The Decibel - The myth and the reality of Newfoundland’s giant squids

Episode Date: December 19, 2023

A giant squid discovered in Newfoundland in 1873 turned what until then was a mythological creature into the scientifically named Architeuthis dux, or giant squid. In the generations since, more sightings and myth-making have become the stuff of local legend on “The Rock”.Atlantic reporter Lindsay Jones explores how the giant squid has since entwined itself in the history and culture of Newfoundland, even as sightings have dwindled in the 21st century.Questions? Comments? Ideas? E-mail us at [e-mail]

Oh, interesting. Oh, my God! The Globe's Atlantic reporter, Lindsay Jones, is off the coast of Newfoundland, on the hunt for a giant squid. A whale right here! Right here! She didn't find one on that boat trip, but she did see a minke whale. Wow, that was so cool. The odds were stacked against Lindsay.

While whale sightings aren't uncommon on the Atlantic Ocean, spotting a giant squid is very rare. They live deep in the ocean and have been reported to be as big as 12 meters long. And in Newfoundland, one of the few hotspots in the world for giant squids, only around 50 of them have ever been found since the 1870s. We're continuing our week of quirky and fun Canadian stories on The Decibel. So today, Lindsay's on the show to tell us about the search for squids and why it's wrapped up in the history, culture, and storytelling of Newfoundland. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail.

Lindsay, thank you so much for being here today. Thanks for having me. So before we get into it, I do want to say I have been fascinated by giant squids for a long time. I remember when I was a kid going to the library with my dad and looking at them in a book, and I was so taken with them that I remember my dad photocopied a picture of the giant squid from the book, and I had it up in my room for a while. So this is like something I've been thinking about for a while. I think it's so interesting. That's awesome. Your dad's going to have to get you the Giant Squid pop-up book that's going to be coming out soon.

Yeah, because so it sounds like this is really part of like the culture in Newfoundland. And so, Lindsay, I know you went on kind of a quest really for the Giant Squid of Newfoundland. When did Newfoundland's connection with the giant squid really start, I guess? Well, there was what many people refer to as the golden age of squid in Newfoundland. And this was in the 1870s. And that was a period of time when several dozen squid were either found alive or washed up. Mostly the giant squid were stranding or washing up in the northeastern part of Newfoundland. So that's if you picture Newfoundland on the map as this sort of rudimentary triangle, that would be near the top, towards Greenland. What do we know about the giant squid, though? Because they are really elusive creatures. Well, no one knew anything about them really back then other than like they were a myth. And there's so many stories in literature and history around,

you know, the kraken and, you know, this mythological creature that could wrap its tentacles around a boat at sea and sink a massive ship. That encounter has never happened. And it's purely fictional. But fishermen had reported sightings of them. And there were fishermen in the ports of Newfoundland that had talked about them. And, you know, when they washed up, they used, they chopped up the tentacles for dog food. But they hadn't been studied scientifically until, and that's where Newfoundland has this amazing little chunk of history attached to it, until they landed in the hands of a scientist at Yale. And I guess this is another interesting thing about the giant squid is that so it is its own species. It's kind of bigger than other squids that you would usually find.

But for a long time, we didn't know it really existed. Right. Like when is the first time that we actually got our hands, I guess, on a giant squid or actually saw one for real here? The first time a giant squid was ever photographed was in 1873. The photograph came a boat because of some fishermen who were out in a boat in Conception Bay. And they saw on the surface of the water what looked to be like just floating debris. And they poked it and it moved like it sprang to life and then a tentacle came over the side of the boat and I mean this is the stuff of the stories that we have in our our heads that make us so fearful of them and there was the son of a fisherman was on board this boat and chopped off one of

the tentacles. And so the fisherman brought it to the home of a naturalist named Moses Harvey in St. John's. And so from there on in, he was on the lookout for giant squid. He became, you know, enraptured with them, like so many. But that was the first photographic evidence of a giant squid, even though there had been reports of them going back to the late 1700s. This was the first real evidence that they existed. And it wasn't just, you know, a mythological story that had been passed around. But the first real body of a giant squid to be studied in science came out of another bay nearby

