The calamari safari

The giant squid has a New England scientist wrapped in its tentacles. His pursuit of the elusive creature is the subject of a Discovery Channel special.

By CRAIG PITTMAN, Times Staff Writer

© St. Petersburg Times, published May 26, 2000

[I.H. Roper, courtesy of the Discovery Channel]

The beached sperm whale drew quite a crowd. Then the three University of Miami students showed up with the double-bladed ax.

One of them was a marine biology major named Clyde Roper, a kid from New England who was fascinated with squids. He was curious about every kind of squid, but one in particular: the giant squid.

Bigger than a city bus, with eyes the size of a man's head and and a massive, parrot-like beak, the giant squid is as elusive as a ghost. No modern man has ever seen a live giant squid. All we have are creative descriptions in myth and literature.

Ancient seafarers called it the kraken and told how its tentacles wrapped around a whole ship, dragging the crew down to a watery death. In Moby Dick, Herman Melville wrote of the squid's long arms "twisting like a nest of anacondas." Jules Verne dispatched dozens of the hideous monsters to attack Captain Nemo in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

"That's what captivated me about it," Roper said. "So little was known, and what was known was mostly lies."

The only predator big enough to eat a giant squid is a sperm whale. So when Roper heard about the dead whale on Jupiter Beach, he thought: Maybe it has a giant squid in one of its three stomachs!

He and and his buddies raced north in a Rambler station wagon, hit the beach and started hacking away at the carcass. Roper cut into the first stomach, big as a suitcase. No squid. Second stomach. No squid.

At last he got to the third stomach.

"I was up to my waist in the whale," Roper said. "I reached in, up to my shoulder, and hauled out several handfuls of squid beaks."

He found more than 100 of the indigestible beaks, proving the whale had eaten plenty of squid. But not one was from a giant squid.

Clyde Roper is 62 now, with the beard of an Amish farmer and the accent of a New Hampshire lobsterman, which he once was.

[Times photo: Cherie Diez] Clyde Roper, photographed on a recent visit to St. Pete Beach, has spent 30 years searching for the giant squid.

For more than 30 years Roper studied squids of every shape and size. He discovered new species. He proved that some squids use chemicals in their bodies to produce light for camouflage, including one he recalls looking "like a little Christmas tree."

A few years ago he was attacked by a Humboldt squid, not long after a swarm of Humboldts killed a fisherman and stripped the body to the bone. Roper got away with just a gash in his, ahem, upper thigh.

But nobody wants to hear about that. All anyone ever wants him to talk about are his expeditions in search of a real live giant squid, his Calamari Safaris.

Roper doesn't mind. The giant squid has made him a star: a media-friendly Captain Ahab. He's starring in a show on The Discovery Channel and he has been written up in everything from National Geographic to GQ.

He knows it wasn't his snappy way with a four-in-hand that put this grandpa's picture in a men's magazine between semi-nude photos of supermodel Tyra Banks. It's because he is part of the Ultimate Fish Story, the Big One That Got Away.

"It's hard not to be intrigued by an animal that's so huge and can't be found," said Roper, a zoologist with the Smithsonian Institution since 1966.

The only giant squids that have been found were dead or dying -- in the stomachs of whales, washed up on beaches or tangled in a fisherman's net. Everything scientists know about Architeuthis dux comes from those mangled specimens, which is why they don't know much at all.

"Even 15 seconds of observation would tell us so much: their habitat, their depth, how they swim, are they solitary or do they travel in pairs or schools," Roper said.

This is what scientists do know: They are the largest invertebrates on earth, as long as 60 feet.

They probably spend their whole lives in the pitch black world 2,000 to 3,000 feet below the surface, and have been found in oceans around the globe -- off Norway, South Africa, Japan and Australia, even in the Caribbean off Florida.

They grab their prey with their sucker-filled tentacles, rip it apart with their powerful beaks and then suck it through their brains. They eat other deep-sea fish and smaller squid, but Roper likes to joke that animals that size eat "whatever they want."

