The terrible kraken - myth or reality? The Kraken Rises: Fictional and Real Monsters from the Depths of the Sea Does the Kraken really exist?
Perhaps the most famous sea monster is the kraken. According to legends, it lives off the coast of Norway and Iceland. There are different opinions about what his appearance is. Some describe it as a giant squid, others as an octopus. The first handwritten mention of the kraken can be found in the Danish bishop Erik Pontoppidan, who in 1752 recorded various oral legends about it. Initially, the word “kgake” was used to refer to any deformed animal that was very different from its own kind. Later it passed into many languages and began to mean “legendary sea monster.”
In the bishop's writings, the kraken appears as a crab fish, of enormous size and capable of dragging ships to the bottom of the sea. Its dimensions were truly colossal; it was compared to a small island. Moreover, it was dangerous precisely because of its size and the speed with which it sank to the bottom. This created a strong whirlpool, which destroyed the ships. The kraken spent most of its time hibernating on the seabed, and then a huge number of fish swam around it. Some fishermen allegedly even took the risk and cast their nets directly over the sleeping kraken. The kraken is believed to be to blame for many maritime disasters.
According to Pliny the Younger, remoras surrounded the ships of the fleet of Mark Antony and Cleopatra, which to some extent contributed to his defeat.
In the XVIII-XIX centuries. Some zoologists have suggested that the kraken may be a giant octopus. Naturalist Carl Linnaeus, in his book “The System of Nature,” created a classification of real-life marine organisms, into which he introduced the kraken, presenting it as a cephalopod. A little later he crossed it out from there.
In 1861, a piece of the body of a huge squid was found. Over the next two decades, many remains of similar creatures were also discovered on the northern coast of Europe. This was due to the fact that the temperature regime in the sea changed, which forced the creatures to rise to the surface. According to the stories of some fishermen, the carcasses of sperm whales they caught also had marks resembling giant tentacles.
Throughout the 20th century. Repeated attempts were made to catch the legendary kraken. But it was possible to catch only young individuals whose height was approximately 5 m in length, or only parts of the bodies of larger individuals were caught. Only in 2004 did Japanese oceanologists photograph a fairly large specimen. Before that, for 2 years they monitored the routes of sperm whales, which eat squid. Finally, they managed to catch a giant squid with bait, whose length was 10 m. For four hours, the animal tried to escape
· 0 bait, and oceanologists took about several photographs that show that the squid has very aggressive behavior.
Giant squids are called architeuthis. To date, not a single living specimen has been caught. In several museums you can see the preserved remains of individuals that were discovered already dead. Thus, the London Museum of Quality History displays a nine-meter squid preserved in formaldehyde. A seven-meter squid is available to the general public in the Melbourne Aquarium, frozen in a piece of ice.
But can even such a giant squid harm ships? Its length can be more than 10 m.
Females are larger than males. The weight of squid reaches several hundred kilograms. This is not enough to damage a large ship. But giant squids are predatory and can still cause harm to swimmers or small boats.
In the movies, giant squids pierce the skin of ships with their tentacles, but in reality this is impossible, since they lack a skeleton, so they can only stretch and tear their prey. Outside the aquatic environment they are very helpless, but in the water they have sufficient strength and can resist sea predators. Squids prefer to live on the bottom and rarely appear on the surface, but small individuals can jump out of the water to a fairly large height.
Giant squids have the largest eyes of any living creature. Their diameter reaches more than 30 cm. The tentacles are equipped with strong suction cups, the diameter of which is up to 5 cm. They help to firmly hold the prey. The composition of the bodies and Lu of the giant squid includes ammonium chloride (common alcohol), which preserves its zero honor. True, such squid should not be eaten.” All these features allow some scientists to believe that the giant squid may be the legendary kraken.
Huge, creepy krakens have dominated the minds of sailors for centuries. Many believed that this monster was capable of entangling a ship with its tentacles and dragging it into the depths of the sea along with its crew. There were all sorts of tales about these monsters.
They said that the tentacles of the kraken can reach a length of up to one mile... And sailors allegedly often mistook the surfaced kraken for an island, landed on it, lit a fire and thereby woke up the dormant monster, it plunged sharply into the abyss, and the resulting giant whirlpool pulled the ship together into the abyss with the sailors...
