At Large with Nat Geo - Scott Cassel, Richard Theiss, and Steve Blair

Three of the smartest natural history guys on television right now tackle the Humbolt Squids of Baja on National Geograhic Television this week:

Undersea Voyager Project - Alarming Squids

Back from the Sea of Cortez with a small crew filming Dosidicus gigas Scott Cassell sent in this front line eye opening expedition report on the health of our oceans:

Hello All!

I just returned from Baja after leading (and Presenting) an expedition for a National Geographic documentary on Humboldt Squid (Dosidicus gigas). I am not at liberty to discuss the documentary itself but I can tell you that all of my experiments were very successful especially the primary experiment.

The Primary Experiment was simple in concept but proved very challenging to accomplish. Tom Loomis, Sid Mitchell and I designed the experiment last fall as follows:

Take a real Salmon to an environment where no Salmon occur and present it to Humboldt Squid (Dosidicus gigas) as naturally as possible (suspended by invisible monofilament line from a blacked-out frame supporting the Salmon in a swimming posture) to see if the Dosidicus gigas would investigate it as a prey item, stalk it, attack it and eat it.

Sounds simple enough.... right?

Actually executing the experiment proved more difficult than expected due to a couple of pesky factors.

First - The region we worked in was Bahia De Los Angeles where a large increase in Dosidicus gigas density occurred simultaneous to the sudden disappearance of the squid in Santa Rosalia (which is normally where I work with friends (Pangeros that commercially fish for the Calamar Gigante... Dosidicus gigas) and they know the Dosidicus gigas behavior very well).

The fishermen in Bahia simply didn't know where to look in the daylight for Dosidicus gigas forcing us to work at night.

Second - The Dosidicus gigas were repulsed by white lights. During my night dives next to the Salmon I bathed it in white lights waiting to capture images of the Dosidicus gigas predating on the Salmon. Trouble is no one came. After 45 minutes I turned off all my lights and just hung in the dark alone with the Salmon. In moments I could see well enough to see dozens of Dosidicus gigas’ as their movements stimulated the algae to emit beautiful bioluminescence illuminating the Dosidicus gigas patrolling in a sphere all around me. Then a few came it fast and hit the salmon so I instantly turned on my lights to film them and they released the salmon and quickly faded out of light-range leaving me without the shots.

Third - When the Dosidicus gigas shoals were found we would deploy the Salmon but by the time the rig was in the water the Dosidicus gigas test subjects would swim off searching for food.

Our Solution; We had to figure out how to do an effective test while keeping the Salmon in the most natural situation possible. Then I remembered a prototype LED True-Red emitting light head that Deep Sea Power & Light (DSP&L) had asked me to test. I never thought about using it because by itself it did not emit enough light for my Sony EX-3 to see well enough to film with. Then I remembered that, right before this expedition, DSP&L loaned me a new low-light camera head that could transpose red-light into normal light spectrum image. So we modified the Salmon rig to support the camera and Red LED light 24” above the Salmon and removed the underwater cameraman (ME) from the equation making it an even more natural appearing situation.

We then went out to the ‘squid grounds’ and quickly found a Dosidicus gigas shoal and deployed the new Salmon rig. Within just minutes of submerging the rig (it did not have time to be lowered to it’s target depth of 60 fsw) it was hit by perhaps a dozen Dosidicus gigas reducing the poor 20 lb Salmon to non-existence in seconds. The Red-LED light was obviously either not seen by the Dosidicus gigas or not intrusive enough to quell their feeding ferocity. The entire event was recorded.

Why is this so significant?

The Dosidicus gigas are going to render the Pacific Wild Salmon species extinct (and possibly several more) within a few years and the scientific and government leaders refuse to take notice.

There has been much dispute over eye witness accounts from commercial Salmon fishermen that Humboldt squid were decimating the returning Salmon populations. Some scientists, media, politicians, California Department of Fish & Game and others have dismissed the Salmon fishermen’s claims and blamed many other factors for the historic decline of the Salmon.

