Researchers Discover Strange Squid

Dec. 20 -- It's more than 20 feet long, has 10 limbs that drape from its crown like puppet strings and swims by flapping two huge fins above its head.

And it won't scare easily.

Scientists estimate the strange, unidentified squid, which seems to prefer the cold, dark waters more than a mile under the ocean's surface, has been spotted eight times in the past 13 years. But the sightings by manned and unmanned submersible vessels have always been unexpected and brief — too brief for observers to understand what they've seen.

The creature has never been captured — dead or alive — and scientists are stumped as to how to classify it.

Everywhere, But Rarely Seen

"We've never seen anything like it," said Michael Vecchione, an expert in squids and head of the National Marine Fisheries Service lab in Washington.

The fact that the strange animal has been sighted at similar depths in the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans indicates the animal, though rarely seen, may be widely distributed — and not so rare.

"It makes you think where have we been and where have they been all this time," said Clyde Roper, an invertebrate biologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington who has spent years in search of another highly elusive animal, the giant squid.

Vecchione, who authored a paper on compiled accounts of the animal in this week's issue of Science, says one possible relative of the strange squid could be the family known as Magnapinnidae or "bigfin" squids.

Bigfin squids (named after their large fins) were recently discovered at shallower depths of about 650 feet below the surface of the Eastern Pacific Ocean and have wormlike extensions growing from the tips of their arms and tentacles.

Since only juvenile bigfins have been recovered, Vecchione suspects these could be the young version of the new squid. He says the bigfin's nubby ends might be what develops into the long, spaghetti-like appendages seen in the unidentified adult squid.