The Only Animal That Terrifies Giant Squid

Añadido: 2026-05-16

[00:00:00]It's been given many names. The Kraken, Cthulhu, Monster of the Abyss. And while the deep ocean is famous for tons of enormous beings all trying to brutally eat each other, the giant squid consistently remains at the very top. Or at least it was supposed to be. Their Latin name, Archetus ducks, comes from the Greek and Latin words for leader squid, which makes sense when you remember that the giant squid is the longest and most famous squid in the world. Their suckers have teeth. They're heavier than lions and they live in a place where almost all the other squids would just well instantly die. But despite all of this, giant squids are prey. No, not to humans. We can't even reach them. To the only animal in the world that is capable of hunting the giant sephilopods of the deep, the sperm whale. But why does a whale, an animal designed for the surface, specifically hunt these giant squids? And why are there no other creatures capable of taking down a giant squid, let alone reaching its habitat in the first place?

[00:00:59]To understand why nothing else is able to hunt a giant squid, we first have to take a look at where the giant squid even lives. They don't hang out near the surface. You will never see one from a boat, and you will never accidentally bump into one while scuba diving, unless your scuba diving trip goes really wrong. Giant squids live in the Bopalagic zone, aka the Midnight Zone.

[00:01:20]This area starts at around 1,000 m down and stretches all the way to 4,000 m deep. This zone is basically completely black, freezing, and the pressure kills almost anything even before any creatures or temperature does. Mammals are most affected by this. We're warm-blooded, vulnerable to pressure, and completely dependent on air to breathe. So, if that's true, then how is it remotely possible that the only animal that hunts these squids is a mammal? These whales are diving over 7,000 ft below the ocean surface. And if you can't imagine how deep that is, imagine going down the depth of the entire Emperor State Building and then doing it three more times. At that depth, the water pressure is over £3,000 per square in. Not to mention the biggest issue. There's no air. So why is the sperm whale the only mammal that can go down this far? Well, it's actually not just because they take a giant breath and fill their lungs with air. In fact, they barely fill their lungs at all. This shouldn't make any sense, but I'll explain. All mammals have a protein in their muscles called myoglobin, which is responsible for holding oxygen in our bodies. But these whales have so much of it packed into their bodies that their muscle tissue literally stains and it turns into a black color. So before each dive, sperm whales take one giant breath. But oxygen alone doesn't solve the major issue of how do these whales actually survive everything else. If for some reason you yourself were to teleport to 7,000 ft, all the air filled spaces in your body would compress so violently that your rib cage would shatter and you'd be cooked in less than a single second. But you don't even need to reach this depth to be completely screwed. Even just a few hundred meters below the surface, the pressure creates a phenomenon called decompression sickness, aka the bends that basically happens when the nitrogen dissolved into your bloodstream under pressure turns into bubbles when you try to come up from the deep too fast. Pretty much like when you try to open a soda. And while the bends are deadly to us, but as whales in general are always diving and coming back to the surface without exploding into bubbles, we thought they were immune to the bends. We were wrong.

[00:03:28]After 14 beaked whales beached themselves on the Canary Islands following a Navy sonar exercise, scientists discovered the whales are indeed affected by the bends because all of them had gas bubbles in their tissue.

[00:03:41]So, this should be a huge problem for sperm whales since they dive so deep and spend most of their lives down there.

[00:03:47]And in reality, they are affected by the bends, too. No one is immune. They've just adapted a counter strategy. Unlike human rib cages, a sperm whale's chest cavity is insanely flexible. When the whale starts to dive into the deep and the pressure mounts, its rib cage compresses and its lungs completely collapse. It sounds like a painful thing, but it's pretty normal for them.