The terrible kraken - myth or reality? The kraken was first mentioned in a Scandinavian manuscript around the year 1000, the above-mentioned Olaus Magnus (1490-1557) devoted a lot of space to it in his book, and the Danish naturalist Eric Pontoppidan, Bishop of Bergen (1698-1774), also wrote about the monster ). Although the kraken is essentially a mythical creature, it is believed that its prototype was the giant squid.
“It is difficult to imagine a more terrible image than the image of one of these huge monsters floating in the ocean depths, even more gloomy from the inky liquid released by these creatures in huge quantities; it’s worth imagining hundreds of cup-shaped suckers with which its tentacles are equipped, constantly in motion and ready at any moment to grab onto anyone or anything... and in the center of the interweaving of these living traps is a bottomless mouth with a huge hooked beak, ready to tear the victim apart, found herself in tentacles. Just thinking about it sends a chill through my skin.” This is how the English sailor and writer Frank T. Bullen described the largest, fastest and most terrible of all invertebrates on the planet - the giant squid. With short throws, this ocean giant reaches speeds that exceed the speed of most fish. In size it is quite comparable to the average sperm whale, with which it often enters into mortal combat, although the sperm whale is armed with very sharp teeth.
The squid's beak is very strong, and its eyes are very similar to human ones - they are equipped with eyelids, have pupils, irises and movable lenses that change their shape depending on the distance to the object that the squid is looking at. It has ten tentacles: eight regular ones and two that are much longer than the rest and have something like spatulas at the ends. All tentacles are studded with suckers. The usual tentacles of a giant squid are 3-3.5 m long, and the longest pair stretches up to 15 meters. With its long tentacles, the squid pulls its prey towards itself and, entwining it with its remaining limbs, tears it apart with its powerful beak.
Until the second half of the 19th century, scientists doubted the existence of giant squids, and the stories of sailors were considered the fruit of their unbridled imagination. But for unknown reasons, many dead giant squids began to be found on the coasts and surface of the seas.
True, the monsters found were not always dead. “On October 26, 1873, three fishermen traveling in a small boat,” writes E. R. Richiuti in the book “Dangerous Inhabitants of the Sea,” “saw some strange floating object in one of the fiords of Newfoundland, it was a giant squid. The fishermen had to fight it not to the death, but to the death: one of them, not suspecting anything, poked an unknown object with a hook, and immediately the squid’s tentacles flew out of the water, the animal grabbed the boat with a death grip and dragged it under the water. One of the fishermen, a 12-year-old boy, managed to cut off two tentacles of the squid with an ax, and it gave up; The fishermen leaned on their oars and safely reached the shore. The piece of tentacle cut off by the boy remained in the boat, and was later measured: it was 5.8 meters in length.”
The worst encounter between a man and a giant squid was reported in newspapers in 1874. The steamship Strathoven, bound for Madras, approached the small schooner Pearl, bobbing on the water. Suddenly, the tentacles of a monstrous squid rose above the surface of the water, they grabbed the schooner and dragged it under the water.
The captain of the schooner, who managed to escape, told the details of the incident. According to him, the crew of the schooner watched the fight between a squid and a sperm whale. The giants disappeared into the depths, but after a while the captain noticed that a short distance from the schooner, a huge shadow was rising from the depths. It was a monstrous squid measuring about 30 meters. When he approached the schooner, the captain shot him with a gun, and this was followed by a swift attack by the monster, which dragged the schooner to the bottom.
Biologist and oceanographer Frederick Aldrich is convinced that squid even 50 meters long can live at great depths. The biologist proceeds from the fact that all the found dead specimens of the giant squid, about 15 m long, belonged to young individuals with suckers with a diameter of five centimeters, while on many harpooned whales traces of suckers with a diameter of 20 centimeters were found...
Well, in the meantime, you can see the 8.62-meter-long giant squid with your own eyes at the British Natural History Museum. Archie (as the squid was nicknamed) was caught in 2004 by fishermen from a trawler near the Falkland Islands. Fortunately, the fishermen realized that they had caught a unique specimen, froze it entirely and transported it to London. Scientists not only examined the giant, but also prepared it for display. Now Archie, located in a 9.45-meter-long aquarium filled with a special preservative solution, can be seen by all museum visitors.