We now have indisputable evidence that Dosidicus gigas will hunt, kill and eat Salmon even if the Dosidicus gigas have not encountered the ‘new’ species before.

With evidence in hand, I intend to rattle some cages and get the problem noticed. The end of this story is grim. With the historic decline of Tuna and Shark species the high fecundity of the Dosidicus gigas has reached wild-fire proportions.

Each Dosidicus gigas many rear up to 20,000,000 eggs and with fewer and fewer predators to keep them in check a massive and historic population explosion has already occurred and is about to reach world-wide plague proportions. The squid now reach as far as the Philippines, Japan, Sitka Alaska, Tierra Del Fuego, Chile and just yesterday for the first time I learned they are now in the Atlantic Caribbean region. To put this in perspective in the 1940’s they were only know to be off the Northern Pacific Coast of South America.

We must stop eating tuna.

We must stop eating sharks.

We must stop eating krill.

We need to eat Dosidicus gigas at an unprecedented rate.

We need to invest in new and environmentally empathetic fish farming methods.

We need to change our self image to that of a culture that leads the world by example.

Help me get the word out by sending me info on major groups and individuals that can have a voice.

The bottom line.

Simply protecting the Oceans is a death sentence for the seas of life. Even if completely successful now... a great multitude of Oceanic chemistry and ecosystems would still fail very soon.

We are now entering a time of historic environmental collapse that will shape human kind’s future and very survival. America must become the steward of the sea, repair damage and lead by example, instead of being the monster consumers we are.

I implore each of you to please become deeply involved in exploring how to change our path of eating fish, how we use energy and our waste production.

Over the next year I will be developing a new program, in collaboration with the Undersea Voyager Project, to investigate and report the condition of the seas and present methods and ideas for tangible change to repair the Dying Oceans.

Non-action is no longer a luxury we can afford. That time has passed.

I wish us all health, wisdom and courage.

Yours truly,

Scott Cassell
CEO & Founder
Undersea Voyager Project
www.underseavoyagerproject.org

Bad Cephalopod...Bad Cephalopod!

When the Cephalopods are out in force, it is time to get out of the water:

Predator Squid Feasting On Fish-Sharks

Filmmaker and show host Scott Cassel with the Undersea Voyager Project has long hypothesized that the wholesale collapse of the shark populations in both Mexico and along the west coast of the USA has lead to a veritable oceanic plague of giant squids.

His theory is bearing fruit, as untold numbers of these super predators are being found as far north as Oregon in population densities never before seen. As Scott recently told us "these animals breed at a rate of millions, if you take their primary predator out of the loop, they will explode on to the scene and dominate the niche the sharks vanished from".

Scott has a way of being right about his observations on the ocean:

BODEGA BAY, Calif. (CBS) In Mexico, they are called the "red devil" and "the beast" in Central America. They are jumbo squid: deadly, fast moving creatures with tentacles that can suck the life out of a human being.

The squid are devouring parts of large populations of native fish in Northern California.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute has been tracking the population explosion of the squid. In just a few years, they have gone from occasional visitor to numbering possibly in the hundreds of thousands.

"It's a stout, very muscular animal, very high speed, excellent vision," said Karl Menard of the Bodega Bay Research Laboratory. "They are called the jumbo flying squid for a reason. They can actually leap out of the water and project themselves into the air into schools of nearby fish.

Full Story Video

Magnapinna Squid-Perhaps, Perhaps

We got the following email this morning about that face hugger critter found at 7800 feet back in November of 2007. We had an ident of Magnapinna perhaps the scariest looking critter you would ever not want to meet free diving at night. The email is from the ROV company who caught this on tape.

Now we're not so sure about the ident, here's the email, anyone out there know what this is?

Gentlemen,

I work as Senior Project Engineer for DOF Subsea Australia. I am on secondment to one of our companies in as you can see from my email signature below. We're an engineering and offshore services contractor to the oil and gas industry. We also perform all kinds of offshore work and recently you may have seen our team and one of our survey vessels was responsible for the locating of the HMAS Sydney. A long lost battleship of the Australian Navy that was sunk in battle in WW2.

