There's no knowledge of how many species of giant squids there are in the world.
We're using a mixture of DNA research with collaborators
to try and find out how many species there are and also
measurements off the specimens to try and see if there's any easy way to tell if this animal differs
from the ones in Japan, in the North Atlantic, in the Southern Hemisphere.
A sucker is like a little shark jaw on a little skinny base. So if I can find one I'll get Jasper to zoom in.
You can see these little sharp teeth around the edge of the sucker
and that means that every sucker along the arms of these animals can act like a little shark's jaw
grabbing onto something when they grab their food.
The skin comes off very easily on a giant squid. This is the maroon coloured skin.
The reason it's red brown is that in very low light levels red becomes black so it looks pitch black
and at that depth when you're deep enough you don't need to have black skin.
Red's enough because the light's so low that they look the same.
So there's a possibility that giant squid are like the jumbo squids.
Jumbo squids in Baja California can flash from white to red.
The whole body goes white, red, white, red in pulses.
So the simplicity of this skin, you can see that it's just red brown. It's got a little bit of density in other spots.
You can sometimes see the little spots that are the individual pigment sacs
but there's no evidence of the muscle bits that can be raised.
So they’re probably smooth skinned and they can probably turn that red skin on and off
and that's probably the limit of their colour change. But that’s not surprising considering it's a kilometre down.
It’s pitch black; you don't do a lot of visual displays.
We're going to work on the beak.
Squid and octopus and cuttlefish all evolved in a very strange way.
The nearest relatives are snails and clams and mussels
so you can think of them as a super snail where they've got...
their foot's turned into eight or 10 limbs around their mouth, they're like super lips,
and then they’ve got a brain that developed around their food tube, their oesophagus,
so it's a donut shaped brain that the food tube goes through the middle of.
Now if you tried to eat something big through that big brain you'd get a splitting headache
so what they've done is they've developed a front end that's kind of like a garbage disposal unit.
It’s got two halves of a beak, like the beak of a giant parrot,
and then behind that is a tongue covered in sharp teeth.
Those sharp teeth are how they puree their food up.
You can see the tips of the two beaks here.
They’re very sharp and very strong.
They could probably cut through our fingers in about two seconds if it was alive.
So what we're going to do is get some dissecting gear and just tease out those two halves of the beaks
and show you the beaks halves out of there.
It's a very complicated arrangement to chew the food into a tiny puree
so they can pass it through the middle of their brain without getting an ice-cream headache.
Here's a model that our preparators at the museum have put together
and it just shows those two beaks in place
and the little sharp toothed tongue behind it, the radula.
We'll be dissecting out the radula, that tongue, and these two beak halves
so that we can look at the fine structure of the teeth, the shape of the beaks,
and see if there's anything that helps separate the two possibly different species.
This is the upper beak.
This piece sits in here like this
and then that becomes the cutting edges.
It cuts along the cutting edge inside there. So it's very good at tearing flesh off the things they eat
and later when we turn it over and open up the stomach contents we'll be looking for the sorts of food remains.
This is the radula or the tooth tongue.
It's got little sharp teeth on it that you can feel.
So again there's rows of seven teeth across and probably a hundred rows long
and they use it like a little conveyer belt covered in sharp teeth to take those little chunks of meat
and puree them into sort of even smaller pieces so then they can swallow that.
It's in the skin that we find evidence of mating behaviour.
This is preliminary because when we turn it over and open it we're expecting it to be female
because the bigger ones are female in giant squids.
And giant squids have very strange mating behaviour.
The male has a metre and a half long penis that it uses like a nail gun.
They can insert little cords of sperm into the skin of the female's arms and sometimes around the head
and she stores them in her skin until she's ready to lay her eggs.
So she may for months have that sperm buried in under the skin and then when she's ready to lay her eggs
she uses that sperm somehow to fertilise millions of tiny little eggs
and blow this big jelly bubble which then floats mid water with the juveniles in.
So we're going to look through the skin to see if there's any what looks like little white worms.
There’s evidence that they're quite cannibalistic so that the females probably eat the males
or they may just eat each other in general if they bump into each other
which might be why that system has developed for putting the sperm
quickly in the female's arms and swimming away quickly.
Because it's probably a very dangerous thing for the smaller males to be hanging around too long,
it can be like some of the spiders or the praying mantises
where the male gets eaten when they're trying to mate and fertilise the female's eggs.
This is the eye and it's deflated.
It’s actually lost the lens which is in the middle.
The lens is about the size of a golf ball and this is the deflated eye orbit itself
and then it sits in a broader socket that has a big sort of lid around the outside.
It and the colossal squid have the biggest eyes in the world, bigger even than blue whale eyes.
You know the blue whale skeleton that's out there is huge
but its eye is actually smaller than the giant squid and the colossal squid.
The main propulsion for squid, octopus and cuttlefish is jet propulsion
and that's where this large muscular tube squeezes
and it forces water at high pressure through a funnel.
This is the funnel or the siphon, it's like a giant jet propulsion.
Those jet planes that can drive around with jet propulsion, these are using this to swim along,
so they're jetting along using jets of water.
And in some of the flying squid it's using a jet of water to get in the air
and then glide through the air and land in the sea again.
This was the revolution that allowed a lot of these animals
to get off the sea floor and up swimming around in the water column.
It's a variation on some snails and clams.
You see a little tube that they suck water into their gills
this has sort of been souped up to super speeds and super senstivity
and they can turn the angle. So they can turn it this way and it will make them jet along this way
they'll turn it this way and they can jet along this way.
So that's the funnel or the siphon.
Now these are the gills.
They have lots of little leaves that maximise the surface area for them to suck oxygen out of the seawater.
There's a left and a right gill and internally there is a heart on the top of each gill
and then a heart in the middle of the body, so they have three hearts.
One of the problems with their blood pigments, it's based on copper
so it's blue compared with ours which is based on iron which is red.
So when something rusts you see red; that's because of the iron oxide.
And our blood is red because of the iron in the blood pigment.
In these animals it's copper based so it's a pale blue runny blood and it's not very good at taking up oxygen.
So they have to compensate by pumping so much more of this runny blood
so much faster to be able to sort of stay fast efficient animals.
The way they've done it is putting a muscular heart on the top of each gill
- and we'll peel off this membrane in a minute and show you inside -
and then one central heart in the middle.
So in our heart we have a left and a right section - I can't remember which is which -
but one does the lung circuit, and the other one takes the oxygenated blood right round the body.
In these, the central heart's the body one,
and the one on each gill is the one that keeps it going through the gills to get the oxygen.