It is worth noting that when talking about the kraken there is often some confusion; the latter is sometimes considered a giant octopus. However, the reality of giant octopuses has not yet been proven, although there are a number of facts that indicate the possibility of the existence of very large specimens. For example, in 1897, the corpse of a huge octopus weighing about 6 tons was found on the beach of St. Augustine in Florida. This giant had a body 7.5 m long, and tentacles 23 m long, with a diameter of about 45 cm at their base.
In 1986, the crew and passengers of the motor ship Ururi near the Solomon Islands (Pacific Ocean) were able to observe a 12-meter-long octopus emerging from a depth of 300 meters. Approximately the same octopus was photographed in 1999. Therefore, it is possible that not only giant squids, but also huge octopuses took part in the formation of the eerie image of the kraken.
Andrey Sidorenko
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As they say, there is some truth in every fairy tale, and as it turns out, sometimes this share comes from the role of dragons, hobbits and underwater giants the size of a 10-story building.
For those who dreamed of being in a fairy tale, website made a selection of 7 legendary creatures that actually existed.
Hobbits
The word “hobbit” was invented by Tolkien, but there is evidence that little people actually existed.
During excavations in 2003 on the island of Flores in Indonesia, archaeologists discovered a human skeleton about 1 meter tall and with a head 3 times smaller than that of an ordinary person. A little later, scientists found the remains of 9 more such people, and the age of the youngest of them was 12,000 years.
Scientists have concluded that this is a separate species. And they gave him the name “Floresian man” (lat. Homo floresiensis), but most of them call them hobbits.
In addition, in Indonesia there are quite suitable volcanoes for, say, throwing a ring into them if necessary.
Dragons
Dragons are without a doubt the most famous of mythical creatures. Huge lizards breathing fire that only a brave knight could defeat.
But there were also real animals, and it was quite possible to call them dragons. For example, Megalania is the largest lizard known to science. They grew up to 9 meters in length, weighed 2,200 kg and spit poisonous saliva. Sounds familiar, right? Megalania existed in the Pleistocene era and could have met humans, and their remains gave rise to the myth of dragons.
By the way, dragons still exist today. They are called Komodo dragons, they live in Indonesia and can reach 3 meters in length, which is also quite a lot.
Kraken
Giant squids, which is essentially what the kraken is, may still exist today. Moreover, this has been repeatedly confirmed by sailors and scientists.
In 2015, a 3.7-meter-long squid was discovered and filmed near Japan. As scientists later said, it was only a cub that can grow up to 25 meters in length. Agree, a 25-meter big guy can easily grab with his tentacles and drag even a large ship to the bottom.
Imoogi, or Korean dragon
Korean legends tell about imuji - huge pythons that were considered young dragons. According to legend, they were found in water or caves and were supposed to live on earth for a thousand years before turning into dragons and flying to the sky.
The largest shark in the world, the megalodon, roamed the depths of the oceans about 28 million years ago. Megalodon was the real king of the underwater world, reaching 16 meters in length and weighing approximately 47 tons.
According to some versions of scientists, which are based on the remains found, these superpredators could survive until the advent of humans. And some believe that megalodons still live in unexplored waters.
Direwolves
The famous novel Moby Dick was based on stories about a real-life giant white sperm whale. He attacked whaling ships and smashed them into pieces, sending them to the bottom. In 1819, the crew of a whaling ship hunted whales for a year and a half until a huge white sperm whale put an end to it.
- In 1839, an article was published in one of the magazines of that time, which stated that a giant whale was defeated off the coast of Chile near the island of Mocha, since then it was nicknamed Mocha Dick.
- And in 1974, Canadian sailors spotted an albino whale in the Atlantic. They chased the animal for many hours until they managed to envelop it in nets in the bay. It turned out that it was a young female. This means that exactly the same giant whale could exist.
In addition, experts in Peru found a well-preserved sperm whale skull, the length of which reached 12–17 meters. This species of animal was named Leviathan melvillei.
The image of a giant cephalopod has always excited people's imagination. The mythology of almost all coastal peoples features various octopuses, cuttlefish and squids of unprecedented size. But where did the numerous legends about the giant clam come from? Do they have a real prototype that exists in nature? And what other monsters, besides the kraken, frightened ancient fishermen and sailors?
