bigfin squid (magnapinna)

There’s an excellent sci-fi novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky from 1971 called Roadside Picnic. It paints a picture of a post-contact world; albeit one wherein the aliens are long gone leaving behind only a series of exclusion zones with defunct artefacts of their visit. The most famous passage in the book, and the one which gives it its name, is about insignificance.

“A picnic. Imagine: a forest, a country road, a meadow. A car pulls off the road into the meadow and unloads young men, bottles, picnic baskets, girls, transistor radios, cameras … A fire is lit, tents are pitched, music is played. And in the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that were watching the whole night in horror crawl out of their shelters. And what do they see? An oil spill, a gasoline puddle, old spark plugs and oil filters strewn about … Scattered rags, burntout bulbs, someone has dropped a monkey wrench. The wheels have tracked mud from some godforsaken swamp … and, of course, there are the remains of the campfire, apple cores, candy wrappers, tins, bottles, someone’s handkerchief, someone’s penknife, old ragged newspapers, coins, wilted flowers from another meadow …”

“I get it,” said Noonan. “A roadside picnic.”

“Exactly. A picnic by the side of some space road. And you ask me whether they’ll come back …”

We don’t know that much about bigfin squids (Magnapinna), other than that they exist. Almost no specimens have ever been collected; very few have even been captured on video. Bigfin squids live deep in the ocean, thousands of metres below the surface. We first encountered the bigfin squid in 1883, though we knew so little about it that we barely understood it was a new species. That changed in 2000, when a remotely-operated vehicle in the Gulf of Mexico captured footage of a strange, never-before-seen squid. Even in the grainy, distorted footage, its form is evident: a short mantle poised like a puppetmaster over its long tentacles that reach down into the darkness, far below what the vehicle could capture. At the time, the rover was at a depth of 2000m. It is these long, creeping appendages that characterise the bigfin squid and make it such a subject of mystery. It is exactly the horror we envision when we consider what might lurk in the ocean. In the absence of credible extraterrestrial visitors, deep-sea cephalopods are the closest thing we have to aliens: utterly inhuman creatures from a totally foreign ecological context whose cognition we could never even begin to understand. This gut reaction to an animal like magnapinna is only natural. They are weird looking cunts.

Researchers later realised that two other pieces of footage of magnapinna had been taken—one in 1988 and one in 1998—without the species being classified. Since 2001, significantly more footage has been captured of the bigfin squid, though we know perhaps less than one might express. Despite leaps forward in remote deep-sea technology, bigfin squid remain elusive, and no new wet specimens have been collected. As such, all we know about them is from all-too-brief video snippets. We know next to nothing about their lifestyle, eating habits, and behaviours. All we know about is their appearance. As far as we know, the total length of the squid—mostly their arms and tentacles—can range from 8m to 12m. The tallest recorded human being of all time, Robert Wadlow, stood at 2.72m. Wadlow passed away in 1940, so it feels a bit unfair to compare him to a squid he didn’t even know about. Bigfin squid have been observed in oceans all over the world, as long as they’re deep enough.

Our lack of knowledge about bigfin squids is only surpassed by bigfin squids’ lack of knowledge of us. Cephalopod intelligence is infinitely high compared to other animals. Here, squids are neglected in favour of their octopus cousins, whose high number of neurons and ability to problem-solve have sparked innumerable debates about the ethics of eating them. It is, of course, very, very difficult for us to know how smart a cephalopod can be. Their brains work so fundamentally differently to ours. Even their structure is totally divergent: the neurons on octopus’ arms aren’t connected to their brains, giving them autonomy. Cephalopod neurology is so dissimilar to ours that we can’t even begin to understand it. Again, we think: aliens. There’s a great deal of poetry to be waxed about octopi, but that’s not why I’m here. I’m here for squids. And while not quite as gifted as their eight-legged cousins, squids’ intelligence is not inconsiderable. The Humboldt squid, for instance, is known for cooperative hunting, a behaviour commonly seen in vertebrates but exceptionally rare in invertebrates. Cooperative hunting requires communication, collaboration, and awareness of others. Not all humans are skilled at these things, so it feels significant that squids could be adept at them.

