A small fragment that has revealed a surprising piece of information.
The Architeuthis is the animal with the highest rate of growth in the animal kingdom.
Thanks to the statoliths,
we now know that these squid grow around 1 cm a day,
which rapidly turns the tiny larvae into the largest invertebrates on Earth.
And, as the detective work progresses,
each new discovery in the bodies found
helps us to approach the challenge of entering the world
of the Kraken and trying to see it alive.
If we have not been able to see the giant squid alive,
it is because its habitat is the depths of the ocean
at between 300 and 1,500 metres.
Down there, the pressure is tremendous.
Where on the surface we are subject to one atmosphere,
equivalent to 1 kg/cm2, at a depth of 1,000 metres
that pressure is multiplied by 100.
It is a crushing world shrouded in perpetual darkness.
Very little food reaches it from the surface
and strange hunters lie in wait, armed with terrible weapons.
Large mouths and sharp fangs to ensure none of the scarce prey escape in the darkness.
Adaptation to this extreme world has generated strange beings,
disconcerting forms which, to our eyes, are easily converted into monsters.
This universe without frontiers,
where perpetual darkness reigns and the pressure is crushing,
was the world in which we wanted to place our cameras in search of the legendary squid.
A challenge, which required meticulous preparation
and specialised equipment.
We had spent just over a year planning the campaign on paper.
Now, long months of work lay ahead of us,
to materialise all the technical devices and means
which would enable us to submerge our cameras into the depths of Carrandi in Asturias.
The countdown had begun.
We had the advice of specialists in submarine technology
and also counted on the collaboration of expert biologists
from the Marine Research Institute and the National Natural Science Museum.
Onboard two oceanographic ships,
the Investigador and the Científico,
we spent long weeks checking the water-tightness,
he resistance and the sensitivity of special cameras
capable of recording in the extreme conditions of pressure and darkness of the ocean depths.
Time was running out.
We wanted to undertake the campaign at the end of summer
and the Cantabrian sea was not an easy place in which to work.
While we checked the stability and floatability
of the buoys designed to carry the cameras,
our chief engineer, Joaquín de Gracia,
made the final adjustments to the key element in our campaign:
a case specially designed for the Kraken Project.
Inside it, a sophisticated system would make it possible to record
- continuously, for the 15 days of the campaign -
the images captured by the submarine cameras
and store them on a series of hard drives.
The complexity of the system was due to the fact that it had to have total autonomy,
a decisive factor in the campaign.
The case would remain inside a floating buoy and would be connected
by a thick optic fibre cable to the structure carrying the camera,
a structure with an adjustable lighting system,
infrared lights and different acoustic and optical signals
which would serve as lures.
The buoy and camera system,
whose nerve centre was the recording case,
would be autonomous and would be regulated from our ships.
And, to cover the search area we had chosen,
we had three similar sets of equipment which defined an equilateral triangle
inside which we would move around with our ships.
The long-awaited day finally came.
On board the ships Investigador and Científico,
belonging to the company Investigaciones Marinas,
we set sail for the Carrandi fishing ground.
We were not alone on our adventure.
In order to carry out the campaign,
we had requested an exclusion zone
to keep the study area free from maritime traffic and the patrol boat Mouro,
of the Spanish navy, accompanied us to guarantee compliance with this.
Finally, two years after we had first considered the idea,
we were setting off in search of the legendary giant squid.
The first mission of the campaign consisted of carrying out a bathymetry
which would enable us to establish the points
chosen for the positioning of our cameras.
At 43º 56' N 5º 29' W, we located the so-called Pozo de la Vaca,
a narrowing of the submarine canyon where we would place
the three cameras at depths of 800, 700 and 500 m, respectively.
Now, we were sailing over the Carrandi trench,
the territory of the enigmatic Kraken.
The Carrandi Trench, less than 30 kilometres from the coast of Asturias,
sharply falls to unfathomable depths, down to over 3,000 metres.
At the start of its drop from the continental platform,
Carrandi forms underwater canyons along
which the currents drag large amounts of nutrients
on which enormous shoals of small fish feed,
and these, in turn, attract the large predators,
among them the giant squid.
And here, in the so-called Pozo de la Vaca,
the land relief enabled us to locate the three cameras in different substrata
and at different depths within the influence of one of these currents.
If designing, constructing and testing the cameras was a complex task,
positioning them at the chosen places represented a truly formidable challenge.
The structure of the buoys, ballasted with a dead weight of 3,000 kg,
weighed over five tonnes, and the Cantabrian sea does not make things easy.
Finally, having stabilised the anchor of the first buoy,
the time came to send one of our cameras into the depths of the ocean.
The air was thick with emotion.
We were going to open a window onto an unknown world which no one had ever seen.
As the camera descended, the optic fibre umbilical cord
that joined it to the buoy indicated the depth of descent.
We positioned this first one at 700 metres on one of the walls of the underwater canyon.
Now, all we had to do was wait for the signal
which would reach us live and by radio,
from the first buoy that was already freely floating above the Carrandi Trench.