August is Giant Squid Month at the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute

WHAT has three hearts, blue blood and a doughnut-shaped brain? It's the rare giant squid and recently researchers at Australia's Melbourne Museum proved it exists. The museum's mollusk master Dr. Mark Norman performed a 90-minute dissection in a public gallery, surrounded by hundreds of fascinated onlookers.

The specimen donated by the fishing crew that accidentally caught the monster near Portland was the largest ever found in Australia. The immature female tipped the scales at 248 kilograms, and stretched to over 12 meters long.

In between surgical sweeps of the scalpel, Dr. Norman conducted a squid tutorial, explaining that the animal emits an ink cloud "like a James Bond smokescreen" to escape from predators which include other squids and sperm whales.

The dissection gave the Australian team a chance to establish the squid's gender, examine her stomach contents, and check under the skin of her tentacles to see if she was carrying sperm packets.

As giant squids are cannibals and the females larger than the males, breeding involves the male squid firing sperm at the female, where it lodges under her skin.

Squids can produce three to six million eggs, but only a fraction survive, Dr. Norman said: "It's a very scary environment in the deep sea, a very difficult lifestyle and that's why 99.99 per cent of the eggs won't survive."

The Portland squid is among the largest ever caught there are reports of a squid weighing 270 kilograms, but no one knows where or when it was caught which only adds to the mythology of the creature.

What little is known about the giant squid has been based on the mangled remains of dead animals caught in fishermen's nets, decayed specimens washed ashore, and the indigestible giant squid beaks found in the stomachs of sperm whales-a natural predator, and one of the few animals large enough to tackle the giant squid. Given this, every new specimen is regarded as a blessing from Neptune.

Starting in the late 1980s, the Beebe Project began searching for the giant squid in the waters off Bermuda in a series of annual expeditions.

Named after Dr. William Beebe, the American scientist who conducted pioneering deep-sea research off Bermuda in the 1930s, the project was financed by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Geographic Society, the American Telephone & Telegraph Corporation, the Explorers Club and International Underwater Contractors, an ocean-diving company.

Scientists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, the University of Maryland, the University of California's Los Angeles and Santa Barbara campuses and the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution in Florida all participated in the Beebe Project.

But despite outfitting their small, 12-ton submarines with 1,000-watt quartz iodide lamps, thallium iodide lamps that gave off low-level green light quite effective in penetrating dark sea water, stereoscopic television cameras and still cameras with flash attachments, the Beebe expedition scientists and marine photographers never caught a glimpse of the elusive giant squid.

The giant squid has always enjoyed a reputation of mythic proportions.

The notorious sea beast in Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was surely based on seafarers' tales of the real giant squid: "It was a squid of colossal dimensions, fully eight meters long. It gazed with enormous, staring eyes. Its eight arms... like the serpentine hair of the Furies... The monster's mouth-a beak made of horn and shaped like that of a parrot. Its tongue... armed with several rows of sharp teeth. What a freak of nature! A bird's beak on a mollusk!"

And more recently, Peter Benchley, in his Bermuda-based eco-thriller Beast, describes a giant squid that "killed without need, as if nature, in a fit of perverse malevolence, had programmed it to that end."

Because Bermuda's waters are depleted from overfishing, the giant squid turns to the residents and tourists as its primary food source in Benchley's fast-paced page-turner.

Jaws author Benchley, who was a BUEI International Advisor up until his death two years ago, introduces the title creature in a moodily atmospheric passage: "It hovered in the ink dark water, waiting.

"It was not a fish, had no air bladder to give it buoyancy, but because of the special chemistry of its flesh, it did not sink into the abyss.

"It was not a mammal, did not breathe air, so it felt no impulse to move to the surface.

"It hovered.

"It was not asleep, for it did not know sleep, sleep was not among its natural rhythms. It rested, nourishing itself with oxygen absorbed from the water pumped through the caverns of its bullet-shaped body.

"Its eight sinuous arms floated on the current; its two long tentacles were coiled tight against its body. When it was threatened or in the frenzy of a kill, the tentacles would spring forward, like tooth-studded whips...

"It existed to survive. And to kill."

