This Elusive Antarctic Squid Was Seen for the First Time

No Antarctic gonate squid had ever been seen alive before, as far as the team was aware. They followed it for a couple of minutes and made sure to record it on video, capturing the creature’s red coloration and white spots. “Videos like this get me really excited,” said Linsey Sala, a museum scientist who manages the pelagic invertebrate collection at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and was not involved in the expedition. Discoveries of species like this “can be really informative to how they live life at great depths,” Ms. Sala said. Unidentified specimens might be sitting in collections around the world, she added, in which case the video footage could be helpful in revealing what they are. Previous sightings of this species of squid have been limited to individuals caught by fishing vessels and squid remains found in other marine animals, mostly in the Falkland Islands. “It’s always exciting to see live footage of a critter that was known only from dead specimens previously,” said Bruce Robison, a deep sea ecologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute who also was not involved in the expedition. For those aboard the vessel, the discovery was “sheer elation,” Dr. Thurber said. There was a fever of excitement even before they had properly identified the squid. To verify the species, Dr. Thurber and his colleagues sent the images captured by the underwater vehicle to taxonomists around the world.