just the next month. This was the squid in Laji Bay in a community also along the northeastern shore. A group of fishermen were casting their net and they pulled up a live giant squid. And by now word had traveled that this naturalist, Moses Harvey, was looking for a giant squid. And so they brought it to him. He photographed it and attempted to preserve it. And that's one of these like incredible photos that's still circulating today of the giant squid's tentacles draped over maybe a bathtub. And you can see all the suckers. I remember I saw this picture when we were looking through the research for this episode,

and it is really quite something. You just have all of these tentacles kind of looped over the rung there. So, you know, kind of a first understanding, as you say, of what this creature really is. Yes. And so that creature was sent to Yale scientist Addison E. Farrell, and he became like the foremost authority on giant squid. And this was the first specimen of giant squid ever to be labeled, discovered. And in a sense, at that very moment, the squid made the leap from myth to scientific specimen. So yeah, it was, and then for years after that, Moses Harvey secured other squid and sent them down to Yale. And the squid that were studied there formed a lot of the research that still stands today about giant squid.

Wow. And I guess we were talking about it before a little bit, the myth of it, grabbing ships and stuff, but we really don't have any evidence that the giant squid is aggressive in that way, right? We really just don't know a lot about this creature. Well, there are some really interesting facts about it that are quite scary. Like one thing I learned from a retired fisheries and ocean scientist who studied the giant squid

along with many other things throughout his career was their tentacles can shoot out at lightning speed to grab prey. They have this beak covered with rows of tiny teeth. And it rams bite-sized pieces of food down the squid's throat. And I know in Glover's Harbor, Newfoundland, you were there, there's a giant squid interpretation site. And I know we have some tape of you at the museum. Come look at this tentacle over here.

Oh, yeah. That's a nice. This one's good. Oh, yeah. See this. You had to come here just by boat to see. This is the actual size of the eye. It's all experience. That's the size of the eye? And you actually saw a replica there of the squid eye. Like, how big is it?

They had a paper mache eyeball replicating the size of the squid that washed up right there, like that came off the creature. And it was the size of a soccer ball. Wow. That's a big, that is a big eye. So tell me about this squid that washed up in Glover's Harbor then. So this squid is probably the most famous squid in Canada. The biggest one ever found in Newfoundland. About 16 meters long. And at the site, there is a sculpture of the giant squid. So you like a wanted poster with a squid on it. Can you describe that and tell me why that's significant?

Yes, it's like an old Western wanted dead or alive poster with like a giant caricature of a giant squid thrashing in the shallows of the ocean. Wow. And this is Memorial University then that's looking for squid dead or alive? Yes. So Dr. Frederick Aldrich was the chair of the Ocean Studies and a professor of biology at Memorial University. And he was trying to catch the attention of locals. And, you know, it wasn't academics who had access to finding or spotting giant squid, it was fishermen. And oftentimes, you know, from some of the stories we've heard, it was somewhat uneventful. And so I think that there had to be an incentive. It says rewards are offered,

and I'm not sure how much anybody was ever paid for a giant squid. But I know when I interviewed a fisherman who discovered one in one small town, he was the last person to find a giant squid washed up, that he donated it. We'll be back in a moment. Okay, so Lindsay, we talked about how these giant squids tend to wash up on kind of the northeastern shore of Newfoundland. Do scientists know why giant squids are appearing in that section of land or why they come close to the shore in Newfoundland. Do scientists know why giant squids are appearing in that section of land or why they come close to the shore in Newfoundland more than other places? Well, so that is something Frederick Aldrich dedicated a lot of his career to. And there

wasn't there still hasn't really been any consensus about, you know, why that is. And so, you know, one thing that is known about giant squid is they live in deep water all over the world. And Fred Aldrich was trying to understand why they keep showing up along that northeastern coastline. He's the researcher at Memorial then who had put out the wanted poster. He is. Yeah. So one of his theories was that the Labrador current, which runs along the East coast of Newfoundland, brings sick or wandering giant squid from the continental shelf into the shallower waters of the bays. Now it's hard to imagine the bays would be

shallow because, you know, they are known for being super deep and, you know, they are known for being super deep. And, you know, there are whales in the bays, but shallow water for giant squid standards. And once they hit these waters, the water carried less oxygen because it's not as cold as the deep, dark water that they're used to. And they may have suffocated. So it sounds like there were a bunch of sightings in the 1800s. You said since then there's been a number as well. But it sounds like the golden age of squids really, Lindsay, was in the 1870s. Relatively speaking, are there fewer found in