Sea troll phenomenon
“When the kraken floats to the surface, its shiny horns rise above the sea. They stretch out in length, swell, filling with blood. They rise above the water, like the masts of a ship. These are apparently the hands of the animal, and they say that if he grabs them even the largest ship, it can drag it to the bottom. Fishermen claim that sometimes, having sailed several miles from the coast and reaching a certain place with a depth of 80 or 100 fathoms, they find there a depth of only 20-30 fathoms. There are clouds here fish are walking, so they conclude that there is a kraken at the bottom. It releases a foul-smelling liquid into the water, which, however, lures the fish. By devouring them, the monster produces this liquid again... Sometimes two or three dozen fishing boats hover above the kraken. The fishermen pull out nets full of fish, and carefully monitor: does the depth remain the same? If the sea becomes shallow, it means that the kraken is rising, and then the fishermen give up fishing, take up the oars and swim away as quickly as possible. When the fishermen return to the shore with a rich catch, they say, that they were "fishing on the kraken." But this is a dangerous business, because the kraken is great." This is how the bishop of the city of Bergen, Eric Pontoppidan (1686-1774), wrote about the mysterious sea monster in his famous book “An Experience in Describing the Natural History of Norway.”
This is one of the most impressive stories about giant squids, but they have been known since antiquity. They were already mentioned by Pliny the Elder and Scandinavian medieval legends were described in detail. However, the word itself kraken didn't exist then. For example, the 1250 Norwegian book “The King's Mirror,” written to educate the future Norwegian king Magnus VI, or the saga of Odd the Arrow tells of a giant sea monster resembling a cephalopod. In both sources it is called hafgufa or lyngbakr.
The name is kraken first appears in the treatise “History of the Northern Peoples” by the famous Swedish cartographer Olaf Magnus (1490-1557), who created the first reliable map of Northern Europe, now known as Carta Marina.
Kraken is a definite form of krake (in Scandinavian languages the definite article is attached to the back of a word). It is believed that its original meaning was “twisted, curved.” In this case, it is related to the English words crook (hook) and crank (turn, bend). The Norwegian word krake is also noted in the meaning of “short crooked tree”. In modern German, Krake (plural: Kraken) means octopus.
One can propose a slightly different etymology of the word kraken, linking it with the Proto-Slavic word *kork (leg). The Bulgarian “krak” (leg), Macedonian “krak” (branch, shoot, branch and leg), Slovenian krak (long leg), kraka (pig leg, ham), Serbian “krak” (oblong part of an object) go back to this Proto-Slavic word , branch, leg (long)), Polish krok (step), Russian dialect "korok" (thigh). The Russian words “ham” (meat from the leg of an animal) and “cuttlefish” (the spelling of this word with an “a” is a consequence of akania) are derived from the same root. True, no words related to Proto-Slavic *kork have been found in Germanic languages.
The above-mentioned Pontoppidan also gives the descriptive names of the animal anker-trold (anchor troll) and soe-trold (sea troll).
In the 16th - 17th centuries, the sea washed up the bodies of dead sea giants a couple of times on the shores of Denmark and Iceland, which was reflected in the Icelandic chronicle of 1639: “In the autumn, an extraordinary creature, or sea monster, was washed up on the sands of Thingor, in the territory of Hynevand, whose body, equal in length and thickness to a human, had seven tails, each two cubits long (1 m 20 cm), with growths similar to eyeballs with golden eyelids. In addition to the seven tails, above them there was another one, especially long - from four to five toises (4.95-5.50 m). There were no bones or cartilage in his body."
Most eyewitnesses of the kraken phenomenon mention the long tentacles (“horns”) of the animal, with which the monster can supposedly drag a ship to the bottom. More than once, whalers found imprints of giant squid suckers on the skin of the sperm whales they killed, which gave rise to stories about life-and-death battles between the whale and the cephalopod.
Thanks to the popularity of the works of Olaus Magnus and Pontoppidan, the Norse word "kraken" penetrated into many languages. In 1802, the French zoologist Pierre Denis de Montfort wrote the book “General and Particular Natural History of Mollusks,” which for the first time in scientific literature told about how a giant octopus pulled a three-masted ship to the bottom. The zoologist obtained information about giant cephalopods by interviewing whalers in Dunkirk. Later, Denis de Montfort put forward a hypothesis according to which krakens caused the death of a group of as many as ten ships in the Atlantic Ocean in 1782.
However, the giant squid known to Europeans has many relatives in the folklore of other regions of the globe.
