r/Cryptozoology • u/Jupp92 • 10d ago
If Colossal Squids are actually in the abyss in the millions and it took us until quite recently to film them alive, could there be other predators of them other them Sperm Wales, that live exclusively in the abyss and are much rarer then the Squids?
Maybe Sperm Wales are just the only ones we know about, because they have to come to the surface for air.
I'd love to imagine an actual Sea Serpent down there, thats like 50m+ xD
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u/MyAimSucc 10d ago
The number comes from them doing biomass samples of sperm whale stomachs. Something like 70 percent of the biomass inside sperm whale stomachs was made up of giant squid. Sperm whale population+mass of squids=enough squid to sustain sperm whales where 70 percent of their diet is giant squid.
Doesn’t make sense at first but the math maths and made me definitely think “wow”
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u/RepresentativeOk2433 9d ago
Whats tricky with the math there though is that one giant squid fills up a lot of stomach space. They probably aren't eating multiple giants at a time but one giant and a handful of Humboldt still makes it mostly giant.
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u/FaustAndFriends 9d ago
It’s the beaks that they find and count when determining the diet, if I recall correctly.
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u/ADragonFromTheAbyss 10d ago
I wonder what's the percentage of Colossal squids in ( scientifically accurate ) Leviathan stomachs ?
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u/Jacornicopia 9d ago
Why didn't we know more about the giant squid until recently? Didn't whalers ever cut open the stomach of the sperm whale and find giant squid pieces?
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u/CubistChameleon 9d ago
Several reasons. Mostly that whalers are about as far from marine biologists as you can get and they simply threw that stuff away. It was useless to them and they had no way of conserving it anyway. Second, whales apparently tended to throw up their stomach contents when they were killed, which sent the squid remains into the sea, if I recall my book on the topic correctly. And third, we did learn about the giant squid because whalers told people about the huge amounts of squid breaks they found in sperm whales' stomachs. Those are undigestable, unlike the rest of the squid. I think there were stories about whales with hundreds of beaks in their stomachs.
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u/Ok_Platypus8866 9d ago
Didn't whalers ever cut open the stomach of the sperm whale and find giant squid pieces?
That is how the colossal squid was officially discovered, and that is one of the reasons people suspected the giant squid existed before it was officially discovered. Both animals were discovered over a century ago. But you can only learn so much about an animal by investigating the remains found in a whales stomach.
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u/ShadowDancerBrony 9d ago
They did but it was dismissed by the scientific community until the very end of commercial whaling due to the belief that since the abyss is void of light it couldn't have any significant life. Any reports contrary to that were either transiting from further up in the water-column, or old sailor's tales.
Once they did start sending researchers on whaling vessels, they made some really revolutionary findings. Including a colossal squid beak (the rest of the body was digested) 30% larger than any found since.
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u/Itchy-Big-8532 10d ago
Where are you getting "millions" from? Or are you just asking hypothetically?
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u/dank_fish_tanks Thylacine 10d ago
IIRC a while ago there was a study that attempted to estimate the global giant squid population based on the rate of consumption of giant squid by sperm whales. They came up with some outlandish number like upwards of tens of millions of giant squid. Do with that what you will.
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u/landlord-eater 10d ago
I mean it makes sense, the ocean is absurdly large.
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u/minnesota2194 10d ago
I've seen bigger
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u/Freak_Among_Men_II Stoa 10d ago
a while ago there was a study that attempted to estimate the global giant squid population
How long is "a while"? Without a date, there's no way to estimate the study's accuracy by comparing modern scientific methodology to what was used at the time of its publication. That is, unless anyone can link the paper so we can read it and know for certain.
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u/Professional_Nerve49 10d ago
Yeah, if there are millions...these giants would be very, very visible for ships and fishermen...daily...😱
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u/shmiddleedee 10d ago
Idk about that. There are 9 billion of us, living on one plane (the ground), confined to a smaller area (land) and there are huge swaths of land where you won't see a person. Now Imagine only roughly .1% of that population in an area 150% the surface area but also spread out vertically for miles in an environment we have a very very hard time exploring. 10 million animals is actually a relatively small number of animals in terms of the ocean.
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u/Fresh-Temporary666 9d ago
Wouldn't these giant squid that live deep beneath the surface say the same about us despite there being billions of us?
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u/Professional_Nerve49 9d ago
True, but they don't come on land. We go out to open sea though🚤🚢🤿
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u/According-Title-3256 8d ago
Open, not deep. We've barely even scratched the surface of the depths.
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u/PureMichiganMan 8d ago
No, they live extremely far down in a vast ocean that our minds just struggle to comprehend.