Newfoundland today? And do we know why? Sure. Well, there used to be so many more fishermen out at sea, like in the inshore fishery around the coast of Newfoundland prior to the moratorium on cod fishing in the early 1990s. And so there are fewer fishermen to potentially spot washed up or stranded giant squid than there were prior to that. And so maybe there's just fewer eyes on the ocean. It's pretty vast out there and no one's there to spot the giant squid that are lurking. Yeah. Okay. So the latest giant squid sighting in Newfoundland was in 2004. Who spotted that squid, Lindsay? So Derwin Roberts is a mussel fisherman who lives in this town of Triton. It's also along the northeastern coast. And he was filling some buckets of water

at a friend's faucet when he spotted what looked to him at the time like white garbage bags and rope bobbing in the water off of a nearby beach. And so he looked a little closer and, you know, it was just unmistakable to him. He was flabbergasted. It was a giant squid. Wow. And what did he do? Did he snap a picture of it? What happened? He went over to his brother's fishing stage, which is a small shed on the ocean, shelter on the ocean where people got fish and work on their lobster pots. And he told his brothers what he found and asked them if they wanted to help him recover a giant squid. And eventually they were able to haul it to shore.

It weighed about 90 kilograms. And they lifted this like slippery, slimy, dead animal into a wooden lobster box. And they drove back to the fishing stage. And there they laid it out on the floor and measured it. And people just started flocking to see it. And where did that squid end up? Not far from where Derwin Roberts found the giant squid is a small community museum called the Sperm Whale Pavilion. And there's a plaque right at the entry to the museum celebrating the Roberts Brothers donation of the giant squid. And it is preserved rather ghastly looking,

it's rather ghastly looking in like this cloudy soup with quite, you know, tattered white flesh. And it's really hard to picture it alive. But there is a huge mounted photo of a giant sperm whale and the skeleton of a sperm whale mounted. And lots of great photos of Derwin and his brothers with the giant squid spread out on the floor of the fishing stage. And the idea of the proximity of the squid and the whale, we don't exactly know, but there's some kind of thinking that these two might fight, and we know that sperm whale eats squid,

so there's kind of a relationship in some ways between these creatures then. For sure. I mean, it's a mythological relationship, but then there's also, you know, historical photos of sperm whales with giant squid suction marks on their flesh. So clearly they do encounter each other in the depths. Wow. So just lastly here, Lindsay, we've talked about so many things here, but it really does seem like Newfoundland is this place where there's this myth of the giant squid, and that's been turned into real science with the findings of all of these real creatures. And it definitely seems like this giant squid is really still very much in the imagination of Newfoundlanders. I guess, how do Newfoundlanders engage with the idea of the giant squid these days? It's always been a part of Newfoundland, but people are starting to realize that the rest of the world thinks it's super cool as well. And so they're

taking more initiative in celebrating, you know, what's become part of their town history. I was so excited to find out that there was the second annual giant squid festival in the town of Hare Bay. So they, their giant squid that washed up in 1981 is one of the giant squid that is on display at the rooms. It's a provincial museum in the capital city of St. John's. And there was one woman who baked pies and tarts with giant squid on them. There were giant squid t-shirts and giant squid crochet stuffed animals. And, you know, they want to make it bigger next year and they want a statue in their town too. And, and then there's, you know, there's, there's this really awesome historian, Jenny Higgins, and she is making an adult pop-up book about the giant squid in Newfoundland. And

she's really zeroing in on the golden age, you know, that part of Newfoundland history that so many people in Canada don't know. Lindsay, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. Thanks for having me. That's it for today. I'm Maina Karaman-Wells. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Adrienne Chung is our senior producer. And Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.