A remotely operated vehicle gliding through frigid water 600 meters below the surface near the South Sandwich Islands captured something no human had ever clearly seen before: a living colossal squid, drifting through the dark on translucent fins. The animal was small, roughly one foot long, a juvenile fraction of a species that can reach 23 feet and an estimated 1,100 pounds. In May 2026, the Schmidt Ocean Institute released the footage after a careful verification process, confirming the creature as Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni and delivering the first definitive video of the world’s most massive squid species alive in its natural habitat.
“This is the first time we’ve been able to observe this animal in its environment,” said Jyotika Virmani, executive director of the Schmidt Ocean Institute, in a statement accompanying the release. The footage was recorded during an expedition aboard the research vessel Falkor (too), which was surveying deep-sea ecosystems around the South Sandwich Islands, a volcanic archipelago roughly 2,400 kilometers east of the southern tip of South America.
A century-old mystery, finally on camera
The colossal squid has haunted marine biology since 1925, when British zoologist G.C. Robson described the genus Mesonychoteuthis from fragments recovered in the Southern Ocean. His formal description, published in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History, established the species based on distinctive anatomical features, most notably the swiveling hooks lining its tentacle clubs. Those hooks, which rotate in their sockets like tiny grappling tools, separate the colossal squid from its more famous relative, the giant squid (Architeuthis dux), which relies on toothed suckers instead.
For the next hundred years, nearly everything scientists learned about Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni came from dead animals. Fishing vessels targeting Patagonian toothfish in the Southern Ocean occasionally hauled up specimens tangled in their lines. The largest on record, caught by the New Zealand vessel San Aspiring in the Ross Sea in 2007, weighed approximately 495 kilograms (about 1,090 pounds) and was later preserved at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Sperm whale stomachs yielded beaks and other hard parts, allowing researchers to estimate how many colossal squid the whales consumed. But no one had managed to observe the animal alive in any meaningful detail.
The giant squid, by comparison, was first filmed alive in its deep-sea habitat in 2012 by a Japanese-led team working with the Discovery Channel and NHK. That footage, shot at around 630 meters in the North Pacific, was hailed as a landmark. The colossal squid, larger and more elusive, had to wait another 13 years for its equivalent moment.
What the footage shows, and what it does not
The juvenile filmed near the South Sandwich Islands measured about 30 centimeters, small enough to fit in a person’s hands. At that size, its signature hooks were not clearly visible on camera, but the animal’s body shape, fin proportions, and mantle structure matched the diagnostic features cataloged in FAO cephalopod identification materials maintained by the Smithsonian Institution. Kathrin Bolstad, a cephalopod taxonomist at Auckland University of Technology who has studied Mesonychoteuthis specimens extensively, is among the researchers whose published anatomical work underpins the kind of species-level confirmation the Schmidt team carried out.
The word “teenager” used to describe the squid is informal shorthand for its size relative to known adults, not a precise age determination. Scientists have never directly measured the growth rate of a colossal squid. How long it takes a 30-centimeter juvenile to reach full adult size, or what developmental stages it passes through along the way, remains unknown. The growth trajectory from hatchling to half-ton predator is one of the largest gaps in the species’ biology.
Behaviorally, the footage offers tantalizing but limited information. The video shows the squid moving through the water column, but no published analysis yet describes whether it was hunting, resting, or simply transiting. Interpreting the behavior of an animal observed for the first time requires caution, and no peer-reviewed behavioral study of a living colossal squid exists. Researchers will likely spend months analyzing the footage frame by frame before drawing conclusions.
Size records and their limits
The headline figures of 23 feet and 1,100 pounds deserve some context. The 23-foot measurement refers to total length including the two long feeding tentacles, which can stretch well beyond the rest of the body. Mantle length, the more standardized measurement marine biologists use, is considerably shorter. The 2007 Ross Sea specimen had a mantle length of about 2.5 meters. The weight figure of roughly 1,100 pounds (495 kg) comes from that same animal, the heaviest cephalopod ever weighed.
Whether those numbers represent the true upper limit of the species is an open question. The sample of intact adult colossal squid is vanishingly small, fewer than a dozen complete or near-complete specimens have ever been recovered. It is possible that larger individuals exist in unexplored depths of the Southern Ocean. It is equally possible that the 2007 specimen was an outlier. Without a broader dataset, scientists cannot confidently describe an average adult size, let alone a maximum.
The deep ocean’s persistent blank spots
The South Sandwich Islands sit in one of the most remote and least-studied stretches of ocean on Earth. The archipelago is uninhabited, battered by storms, and surrounded by water that plunges to abyssal depths within a few kilometers of shore. It is exactly the kind of place where a species can go unfilmed for a century.
The sighting at 600 meters falls within the depth range scientists had predicted for the species based on trawl captures and beak recoveries from predator stomachs. That consistency is reassuring from a scientific standpoint: the animal was found where the evidence suggested it should be. But it also underscores how little active searching has been done. Most prior encounters with colossal squid were accidental, bycatch from commercial fishing or fragments from whale dissections. The Schmidt Ocean Institute expedition represents one of the few deliberate efforts to survey the deep waters where Mesonychoteuthis lives.
The institute’s decision to delay releasing the footage until experts had verified the identification reflects a broader challenge in deep-sea biology. At 600 meters, in low light and with limited camera angles, distinguishing one large squid species from another is genuinely difficult. Several other big oegopsid squid inhabit the Southern Ocean, and a hasty announcement could have damaged the credibility of the finding. By waiting, the team ensured that the scientific record gained a solid data point rather than a contested one.
What comes next for the colossal squid
For researchers who have spent careers studying an animal they had never seen alive, the footage opens a new phase of investigation. Questions that could never be answered from carcasses, how the squid holds its arms at rest, how its fins generate thrust, how it orients in the water column, are now at least partially addressable. Even a few minutes of video from a single juvenile can inform biomechanical models and refine hypotheses about the species’ ecology.
The broader lesson is one of scale. A century after Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni entered the scientific literature, the first clear footage of it alive shows a creature no bigger than a loaf of bread, drifting through black water half a kilometer down. Somewhere below, in depths that ROVs are only beginning to reach routinely, adults the size of small cars are presumably going about their lives unseen. The deep ocean, which covers more of Earth’s surface than all the continents combined, continues to guard its largest residents closely.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