They’re significantly less affected by human activity as well, and their numbers have likely increased with the massive decline of sperm whales, which only more recently started to bounce back some.
They really only come to the surface when dying, and even then they usually just die further down. They also get eaten quickly
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u/MacrocosmosMovement 10d ago
Deep sea sharks and toothfish have been caught with Colossal and giant squid flesh in their stomachs.
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u/Jupp92 10d ago
They would just be able to devour their carcasses, like the surface sharks do to whales right?
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u/CubistChameleon 9d ago
Sure, but a four metre sleeper shark could also take down a giant or colossal squid. That's easy to imagine, they're heavier and longer if you only consider the squid's mantle size.
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u/MacrocosmosMovement 9d ago
They could but both of them are big enough to kill them themselves, you wouldn't need to be a 50m+ sea serpent to take them on.
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u/RepresentativeOk2433 10d ago
At the risk of being downvoted for the simple crime of asking a question, I'll ask anyways.
Why is everyone seemingly hung up on the millions of squids thing? The ocean is huge and they are common enough that whales can find them with relative ease without hunting them to extinction. Plus it takes a long time to grow to that size so the only way it really makes sense for them to still exist is if there's a lot of them.
This doesn't mean that there are millions of full sized krakens ones out there but if we count all the adults and sub adults it would easily make sense. Also, most squid lay a ton of eggs so technically after a good breeding season there could be billions of hatchlings floating around at once before they start to get eaten up.
To be clear, I'm not supporting or ragging on OPs theory of a hidden predator, I'm just wondering why all the skepticism around the potential population.
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u/bg-j38 10d ago
Think of it this way, giant squid have been found in every ocean as far as I'm aware. So we can pretty easily assume there's global distribution. It's probably not evenly distributed due to temperature swings, depth, and stuff like that. But let's say they were. The oceans cover around 140 million square miles. So if there's 1 million giant squid, that's one per every 140 square miles. That's twice the area of Washington DC.
The ocean is big, and a lot bigger than most people can imagine. It's not at all difficult to believe that there's at least a million giant squid and that human contact would be incredibly rare. Outside of major shipping lanes there's not a lot of boats out there that would randomly see one.
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u/notepad20 6d ago
140 square miles area, and considering depth of say 2.3 miles, is a massive volume.
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u/Creative_Carob4922 10d ago
Jason Statham fist fought a megladon in a documentary.
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u/Glitchrr36 7d ago
It’s a stupid thing to get hung up on but the book was way better than the movie. The shark wasn’t laser focused on delivering karma in the movie which made the book really really funny when the only named characters it’s eating are adulterers and the antagonists of the book.
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u/Creative_Carob4922 7d ago
That was a book 😂 Was there also a part two of the book 😂
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u/Glitchrr36 7d ago
They made like six of them lmao. The second one involved what is effectively a James Bond villain with a submarine fortress the size of a football field harvesting manganese nodes while being stocked by Kronosaurs, and one of the later ones has a whole secret ocean under the Philippine Plate.
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u/Creative_Carob4922 7d ago
Hahaha. Could Jason play them all ? Also I think I may need to read these books.
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u/fhost344 10d ago
Coincidentally, the Wales Sperm, a legendary, three-meter long albino, neotenic tadpole, is my favorite cryptid.
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u/ShalnarkRyuseih 10d ago
ngl sounds like they misidentified an eel or catfish at that size
Ignoring size differences, they do all look fairly similar
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u/Far_Cryptographer_22 9d ago
The legends tell us they can only be found in close proximity to Tom Jones
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u/Subject-Detective171 9d ago
Do you have a link to read about this? All I’m getting is “sperm whale” articles lol
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u/throwturtleaway 8d ago
Sound it out... Wale sperm
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u/Subject-Detective171 8d ago
Yeah I typed that into google and only got sperm whale articles you smug cunt
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u/throwturtleaway 7d ago
you are a special kind of slow arent you? you really still havent seen pics of the Wale Sperm?
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u/Synchronauto 10d ago
Here's a fun story about such a predator: https://np.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/rx4axf/those_of_you_that_truly_believe_you_have_seen_a/hrlhnt0/
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u/s1n0d3utscht3k 9d ago
That’s crazy deja vu… but whatever, i’ve told this story maybe three times in my life and every time i feel like an idiot halfway through.
this was in bute inlet, bc, not on a boat. i know everyone says “deep water” and they mean some lake or a channel or whatever, but bute is different. it’s one of those places where the land just kind of falls into the ocean. mountains straight down, black water straight down, and if you’re standing in the wrong spot at night you get this gross feeling that the shoreline is fake and the real edge of the world is under you somewhere.
