In Search of Giant Squid

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January:15-18-20-25-28-30
February:1-6-7-11-12-13-14-16-19-26-27-28
March:1-2-6-7-9-10-12-14-15

March 6, 1997 - Clyde

Dr. Malcolm R. Clarke, Fellow of the Royal Society , hails from England, where he has worked for many years on oceanic squids and on a major predator of these squids, the sperm whale. has conducted extensive research on the anatomy and physiology of the sperm whales head in an attempt to discover how the whales regulate their buoyancy during their long, deep dives into great depths of the sea.
He also developed the sub-specialty of identifying the hard, horny, indigestible mouth parts, of squid, called beaks, frequently the only remnants in the stomachs of stranded sperm whales. It is important to know what species of prey an animal eats, so, while digestion is very rapid in sperm whales, the squid beaks remain to give a record of their last meals.

The following section is a description of Dr. Clarke's study of beaks from the stomach of a sperm whale stranded recently to the north of Kaikoura.

A great profile of Dr. Clarke, including wonderful photographs is available on the National Geographic Society's Kaikoura Web Site. Be sure to take a look at Dr. Clarke's entry in the Crew section.





Whales Tale Told by Squid Beaks - Dr. Malcolm R. Clarke


Our knowledge of the distribution of the giant squid rests upon strandings on particular coasts, a few captures in deep sea fishing trawls and the presence of their jaws (beaks) in the stomachs of sperm whales. All three of these sources show that giant squid occur in New Zealand waters. We were fortunate to obtain a sample from the stomach of a sperm whale which stranded a few months ago in a bay north of Wellington from Anton van Holden of the Natural History Division of the Museum of New Zealand, Wellington. This was the nearest we could get to sampling a whale from the Kaikoura Canyon. The sample comprised about 10,000 beaks representing 5,000 individual squids and 6 or 7 octopods The squid beaks included three from giant squids which supports our other evidence from the area, and they show that using our observations of the whales diving behavior to locate these elusive animals may prove the best way of finding where they usually live.

A few beaks from Antarctic species show that the whale must have come from a feeding period in the Antarctic Ocean within a week or two before stranding. The vast majority of the beaks was from small squids that weigh less than 0.5kg, from the family Histioteuthidae, and the second most numerous were from the New Zealand warty squid, Moroteuthis ingens. In all, there were more than 20 species of deep sea cephalopods represented in this single stomach. Beaks of the commercially fished New Zealand arrow squid, Nototodarus, were not present in this whales stomach, confirming the evidence from other sperm whales around the world that members of the family to which Nototodarus belongs normally are not eaten by sperm whales.

Smithsonian Giant Squid Overview Page

gene carl feldman / gene@seawifs.gsfc.nasa.gov