Such fictional accounts, coupled with scores of unconfirmed sightings by sailors over the years, have elevated the giant squid into the fabled realm of the fire-breathing dragon and the Loch Ness monster. Though the giant squid is no myth, the species, designated in scientific literature as Architeuthis, is so little understood that it sometimes seems like one. A fully grown giant squid is classified as the largest invertebrate on Earth, with tentacles sometimes as long as a city bus and eyes about the size of human heads.

Yet no scientist has ever examined a live specimenor seen one swimming in the sea. Researchers have studied only carcasses, which have occasionally washed ashore or floated to the surface. (One corpse, found on a Bermuda beach in 1963, was said to have tentacles that trailed a hundred feet behind it).

Other evidence of the giant squid is even more indirect: sucker marks have been spotted on the bodies of sperm whales, as if burned into them; presumably, the two creatures battle each other hundreds of feet beneath the ocean's surface.

Mesmerised by such descriptions scientists have tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to find the haunts of the elusive creature.

In 1996 during an expedition to the Azores scientists attached a "Crittercam" a specially designed video camera invented at National Geographic to a sperm whale, hoping that the whale would guide them to the squid. No success.

A second expedition in 1997 was conducted in the Kaikoura Canyon in New Zealand a spot where immature male sperm whales hang out and eat giant squid until they are ready to command a harem. During this expedition the Crittercam was mounted on the nose of an autonomous unmanned vehicle that captured some spectacular whale behaviour, but no squid.

Almost a decade later a Japanese research team succeeded in filming a giant squid live.

The team videotaped the giant squid at the surface as they captured it off the Ogasawara Islands south of Tokyo earlier this month. Unfortunately the squid, which measured about 24 feet long died while it was being caught.

For years the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute's International Advisor, Dr. Clyde Roper has been on a personal mission to find and capture the ever-elusive Architeuthis on film.

"Over 99 per cent of the living space on Earth is in the oceans and we would have had to be phenomenally lucky to find it," he jokes. "This is part of a much bigger quest.

"It is not about instant gratification. It is exciting that there are still these mysteries to be probed and explored."

Dr. Roper is curator of the exhibit, In Search of Giant Squid at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, in Washington, DC, where he has worked since 1966.

He explains that no one has ever seen a giant squid in its natural habitat which he believes may be 300 to 1,000 meters down although they have been encountered at the surface.

"When you net a squid in the deep sea", Dr. Roper elaborates, "the only ones you catch are the slow, the sick, and the stupid, because they normally have excellent eyesight and are extremely sensitive to what goes on around them.

"They have the most highly developed brain of any invertebrate."

No living giant squid has ever been maintained in an aquarium or research institution. So they remain an enigma.

"We probably know more about the dinosaurs than about the giant squid," says Dr. Roper. "And that's what lures me on. I don't have to find the biggest. I just want to find where they live, what they do down there, how they move, how they mate."

What little scientists do know about these creatures is so intriguing that, as Dr. Roper puts it with forgivable hyperbole, "everybody in the world is interested in them."

The giant squid is a member of the cephalopods ("head-foot"), the class of marine animals that also includes the cuttlefish, the octopus, and the chambered nautilus. Some squid are tiny, little more than an inch long.

To date the largest specimen ever measured, was one that was washed ashore in New Zealand in the late 1800s, and was 60 feet long from the tip of its torpedo-shaped body to the ends of its two feeding tentacles, which are much longer than the other eight arms. This giant weighed about a ton.

Dr. Roper believes they may grow up to 75 feet long, making them "massive, massive, unbelievable animals."

The mesmerising eyes of the giant squid, with a prominent dark iris, are the largest in the animal kingdom, as big as hubcaps.

At the centre of the crown of arms is the creature's formidable mouth, with a strong parrot like beak and a rasping, toothed tongue called the radula, which together make mincemeat of its food.

The powerful arms, thick as a mans thigh, bear rows of sharply toothed circular suckers "the shape of a plumbers helper," says Dr. Roper.

So do the club-like ends of the far thinner but muscular tentacles, which can clamp down on prey like the jaws of some enormous pliers.

So what did the giant squid recently discovered off the Australian shores have for dinner? The team found nothing too revealing in the squid's stomach, but then Dr. Norman was not entirely surprised.

Squid use their sharp teeth to "puree" their food into tiny pieces. He adds that their oesophagus runs through their doughnut-shaped brain, which means that large meals can "leave the squids with serious headaches."

This specimen will be preserved in a 70 per cent ethanol solution and has now been put on display in the Melbourne Museum.

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