[00:04:10]By compressing the lungs down to a fraction of their normal size, the whale reduces the amount of air in its body, helping it conserve oxygen as it dives deeper. And with its lungs collapsed, there's no nitrogen getting into the bloodstream in the first place. nothing to bubble and nothing to kill. When the whale reaches around 900 ft below the ocean surface, it just stops using its tail altogether, essentially free falling into the blackness of the deep sea on the momentum it has created. I know this sounds like a really weird dive just to get some calamari. But there's still another problem. Even though they survived the pressure, sperm whales are now in the coldest parts of the entire ocean. Like the temperature down there is almost zero C. Shouldn't the sperm whale just completely turn into a huge frozen rock? Because water pulls heat away from a body about 25 times faster than air does, an unprotected mammal in these waters will die from severe hypothermia in a matter of minutes, even if it could survive the pressure. But fortunately for the sperm whale, it's absurdly fat. The sperm whale is surrounded by a dense layer of fat called blubber. This layer can reach up to a foot thick in some places and acts not only as an impenetrable wall of armor, but also an oddly good insulator.

[00:05:22]Not all parts of it are fat in the same way. Their flippers and tails are clearly thinner and have almost no fat at all, making them more exposed to the cold. To keep the parts that aren't covered in so much blood are warm, the sperm whale uses a trick called countercurren heat exchange, where the warm blood basically transfers heat to colder blood from the skin. Okay, cool.

[00:05:42]It can stop itself from freezing. It can stop the pressure from killing it and it can hold its breath for a long time.

[00:05:48]There are still giant sea monsters in the deep. Giant horrendous sea monsters.

[00:05:53]If sperm whales want to dive deep to hunt, then how are they surviving all the monsters down there? When you picture the deepest parts of the ocean, you probably imagine an absolute gauntlet of terrifying monsters. You have the angler fish, the fangtoothoth, the gulper eel. Creatures that look absolutely unhinged and ready to rip apart anything they come across. And yes, there are tons of these monsters down here. But the sperm whale has one major advantage over all of them. It is still just way too fat. Here's the hilarious secret about the Midnight Zone. A lot of these terrifying monsters are basically the size of a shoe. A terrifying toothy anglerfish weighs maybe a singular pound on a good day. A sperm whale weighs 50 tons. To a whale the size of a school bus, these deep sea creatures are really just harmless. Even though they look like absolute freaks, they pose absolutely zero physical threat to a giant mammal. Honestly, most of the creatures in this zone aren't even worth the sperm whale's time. Yes, they are freaks, but they're crumbs in comparison to what the sperm whale actually needs to eat. 2 lb of angler fish isn't exactly worth diving a 60,000lb body that far. The only thing that can match the sperm whale's size is the only thing that it's trying to hunt, the giant squid. And see, the sperm whales are beasts. But the giant squid isn't helpless either. Unlike many fights in the wild where it's just prey running from a predator, the fight between the sperm whale and the giant squid is actually violent. Extremely violent. Remember that these creatures are designed to dominate the deep sea.

[00:07:28]And at 45 ft long, they're actually comparable in raw length to the sperm whale. In this fight, though, the giant squid has absolutely zero intention of eating the whale. It obviously can't swallow a 50tonon wall of blubber.

[00:07:42]Instead, its entire strategy is based on one simple fact. The whale is still on a timer. Remember, the sperm whale is doing all of this on a single breath of air. Yes, they can last a long time, but if it stays down too long, it will eventually drown. There are theories that the giant squid tries to cover the whale's blow hole to make it drown faster, but this isn't likely to be what's actually happening. For one, it'd be hard for the squid to even find the blow hole and accurately drown it. And two, the sperm whale isn't really breathing in the first place because it's already underwater. But despite that, we find these sperm whales at the surface with horrendous tentacle marks from the giant squids, we suspect that the squids win the fight less than 1% of the time. See, it's not that the giant squid is that much smaller than the whale, as they can be nearly 45 ft. We suspect that the squids win the fight less than 1% of the time. The problem is that they're two different types of giants. The squid is incredibly light and soft. Well, for a creature that big.