As for what eats them, the answer is sperm whales and Smithsonian zoologists. Actually Roper only ate part of one, out of his devotion to science and his love of seafood. He didn't go back for seconds because it tasted like pure ammonia.

The giant squid has one of the most well-developed nervous systems in the animal kingdom, which has led some wags to suggest that the main reason no one has found a live giant squid in its natural habitat is because they're too smart for us.

"We don't know where the animals are," Roper figured, "but the whales do, so let's follow the whales."

In 1995, he headed for the Azores, about 900 miles west of Portugal, with something called a "critter cam," rigged to be stuck onto a whale so it could broadcast back to a nearby ship.

When Roper and his crew found sperm whales feeding on the surface, they would paddle up to the whales in an inflatable kayak. If they could get to within an arm's length, they would try to stick the camera on the whales' heads with a giant suction cup.

"It was not an easy thing to do," Roper said. "Often we would get two arm's-lengths away and the whale would dive."

They managed to stick cameras onto a dozen whales. The cameras relayed back what Roper called "fabulous footage on their diving behavior and socializing," including eerie shots of whales floating vertically, lined up in a row sleeping like the Seven Dwarfs.

But no giant squid.

So Roper shifted his hunt to the other side of the world, to New Zealand, where fishing boats had been hauling up giant squid carcasses left and right. In 1997 he tried again, with both the "critter cam" and a diving robot vehicle, but again came back with no giant squid footage.

Two years later, with financial backing from The Discovery Channel, Roper set out to search along a deep underwater canyon off the island's coast where sperm whales live year-round.

"We felt we were in squid country," Roper said. Last year, 23 dead or dying giant squid were snagged by New Zealand fishing boats.

This time, Roper sent a manned submersible down, armed only with bright lights and cameras. One of the pilots expressed concern that Architeuthis might attack the little sub.

"Let him come after us!" replied a delighted Roper.

An attack would have been a rare bit of luck for the trouble-plagued expedition. Roper had enough money to spend a month in New Zealand, but bad weather and technical glitches limited the crew to just eight days of diving.

In the last day's dispatch, Roper wrote about the marvelous sights that the sub's cameras beamed back up to the surface on its final dive: " ... delicate little tusk shells curving up out of the silt like snow white whiskers from Neptune's beard. And a magnificent Medusa, a transparent jellyfish revealed only by its satin white skirt, billowing and swaying in its self-made propulsive current."

But the giant squid again failed to show up for its close-up.

"It's a big ocean," Roper said. "We could've been within a few meters of a giant squid. It could've been right behind us, following us, and we didn't know."

He began his scientific studies in the era of slide rules. The first sub he rode in is now a museum exhibit. But age did not slow his search for the giant squid until a few months after last year's expedition, when a dizzy spell sent him to the hospital.

He had to have a quadruple bypass and did not return to work full-time until this spring.

So his family made him promise to give up something -- not the search for the giant squid, but the search for money to search for the squid. Doing the fund-raising tap dance proved to be more exhausting than the squid hunt itself.

He hasn't given up hope that someone will bankroll one more Calamari Safari. Last year's New Zealand trip cost about $1-million.

"I had a volunteer who worked for me who would go out and buy D.C. lottery tickets," Roper said. "The whole thing's a lottery. ... Six to eight weeks of diving in the right place at the right time would produce an image of this animal."

When Roper talks about his squid hunt he sounds like a man who's been playing the same slot machine for hours. Eventually it's got to pay off, right?

"There have to be millions of giant squid in the sea," Roper said. "It's just a matter of being in the right place at the right time."

Learn more about the giant squid

The Discovery Channel is scheduled to premiere the one-hour program Quest for the Giant Squid at 9 p.m. on June 4.

More information about Clyde Roper's search for Architeuthis dux is available on the Internet by clicking on:

• http://seawifs.gsfc.nasa.gov/OCEAN_PLANET/HTML/squid_opening.html
  or on:
• http://partners.si.edu/squid/
• If you want to see a dead giant squid up close, the largest specimen in the world is scheduled to go on permanent display in the new Mollusk Hall at Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota later this year. For more information, click on:
• http://www.mote.org/terri/motesquid.phtml

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