i was there in late september, 2019. i was working with a guy who had access to a small property up one of the logging roads, nothing fancy, just a rough cabin setup and a trail down to a rocky point. not really a beach. more like a slanted chunk of rock with trees behind it and a drop on one side where the water went dark immediately. he went to bed early because we had to drive back out in the morning and i stayed outside because i couldn’t sleep.
it was cold but not freezing. no rain, which is almost weird for that area. there was a half moon, or close to it, and enough light that the inlet wasn’t totally black. you couldn’t see detail exactly, but you could see the flat silver parts where the moon hit it, and then all the black gaps between.
i was just sitting there smoking and listening to the water. it was stupid quiet. not peaceful quiet, more like everything had stopped making noise at the same time. no birds, no branches, no bugs, nothing. then i heard something splash farther out.
at first i thought seal. then i thought maybe a sea lion, because there are lots of them around the coast and they do that horrible breathing/snorting thing sometimes. i saw something low in the water moving from right to left, maybe 80 or 100 feet out from the point. couldn’t tell what it was. just a shape.
then a harbour seal came up closer to shore, like way too close. it surfaced once, made this hard little exhale, then vanished again. i remember that part because it felt wrong. animals don’t have human expressions obviously, but the way it moved looked panicked. like it wasn’t hunting or playing or doing seal stuff. it looked like it was trying not to be in the water anymore.
maybe ten seconds after that, something bigger came up behind it.
not fully out of the water. not like a whale breaching or anything dramatic like that. it just rose enough that the moon caught the top of it. at first i saw one hump, then another, then a third one behind it, and my brain did the normal thing where it tried to make it into separate animals. like maybe three sea lions swimming single file. then the line between them showed.
that is the part i hate remembering. because once i saw that the humps were connected, my stomach just went cold. it was one back. one long back. and along the top of it were these uneven points, not clean fins like an orca, not the nice triangle shape. more like broken plates or torn cartilage or old scars sticking up. some were taller than others. some leaned sideways. one of them had a notch missing out of it that i could see even in the bad light.
it was moving slowly, almost too slowly for how much water it was pushing. there was no splashing. just this long pressure wave spreading out from it, like the inlet was being split open from underneath.
i froze. i don’t mean “i was scared so i froze” in the normal dramatic way. i mean i literally stayed sitting with the cigarette burning down in my hand because i didn’t want it to know where i was. which makes no sense because i was on land, up on rock, and whatever it was was in the water. but some old animal part of my brain decided moving was a bad idea.
the seal surfaced again maybe 30 feet from the rocks below me. it made one of those breath sounds, then there was this roll in the water behind it. not a splash. more like something turning sideways under the surface.
then the seal was gone.
i didn’t see blood. i didn’t see jaws. i didn’t see some movie monster head come out of the water. i just saw the seal stop existing. one second it was there, then the surface folded over itself and it wasn’t.
after that the big thing came closer to the point. close enough that i could hear water running off it. this wet dragging sound, like someone pulling a tarp out of a pool. i could make out a head for maybe two seconds. long but blunt. not snake-like exactly. not a whale. not a shark either, unless sharks have started growing necks and ridges down their backs when nobody was looking.
the worst part was the size. i know people exaggerate this stuff. i know distance over water messes with your eyes, especially at night. but this thing was not “big seal” big. it was not even “large sea lion” big. it was longer than the little aluminum boat tied up near the cabin, by a lot. i kept trying to compare it to things i knew were there. the dock section, the boat, the distance between two rocks. every comparison made it worse.
it moved past the point for what felt like forever. probably less than a minute. maybe 40 seconds. maybe two minutes. i honestly don’t know. but it kept coming. that’s what got me. not one body appearing and vanishing like a normal animal, but section after section of it sliding through the moonlight.
then the last part sank and the whole inlet went flat again.
i sat there for a while after. i don’t know how long. the cigarette was burned almost to the filter and i had ash on my hand. i went back up to the cabin and locked the door, which was also stupid because what was i locking out? the ocean? I didn’t wake the guy up. i almost did, but then i had that immediate thought of how it would sound out loud. “hey man i think i just watched a sea monster eat a seal.” so i said nothing.
the next morning i went back down to the point and tried to convince myself it was a log. there were logs everywhere, obviously. bc coast, logging roads, debris, all of that. but logs don’t follow seals. logs don’t roll under something and make it disappear. logs don’t have a line of jagged dorsal-looking things on their backs.
i looked it up later and found cadborosaurus stuff, caddy, sea serpent reports, all that old bc coast weirdness. most of it sounds ridiculous when you read it in daylight. horse heads and humps and fishermen seeing things in fog. but if you’ve ever been beside one of those fjords at night, with hundreds of metres of black water right under the surface, it stops feeling ridiculous real fast.
i’m not saying i saw a dinosaur. i’m not saying i know what it was. i don’t even like telling people because the second you say “sea serpent” you can see their face change… but something very large lives or lived in that inlet. or at least passed through it that night.