Iku-Turso - Finnish nightmare
The species identity of the Finnish sea monster Iku-Turso (Tursas, Meritursas) is unclear. In a word tursas in the old days they called the walrus, but now the Finns usually call it mursu. In a word meritsas, literally "sea Tursas", is the name of an octopus, although the word used for this is much more often mustekala or "ink fish". In the Kalevala his name is Tursas or Iku-Turso (“Eternal (ancient) Thurso”). It is impossible to say anything definite about Iku-Turso’s appearance; he is described by epithets tuhatpää(“thousand-headed”) and tuhatsarvi(“thousand-horned”), and also partalainen("bearded").
It is mentioned twice in the Kalevala. For the first time, Iku-Turso rises from the depths of the sea and sets fire to a haystack standing on the shore, and places an acorn in the remaining ashes, from which a giant oak tree grows. In another case, the mistress of the ominous northern country of Pohjola, having discovered that Väinemöinen has taken away the wonderful Sampo mill, conjures Iku-Turso to overtake and punish the thief:
Iku-Turso, you, son of the Elder! // Raise the head from the sea, // Raise the top of the head from the waves, // Cast down the men of Caleb, // Drown the friends of the streams, // Let those evil heroes // Perish in the depths of the ramparts; // Return Sampo to Pohjola, // Capturing him from that boat!(translation by L.P. Belsky)
However, Väinemoinen easily dealt with Iku-Turso: he pulled him out of the water by the ears, sternly scolded him and let him go, ordering him not to rise to the surface and not disturb people until the end of time.
Some Finnish legends say that it was from Iku-Turso that the “airy maiden” Ilmatar conceived Väinemönen (it is usually believed that he has no father). If we consider that Väinemöinen was born shortly after the creation of the world, then Iku-Turso turns out to be one of the most ancient creatures. In the writings of the Finnish bishop Mikael Agricola (1510-1557), among the pagan gods of Tavastia, a region in southern Finland, a certain Turisas is mentioned, who “brings victory in battle.” Some researchers suggest a connection between Iku-Turso and the Turs - giants from Scandinavian mythology.
Thunderstorm of the Sea of Okhotsk - Akkorokamuy
A character from Ainu mythology, Akkorokamui, lives in the waters off the island of Hokkaido. It looks like a giant octopus or squid. Known since the 19th century and, according to legend, it caught the eye of people not only on the island of Hokkaido, but also off the coast of Korea, China and even off the island of Taiwan. A typical legend about a meeting with him is contained in John Batchelor’s book “The Ainu and Their Folklore” (1901): three fishermen who were catching swordfish barely escaped with their lives when their boat was attacked by a huge sea monster with large bulging eyes. It released a dark liquid into the water with a very strong and unpleasant odor. The legends about Akkorokamui say that it is bright red in color and resembles the reflection of the setting sun in the water. Its length reaches 120 meters. Due to its color and size, it is visible from afar.
The Japanese included Akkorokamui among the Shinto deities - kami. After this, the monster’s character improved somewhat, he began to bestow healing and knowledge on believers, but still he is a formidable octopus and terrible in anger, and it is impossible to escape from his tentacles. Akkorokamui punishes for violating ritual purity, so before entering the temples dedicated to him, you should wash not only your hands, but also your feet.
There are Akkorokamuy shrines not only in Hokkaido, but throughout Japan. Seafood is brought to him as offerings: fish, crabs, shellfish, and so on. The fishermen hope that for such gifts he will send a good catch. Apparently, the ability of cephalopods to restore lost tentacles made Akkorokamui responsible for curing diseases of the arms and legs, including fractures.
Friend of the Cannibals - Te Weke-a-Muthurangi
This giant squid took part in a historical event for the Maori people - the resettlement of their ancestors from their legendary ancestral home, the country of Hawaii, to New Zealand. According to the legends of some Maori tribes, a monstrous squid stole fish bait from a fisherman named Kupe. The coupe chased after him. For a long time he sailed south across the ocean until he saw unknown islands, to which he gave the name Aotearoa - “long white cloud.” This is now the official name of New Zealand in the Maori language.
There are legends about a number of bays and straits off the coast of New Zealand that episodes of a fight between Kupe and a giant squid took place in them. He overtook the squid Kupe in the strait separating the North and South islands, where, after a long battle, he cut off its tentacles and killed it. And then he returned to Hawaii and told everyone about the beautiful country in the far south.