We have no idea how intelligent bigfin squid are. They could be even more gifted than our Humboldt friends; or, they could be the dunce of cephalopods, their deep-sea habitat a result of intellectual ostracisation. The answer is probably somewhere in the middle. They are, evidently, as intelligent as they need to be. Something that may differentiate magnapinna from most other squids—and which may serve against its favour in the intelligence debate—is that they may not be active predators. Most squids will seek out and hunt their prey, but magnapinna seem to just… wait. They float, arms extended, until something wanders into their grasp; at least, this may be the case. We don’t know. The point is, even if they were significantly intelligent, bigfin squid still wouldn’t know about us, because none of them have ever seen us. We’re only able to see them through complex robotics. There’s no way the squids could know about the upright, overly complicated apes peering at grainy footage of them. There’s something voyeuristic in it.

I can’t explain why I like magnapinna so much. It really is just that they’re so strange, so exaggerated. Animals from extreme environments are captivating. I spend a great deal of time thinking about the conditions of survival. It’s as irrational as any pet interest. I care, simply, because they exist. Because they’re on this planet, so deep into it, so far removed from us, and, despite that they live, they live. Cephalopods first appeared around 500 million years ago. Pangaea began to split apart 200 million years ago. Primates first appeared 70 million years ago. Cephalopods’ long tenure means that their evolution has been extremely diverse, with various squid, octopus, cuttlefish, and nautilus  species populating every corner of the ocean. It’s no surprise that sometime in that 500 million years they began swimming deeper and deeper and found themselves changed by it. They have filled a niche with impressive success. The bigfin squid is not strange to itself. It is nothing more than it needs to be to live.

In our era of environmental destruction, there is something comforting to know that there is an animal so removed. They’re not entirely free from human environmental impact, of course: the deep-sea mining sites and remote rovers that capture footage of magnapinna are invasions of their habitat like any other. Pipes and tanks pollute the deep water like scattered rags, burntout bulbs, someone has dropped a monkey wrench. The animals learn to avoid the exclusion zone. They don’t understand what any of it is, so what can they do but keep living? The squids aren’t what we’re seeking out down there, after all. Magnapinna’s eerieness is underpinned by what it witnesses us extract from the earth. Even down there, we can’t hide from what we’re doing.

The fog of knowledge is highly appealing, and something I find myself dedicating my life to. On a visceral level, I want to understand the bigfin squid. I want to know its behaviours, its ecological role, its cognition. I want to run a hand over the full length of its arms and hold a round, wet eyeball in my palm. I want the reality of its existence to ground me. On a deeper level, though, I hope I don’t learn more about the bigfin squid. I am furious that we already know so much, and I am disquieted by my own urge to know more. We have no reason to know magnapinna, and it has even fewer reasons to know us. We are naturally separated by space and forces we only pretend to fully understand. We should never have known about it. But we do, and knowledge is difficult to reverse. Despite magnapinna’s relative obscurity, there is a small community dedicated to preserving footage and research related to the bigfin squid. Magnapinna Archive uploads all available footage of the creature, and magnpinna’s Wikipedia entry contains a meticulous table of all contact with the squid. This is the other side of it: knowledge collected out of a strange love. Does it hurt magnapinna for us to know about it?  We are the alien invaders. We have entered its space, filled it with our things and now gawp at what has been there for millennia. Maybe knowing magnapinna now will save it when the time comes. If we leave, we won’t take all our things with us. We never do.

All of this is also speculation. I don’t know if magnapinna particularly cares either way about apes swimming down to where we emphatically do not belong. They will only begin to care if it becomes relevant. This is the human approach to aliens, too.