THIS is the incredible moment a bigfin squid with 13ft tentacles was spotted lurking 20,000 feet below the surface.
A team of researchers made the incredible find using cameras which they lowered to the bottom of the Tonga Trench in the South Pacific.
Researchers snapped the bigfin squid at the bottom of the Tonga Trench[/caption]
There have only been around a dozen sightings of the species worldwide[/caption]
“We always hope to see this type of animal,” Alan Jamieson, a professor and deep-sea scientist at the University of Western Australia who collected the footage, told Live Science in an email.
“[Bigfin squid] are not something you would actively go looking for, they are a species that relies on us coming across them by accident.”
Most documented bigfin squid sightings are “serendipitous filming from oil and gas activities,” Jamieson said.
Bigfin squid are very rare to spot.
They’re known for their long tentacles that can grow up to 26 feet long.
Only about a dozen sightings of them have been confirmed worldwide.
The squid the researchers saw didn’t seem to have the long extensions that the adult bigfins have so it was determined to be a young squid.
Previously, the deepest bigfin squid recorded was spotted around 15,400 feet deep.
That was in the Kermadec Trench in the Pacific Ocean.
Scientists get excited when they find a squid in deep and largely unexplored parts of the ocean because it means there’s likely more life down there.
Squids are large predators and they’re usually on the hunt for food so the young bigfin’s next meal was likely somewhere 20,341 feet below the surface.
ANOTHER BIGFIN FIND
It comes after researchers laid eyes on a bigfin squid in the Philippine Sea back in January 2022.
The squid was spotted deep in the Philippine Trench.
According to CBC, Zoologist Mike Vecchione told As It Happens host Carol Off: “It was exciting for me.
“I’ve been looking for cephalopods from these really ultra-deep environments for quite a long time.”
Vecchione reviewed the footage and still images of the squid for the explorers.
The Tonga Trench
Located in the southwest Pacific Ocean and at the northern end of the Kermadec Tonga Subduction Zone, the Tonga Trench lies around 10.882 km below sea level.
The deepest point in the Tonga trench, known as the Horizon Deep, is considered the second deepest point on Earth after the Challenger Deep and the deepest trench in the Southern Hemisphere.
Researchers have also found that these plate movements cause large volcanoes in the Japan and Mariana Trench. According to marine scientists, the sediments of the Horizon Deep house a community of roundworms.
The researchers published evidence of their big squid find in the journal Marine Biology last month
It includes a shadowy image of the squid that was deep under the sea.
As soon as Vecchione saw the image he said he knew it was bigfin squid.
He said: “It’s got a really big fin compared to the size of its body.
“But really, the most remarkable thing about it is, squids have eight arms plus two tentacles, which are modified arms.
“But in bigfin squids, the tentacles look very much like the other arms, and all 10 of these appendages have long, spaghetti-like extensions at the tips of them.”
The squid the researchers saw didn’t seem to have the long extensions that the adult bigfin’s have so it was determined to be a young squid.