We design and fabricate and install all manner of equipment and systems in all corners of the oceans. We have dedicated vessels from which we perform all our work and on these vessels we carry a full survey crew, an ROV crew for each onboard ROV, Saturation Diving crews, marine crew, deck crew and engineering staff. Within the travels we have collected large amounts of digital footage recorded from at least one of the 7 onboard cameras of the ROV(s) (some vessels have two) and share them amongst ourselves. I have attached the footage of the squid????? as described.

You can see from the title that the ROV boys have named it “Creature” you’ll see why. From the video overlay you can see the Eastings and Northings for the location in the Gulf from the onboard survey systems and the depth as recorded by the onboard ROV instruments.

Anyway if you can indent this let me know.

Company website

Giant Squid vs ROV 0-1

Huzzah! More Giant Squid news this week. Well, unless the ROV in this video is 60 feet across, perhaps not a Giant Squid but squiddy video news none the less...and we'll take it.

A huge squid was caught on underwater camera attacking a ROV at around 1650 ft water depth in the Gulf of Mexico. The ROV hydraulic arm made an attempt to nudge the squid away but it held on firmly to its target until it gave up and left:

Squid Video of Magnapinna Focus! Focus!

It's been what, 3 months, since we blogged about anything remotely squiddy?

Today changes all that as news surfaces from internal Shell Oil emails and an rov video featuring Magnapinna which looks like that "face hugger critter" from the movie series Alien. This one was filmed at a crushing depth over 2 kilometers down.

The video is evidence of how, as oil and gas industry ROVs dive deeper and stay down longer, they are yielding valuable footage of deep-sea animals.



Some biologists have even formed partnerships with oil companies, allowing scientists to share camera time on corporate rov's--though critics worry about possible conflicts of interest.

Undersea Voyager Project 2009

The Undersea Voyager Project is a multi phase program developed by undersea explorer, Capt. Scott Cassell, founder and CEO of Undersea Voyager Project (a non profit research, and undersea exploration company). The Undersea Voyager Project is designed to utilize manned submersibles to take a physical look at the first 100-1,000 feet of seawater, (which is the largest environment on Earth) on a five year continuing mission to explore the unseen as they circumnavigate the Earth underwater. The UVP will break several existing world records and set even more.

It has been suggested this project equals man's first steps on the moon. The focus is on the seas relationship with the global climate, and the discovery of new life. To explore to further man's knowledge of the most hostile environment on Earth, the deep sea.

Scott will speak of this past experiences in undersea marine research (including his work with giant squid), his present work at Undersea Voyager and future plans for ocean exploration.

Scott Cassell
Captain Scott Cassell, President and CEO of Undersea Voyager Project. Since 1977, Scott has accumulated over 12,000 hours of drive time. He is a USCG Qualified Submersible Pilot/Captain with over 1200 dives. A former Advanced Diving Medical Technician Instructor (1 of 10 in the USA), Commercial Diving Instructor, and Hyperbaric Medical Technician Instructor he taught for years at the College Of Oceaneering. He is also a PADI Instructor. His film and documentary credits include undersea cameraman for nearly 20 documentaries and host / presenter on several documentaries on several networks including Disney, MTV Wildboyz, the Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, BBC and the History Channel.

60+ Foot Giant Squids-Sea of Cortez

A while back we were chatting with Scott Cassell one of- if not the foremost squid expert-in the Sea of Cortez. He had just completed a show for the History Channel called Monster Quest.

The show was to feature what was then considered to be the first evidence of a 60+ foot squid lurking in the Sea of Cortez.

A 60+ foot squid people!

Now don't get us wrong, we loves our squidoos as much as the next all-shark-blog-all-the-time guys.

Unfortunately we had to wait for the footage of this one-time "holy cow encounter" to make it to You Tube on account our boys were wrapped up in a shoot contract. Have you ever seen a shoot contract?