"Florida Monster" - Luska
The giant octopus of that name is the hero of stories of the inhabitants of the Caribbean islands and one of the favorites of cryptozoologists, although not as popular as Nessie or Bigfoot. Most often, news of meetings with him come from Andros Island in the Bahamas archipelago. Luska is described as an octopus ranging from 20 to 60 meters in length.
Rumors about Lusk are fueled by periodic discoveries of globsters - large masses of organic matter thrown ashore by waves. Most often, globsters turn out to be fatty masses from the decomposed bodies of dead whales or the corpses of giant sharks ( Cetorhinus maximus), or very real giant squids, but not as big as the legendary Luska.
The famous globster, discovered in 1896 on the Florida coast off St. Augustine, was estimated to weigh up to five tons. It went down in history as the “monster from St. Augustine”, or the “Florida monster”, and was mistaken by some researchers for the remains of an octopus and even managed to receive a Latin name Octopus giganteus. It seemed to enthusiasts that Luska's reality was confirmed. But scientists have found that the “Florida monster” was still a large piece of flesh from a dead whale. This was done by analyzing the composition of amino acids from preserved samples and comparing the results with the amino acid composition of proteins from the mantles of cephalopods, fish meat, sharks and whales. As a result, biochemists confirmed that the “Florida monster” and a number of other globsters are the remains of large warm-blooded vertebrates.
Victim of slander - Kanaloa
Kanaloa, which looks like a huge octopus or squid, was considered by the Hawaiians to be one of the ancient deities. He is often mentioned in conjunction with the god Kane, a participant in the creation of the world and man. For example, Kane was called during the construction of the canoe, and Kanaloa during the sailing; Cane ruled the constellations to the north of the zodiac, and Kanaloa to the south.
There was nothing specifically evil about Kanaloa, but in later legends he appears as a rebel, defeated by the other gods and cast into the underworld as punishment. Kanaloa begins to be considered the god of evil, death and the underworld. All this happened under the influence of early European missionaries, who, trying to find support points for their preaching in the mythology of the Hawaiians, “appointed” the gods Kane, Ku and Lono as an analogue of the Christian Trinity, and for Kanaloa they chose the role of Satan. Although the Hawaiians had a separate god of the underworld and death named Milu.
Nameless Eyak Octopus
The Eyak Indian people live in southeastern Alaska, off the Pacific coast. Now there are only 428 people. The legend of the octopus was recorded on tape in 1965 by the famous linguist and specialist in endangered languages, Michael Krauss, from the words of Anna Harry, a representative of the Eyak people.
It talks about a woman who was grabbed and dragged underwater by an octopus. Contrary to expectations, she did not drown, but became the wife of the octopus and settled with him in an underwater cave. The octopus took care of his wife, brought her seals and fish, and even provided her with hot food (“he cooked food like this: he drags a seal and lays on top of it, and that’s how the carcass cooks”). They gave birth to two small octopuses.
One day, this woman’s brothers, having gone on a sea hunt, met her while she was resting, sitting on a sea rock. They called her home, but she refused, but promised that her husband would catch various prey for them. And after some time, a woman with children and an octopus husband completely moved to people. At the same time, the octopus acquired a human appearance.
The husband still went to sea to hunt, but on a boat. One day he fought with a whale and was killed by it. The woman then left her native village to live with the octopus’s sisters and soon died. The grown-up children decided to avenge their father, found the whale, fought with it and killed it, and gave the carcass to their mother’s brothers. After that they left the people.
What do zoologists say?
The true scientific history of giant squids can be dated back to 1857, when the outstanding Danish zoologist and botanist Iapetus Smit Stenstrup (1813-1897) compiled the first description of the animal from a number of remains thrown up by the sea and gave it a Latin name Architeuthis dux.
On November 30, 1861, sailors from the French corvette Alekton, sailing near the Canary Islands, saw a giant octopus on the surface of the water. Its red body was about six meters long and its eyes were the size of cannonballs. Frightened by the myths about the kraken, the sailors fired at the animal with cannons, and then tried to lift its body on board. They did not succeed (the squid weighed, according to estimates, about two tons), but they managed to get a fragment of its body weighing about twenty kilograms, and the ship's artist made a drawing of the animal. This evidence created a sensation in Europe. The French Academy of Sciences has recognized the existence of the giant squid.
Encounters between sailors and giant squid continued, and even became frequent in the 1870s. Then the bodies of dead squids were discovered more than a hundred times (there are hypotheses that during these years there was an epidemic of some unknown disease among them).
