks will grow with it. The transparency will fade as pigment fills in.

[00:25:24]And one day, [music] in water too deep for current ROVs to reach, that same animal will be hunting in the dark, evading whales it sees through eyes the size of soccer balls, doing what its species has done for millions of years before [music] anyone on the surface knew what it looked like alive. If the part of this that hit you hardest is the thought of what else is still out there in the millions of square kilometers nobody has ever filmed, drop a comment with your guess for the next species the cameras will catch first.

[00:25:52]The animal we already know is hiding down there, or the one we don't know about yet.

[00:25:57]I read every comment, and the next deep sea story is already being prepared.