Suffice to say there's a paragraph in there that talks about broken legs and lawyers if you so much breathe a word of the production ahead of time. Anyway-we digress so we can make some space between that cool squid image shot by us last week "fishing" and this video clip of the 60 Foot Monster Squid...this had better be good:

Giant Squid Diving-Steve Blairs Report

From Steve Blair this week a quick albeit amazing Giant Squid report from the Sea of Cortez:

Patric,

I wanted to tell you about my dive trip down to Santa Rosalia, Baja last week. I had an interesting trip! As you know I was going down there to dive with the giant Humboldt squid and with our infamous friend Scott Cassell. Scott was finishing up a Discovery Channel film shoot when I arrived and we had 3 days of diving to look forward to.

The idea was to get into the water once at dusk and then again after dark to observe and film the squid’s natural feeding behaviors at night. Because the squid can be pretty dangerous we were wearing full chain mail suits and helmets for protection against bites and the ring teeth in their 1200 suction cups and eight arms.

Here’s the fun part – we were diving at night in blue water with only 10 foot visibility hanging on a steel cable 40-50 feet deep under the panga and suspended over the 3000 foot deep abyss below. At night with the limited visibility you looked down below your fins into the inky black that only monsters come out of! We had no lights except for two small LED lights on a cable suspended 15 below the boat.

To bring the squid in close (and that’s not difficult) we had the fisherman on the boat cut up chunks of squid they were catching and throw them overboard. It was eerie to watch the white chunks of flesh flutter down all around us and just before you lose sight of them in the dark around you “something” would quickly appear and the chunk of flesh would be gone in a blur of arms.

The squid are very fast and in the limited visibility they move in and out of sight really quickly. These were some pretty large ones at about 6 feet total length. I was watching one attack Scott in the head and seeing others move around near him when one hit me in the side of the head as well. When they attack they hit with force and the arms grab and hold while the beak rips into you. Luckily I was wearing a helmet and this one didn’t try to bite me.

In the dark with hundreds of squid darting all around eating the chum raining down it can get pretty intimidating – like walking through a bar where everyone is throwing punches at you or is about to! Wild stuff to say the least. And I thought cage diving with great whites was cool.

Wanna go diving with us?

Live Giant Squid Dissection-Museum Victoria

You just know we can't pass up a giant squid story so when news broke that there was going to be a live dissection of one, we just about went all kaddywompus here at the office:

Scientists are hoping to learn more about a giant squid, when it is dissected in Melbourne tomorrow July 17. 2008

The 245 kilogram squid was caught by fishermen off the coast of Portland in May.

The giant squid will go under the knife at Museum Victoria.The procedure will be open to the public and streamed live on the internet.

Call us geeks, but this sounds like a a whole lotta fun. If the servers do not crash we'll see you tomorrow in Melbourne!

Giant squid found off Santa Cruz dissected by researchers

You KNOW we never pass up a good giant squid story, so when this one hit our desk it landed with a local splat.

Researchers have discovered the remains of, and are 99 percent certain that they have a giant squid, only four or five of which have ever been found in California waters, according to John Field, a fishery biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Santa Cruz.

Found off the California coast only about 40% of the critter was still intact. By all accounts what has been left for study will make a lot of calamari.

Underwater Times Reports:Giant Squid Caymans

From the good folks over at the Underwater Times the following story of one of our favourite critters in the ocean, the squid.

This rather large 7 foot specimen was found by local fishermen in of all places the Cayman Islands.

After 10 years of diving these islands we have never seen anything like this...apparently no one on the Caymans have seen anything like this either:

George Town, Cayman Islands (May 21, 2008 15:40 EST) A rare squid found floating on the surface of the ocean about 5 miles south of Little Cayman this weekend has been positively identifed as Asperoteuthis.

Local fisherman Derren Burlington, who was taking part in the Brac Jackpot Fishing Tournament, discovered the 24lbs 4oz creature, which is over 7 feet (2.5m) long, on Saturday 18 May at around 9:00 am, and transported it to the Little Cayman Research Centre operated by the Central Caribbean Marine Institute (CCMI).

