Animal · New Zealand, Japan, Spain
Giant squid
Architeuthis dux — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The giant squid is a hunter of the deep sea with eight arms, two long tentacles and the largest eyes of any animal on Earth. It lives so far down that a living one was first photographed in the wild only in 2004.
Picture credit: Addison Emery Verrill (Public domain) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the giant squid live?
Home: Deep open ocean, a few hundred metres below the surface.
In the wild it lives in these countries: New Zealand, Japan, Spain, the United States, Norway, South Africa.
Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.
The short profile
Fully grown: up to about 12 m long, counting the two long tentacles. It weighs about 150 kilograms. On the menu: meat.
The story behind it
For a long time people knew the giant squid only from bodies washed up on beaches and from beaks found in the stomachs of sperm whales. Its body tube alone can be two metres long, and its eyes are as wide as a dinner plate, which helps it catch the faintest glimmer of light in the dark. It shoots out its two long tentacles to grab fish and smaller squid, holds them with rings of tiny teeth inside the suckers and pulls them to a sharp beak. Sperm whales dive hundreds of metres to hunt it, and many of them carry round scars from squid suckers on their skin. Because the animal lives so deep, nobody knows how many there are or how long they live, and every new find teaches scientists something.
Find it on the globe
Giant squid is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
How big is a giant squid?
Females reach about 12 m from the tail to the tip of the long tentacles, males a little less. Most of that length is the two thin tentacles, so the body itself is closer to two metres.
Has anyone ever seen a living giant squid?
Yes, but only a few times. Japanese researchers took the first pictures of one in the deep sea in 2004, and later teams filmed living animals with cameras lowered on long cables.
What eats a giant squid?
The sperm whale is its main enemy. It dives deep, finds squid with sound and swallows them, which is why sperm whales often have round sucker scars on their heads.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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