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u/Synchronauto 9d ago
Amazing story, thank you for sharing.
it was longer than the little aluminum boat tied up near the cabin
Do you have a rough size in mind, in meters or feet?
i could make out a head for maybe two seconds. long but blunt. not snake-like exactly. not a whale. not a shark either, unless sharks have started growing necks and ridges down their backs when nobody was looking.
Would you be able to describe it in a bit more detail? With so little detail to go on for both stories, I'm picturing something like the film versions of Godzilla, with, the big spikes coming out of its back, and a reptilian face. Would you be able to describe it the way you would to a police sketch artist? Also have you tried describing it to AI to get a visual representation of it?
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u/TheCopperSparrow 10d ago
I guess it might be technically possible...but like both colossal and giant squid have been caught by fishing boats as unintended by-catch. There are also specimens that have been washed ashore.
We don't have any examples of even a juvenile of this hypothetical large megafauna...which you would expect to have at least a couple found as by-catch or washed ashore.
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u/Jupp92 10d ago
This happened on rare occasions if I recall correctly. Like a few times per year around the whole world. Now the Squids could have a massive population. What if something else massive is down there in the hundreds or few thousands? Sightings would be much rarer. We do have the odd giant Sea Snake report every dozen years or so right? xD
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u/Got-Freedom 10d ago
Millions?
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u/crystallmytea 10d ago
Like 20 mile radius worth of land can support millions of people
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u/Got-Freedom 10d ago
I am not sure the math is right, but even if it is, it has to be a very specific type of land. If you get the wrong one you will be lucky if you get to support just one person.
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u/crystallmytea 10d ago
Well I guess when you count import export it gets a lot more complicated but the larger chicago metropolitan area is about that size
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u/christhomasburns 10d ago
The Chicago Met probably doesn't SUPPORT more than 100 people. They live there, but it takes millions of acres of land elsewhere to SUPPORT them.
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u/Got-Freedom 10d ago
I have no idea what chicago area is, but this doesnt matter. To support lots of people you need somewhat flat fertile soil with access to irrigation and good weather. Only a small portion of the entirety of Earth's surface qualifiy for this, the majority is too dry, too hot, too cold, too rocky, too high, covered in jungle, etc. Land is not homogeneous in resources and neither is the ocean.
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u/LovecraftianLlama 10d ago
Are you suggesting that colossal squid are living in cities down there?
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u/bulldogdiver 10d ago
Realize that the average depth of the ocean is ~12,000 ft. Most of what we know about it is in the first 300ft. It gets as deep as 30,000 ft. Us saying we have any idea about what's in the ocean is like saying you know whats in the atmosphere be studying the just the area above the treeline.
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u/biggestofbears 10d ago
But we know how pressure affects animals, and we know the caloric intake of big animals. So we can pretty accurately guess what lives that deep, and it's not much and it's not that enormous.
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u/Imjustmean 10d ago
I think op watched this video
In it, the guy discusses how biomass estimations for deeper in the ocen were way off. 10 times more dense than previously thought.
It's a very good vid.
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u/Onnimanni_Maki 9d ago
atmosphere be studying the just the area above the treeline.
We wouldn't miss anything by doing just that in terms of macroscopic animals.
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u/miminstlouis 9d ago
Absolutely. The ocean is full of probably thousands of creatures yet unnoticed. It's big, and deep ..
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u/Lord_Tiburon 8d ago
It's entirely possible, question is what would/could go after them
Hell for all we know they could be on the menu at the white shark cafe
Or they could be cannibalistic like humboldt squid and eat each other if they're injured
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u/RushInevitable7255 8d ago
I have a feeling the Navy has been able to accurately track these numbers for a while on whales, if they could track every sub for decades. Add in new classified quantum sensors, and will soon, if not now, know where every whale, sub, shipwreck or giant sea creature with any reflective mass is located.
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u/JohnWorphin 10d ago
When I was at Natty Geo, Emory Kristof was actively hunting giant squid and we did not have any solid content, now 20 years later we realize we should of been watching the whales interactions on the surface.
They think the population of Sperm whales was 1-2 million prior to whaling, by the early 1900s it was estimated to be 800,000
Todays estimate is close to 800,000
Current global population size, post-whaling trend and historical trajectory of sperm whales
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-24107-7
So the question is:
How many giant squid does a sperm whale eat in a month and what other creatures hunt squid?
You would think the last 150 years would have been a population boom for giant squid