Dr. Clyde Roper, Emeritus Zoologist at the Smithsonian Institution, has confirmed that it is only the fourth specimen known in the entire Atlantic Ocean. He said all other specimens known of this species – a dozen or so – have been found in the Indo-Pacific waters.

Ocean Pillage-High Tech Sales

This morning we got the following spam email-with a twist. Here's what's interesting about this one:

1. The sheer amount of ocean/wildlife product for sale "direct to consumer"

2. The method of sale (email)

When people in the eco community throw around numbers like 100 million sharks taken each year just for their fins, one would be well reminded after reading this email how that comes about.

Those that harvest from today's oceans no longer have to rely on old school distribution methods and even government regulations. Today, with a click of a mouse, 600 tons of sea product can be traded direct to consumer overnight:

we can offer,

100 tons of squid illex tentacles seafrozen of jigger vessel packing 1 x 20 abt without eyes and beak Price usd 1700 c+f china port

300 tons of squid illex tentacles seafrozen of jigger vessel packing 1 x 20 abt with eyes and beak Price usd 1400 c+f china port

600 tons squid tubes seafrozen of jigger vessel ask !!!

ask for more products available

Our Best Rgds
Gustavo Suarez
Salinas Seafood Arg
SALINAS_SEAFOOD@SPEEDY.COM.AR
SALINAS-SEAFOOD@SPEEDY.COM.AR
SALINAS.SEAFOOD@GMAIL.COM
SKYPE:SEAFOOD-ARG

Giant Squid Video-Autopsy

The Giant Squid autopsy from New Zealand we blogged about earlier this week now has a video for your review. Thanks to the good folks at current.com for sending this in.

While it's not an alien autopsy, it might as well be.Rumor is these are also tasty critters:

Giant Squids-Cool New Research

And you thought we would never get around to blogging about the Giant Squid again.

The AP reports today that researchers in New Zealand, home to perhaps more giant squids than any other place on the planet (betcha didn't know that) have concluded that their critters have the largest eyes of any animal on the planet.

Take that Mr. Blue Whale.

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — Marine scientists studying the carcass of a rare colossal squid said Wednesday they had measured its eye at about 11 inches across — bigger than a dinner plate — making it the largest animal eye on Earth.

One of the squid's two eyes, with a lens as big as an orange, was found intact as the scientists examined the creature while it was slowly defrosted at New Zealand's national museum, Te Papa Tongarewa. It has been preserved there since being caught in the Ross Sea off Antarctica's northern coast last year.

"This is the only intact eye (of a colossal squid) that's ever been found. It's spectacular," said Auckland University of Technology squid specialist Kat Bolstad, one of a team of international scientists brought in to examine the creature.

Giant Squids - Dosidicus Gigas - Killing Off Salmon?

Scott Cassell, one of the foremost authorities on the Giant Squid sent in this article today.

If you follow recent events off the shores of California and Oregon talk is squarely centered around the imploding salmon runs. In almost every major river and tributary salmon runs this season are off by almost 80%. That's a stunning statistic.

At the same time giant squid populations are surging up and down the coast and in areas where squids were once only sighted periodically.

What is happening out there?

"His years in the water with the animal has convinced Cassell that the West Coast squid population is booming. He speculates that the animal's increased numbers coincide with a drop in its predators, tuna and sharks, which are commercially hunted. Cassell isn't alone in his belief. The Pacific Fishery Management Council, which has authority to set restrictions on commercial and sport fishing, identified Humboldt squid as one of 46 possible reasons salmon are disappearing".

"Cassell said he believes the squid are preying on the salmon, although one study showed no evidence of that. Another theory suggests the voracious squid have disrupted the food chain, which is contributing to the salmon's decline."

Clearly something is happening off our coasts with salmon being the "canaries in the coal mine". The giant squid nexus seems plausible from a guy like Scott Cassell.