[00:08:43]When you're an animal weighing 600 lb, you stand no chance against a 100,000lb body. Even if it's the same length. Even if there was a super massive giant squid that was born 100 ft long on a fluke, it would still be less than 2,000 lb, which even though it'd be way longer than the sperm whale, doesn't compare in sheer mass. Compared to the squid build, the whale build is just too chunky. So, when a sperm whale locates the squid, it will snap its jaw around the squid's body.

[00:09:11]Even though the giant squid immediately violently reacts, the whale will just power through the pain and slurp it up whole anyway. It's not like the giant squid can't by all means hurt the whale.

[00:09:22]We know it can. In the fight, the giant squid really tears the whale's skin hard in an attempt to survive, but it's nowhere near enough pain to actually cause much serious damage. Overall, this looks like a pretty unfair matchup because the sperm whale is about 50 weight classes above the giant squid.

[00:09:40]And yes, it is unfair, but it's not like these guys are constantly trying to battle each other for fun. The sperm whale wants to smoke, and it's the one that has to find the squid. With the ocean being so massive and the squid living in, well, the equivalent of the shadow realm, how are these whales even finding these fights in the first place?

[00:09:59]Well, the sperm whale has the one hidden feature it uses to find them, screaming.

[00:10:04]Well, not really. I know there are a lot of loud animals in nature, but the sperm whale is so loud that it's violent.

[00:10:10]Inside the sperm whale's head is a gigantic sack filled with hundreds of gallons of a thick waxy yellow oil called spermaceti. That's actually where their names come from because back in the day, whalers thought the oil was another thing. They used to hunt these whales specifically to take the oil to make candles and lubricants. But for the whale, the oil sack serves a much more violent purpose. When the sperm whale is hunting, it produces numerous clicks.

[00:10:37]But these aren't normal clicks. These sounds can reach 230 dibels. 180 dibbels is enough to burst human eardrums. It's the loudest sound in the entire animal kingdom. When these sounds are produced, they travel through the water and reflect off everything around, creating echoes that return to the whale. And these echoes are so flawless that they give the whale a 3D map of the environment around it and the exact location, size, and distance to the giant squid. Even though the giant squid might see the whale coming, the sperm whale has already pinpointed its location from hundreds of meters away. I know this seems brutally overpowered for the sperm whale. So, knowing all of this, does the squid ever actually win the fight against the whale? Is it just a complete massacre every single time a whale dives down to the deep? Well, yes.

[00:11:27]There is a way they can win, but not because they're stronger. As I said, the squid wins less than 1% of the time, and it'd be usually if somehow the whale was already injured, a juvenile, made a major mistake, or it was some crazy crazy beefy squid. But the squid doesn't need to kill the whale to live. When the whale reaches the deep, they have already spent a decent amount of time getting to the bottom, so they don't actually have a lot of time to waste.

[00:11:53]Every second down there matters. So, when the sperm whale and the giant squid are chasing or fighting, and time starts to pass, the whale begins to run out of oxygen and finds itself trapped. It either lets the chase go and heads back to the surface to breathe, or it dies.

[00:12:07]The sperm whale is definitely the predator, but this floor kind of nerfs it in a fight. If the giant squid defends itself or flees long enough, the sperm whale will let go at some point.

[00:12:17]The squid doesn't need to win the fight.

[00:12:19]It just needs to not lose it. In reality, each dive by the whale likely only results in a successful catch around 10% of the time. Most of the time, it's just a failed attempt, and the squid gets away, or they might just lose track of the prey too early. The ocean is massive, too. And while giant squids are giant, the ocean is thousands on thousands of times giant. It's not like the deep sea is just an endless buffet of schools of massive squids. But to be honest though, if the sperm whale does manage to get a good grasp on the squid, it's probably not letting go.

[00:12:53]Maybe the squid can manage to sacrifice a few tentacles, but even then, it will be hard to escape. All I know is if I was a giant squid, I'd be horrified by the surface. Nothing in my zone can even come close to killing me. Yet, this enormous unstoppable boulder from above is just absolutely mauling anything it wants to. Sperm whales can be scary. But anyways, I hope you guys enjoyed and check out our video on the megalodon here.