Eight species of the genus have been described today Architeuthis. Although many details of their life remain unknown, scientists have managed to find out a lot, and in the last decade they have even obtained several videos of giant squids in their natural environment. Like all squids, they have ten tentacles, two of which - the hunting tentacles - are longer than the others and several times longer than the squid's body. The maximum length of known specimens, taking into account the hunting tentacles, was 17.4 meters, and without them - a little more than six meters.
If a squid is measured by the length of the mantle, since it is determined by a rigid skeletal plate and does not depend on the condition of the animal and external conditions, then it turns out to be up to five meters. And his weight reaches 275 kilograms. The body color of "arch-squids" is red. The largest suckers on the tentacles have a diameter of up to six centimeters and are surrounded by a chitinous ring with sharp teeth (it is their traces that are found on the skin of sperm whales). By the way, giant squids do fight with sperm whales, but this is not a fight between two equal opponents, but the squid’s desperate but hopeless attempts to resist. The outcome of their fight is predetermined, and always in favor of the sperm whale.
Zoologists also explained another legend associated with giant squids. They said that the squid rises to the surface of the water, luring birds, and when they descend to feast on its body, it grabs several with its tentacles and goes into the depths. In fact, the squid doesn’t win here either. It’s just that albatrosses really often find dead giant squids on the surface of the ocean and go down to them to eat.
Besides gender Architeuthis there is a genus Mesonychoteuthis with a single species - the Antarctic giant squid ( Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni), which is also called the colossal squid. If giant squid live in the temperate and subtropical waters of the Indian, Atlantic and Pacific oceans, then colossal squid live only in the waters of the Southern Ocean, off the coast of Antarctica. Its length is not as colossal as its name, and is comparable to a giant squid (mantle - up to 3 meters, with tentacles - 10 meters), but in weight it really is a record holder - up to 495 kilograms. Most of the colossal squid that came into the hands of scientists were extracted from the stomachs of sperm whales when whaling was allowed.
Neither giant nor colossal squid pose a danger to humans. The only species of squid known for its attacks on divers is much more modest in size. This is a Humboldt squid ( Dosidicus gigas). The length of its mantle is 1.9 meters, weight up to 50 kilograms. A number of attacks by these squids on divers at a depth of 100-200 meters have been described. Sometimes they also disable deep-sea cameras. But not a single person has yet died from their tentacles.
The largest octopuses are smaller in size than giant squids. Record individuals of the giant octopus ( Enteroctopus dofleini) were more than three meters long and weighed about half a centner, but their usual weight was about 30 kilograms. This species lives in the northern part of the Pacific Ocean off the coast of the USA, Canada, the Aleutian and Commander Islands, Kamchatka, Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, Korea and Japan. Its rich red color suggests that it is Enteroctopus dofleini served as the prototype of Akkorokamui in Ainu mythology. Another large species is the seven-legged octopus ( Haliphron atlanticus) - can reach 75 kilograms with a length of 3.5 meters. Despite the Latin name, it can be found not only in the Atlantic, but also in the Pacific Ocean.
By the way, this octopus still has not seven legs, or rather tentacles, but eight, like the others. It’s just that one of them is greatly reduced and turned into an organ with which the male transfers the spermatophore into the mantle cavity of the female. When there is no need for it, the eighth tentacle is hidden in a special cavity above the octopus’s eye.
Marine life is very diverse and sometimes frightening. The most bizarre forms of life can lurk in the abyss of the seas, because humanity has still not been able to fully explore all the expanses of water. And sailors have long had legends about a powerful creature that is capable of sinking an entire fleet or convoy with just its appearance. About a creature whose appearance inspires horror, and whose size makes you freeze in amazement. About a creature the likes of which have never been seen in history. And if the sky above the world belongs to and, the earth under our feet also belongs to the Tarascans, then the expanses of the seas belong to only one creature - the kraken.
What does a kraken look like?
To say that the kraken is huge would be an understatement. For centuries, the kraken resting in the depths of the waters can reach simply unimaginable sizes of several tens of kilometers. He is truly huge and scary. Outwardly, it is somewhat similar to a squid - the same elongated body, the same tentacles with suction cups, the same eyes and a special organ for moving underwater using air propulsion. But the sizes of a kraken and an ordinary squid are not even close to comparable. Ships that disturbed the peace of the kraken during the Renaissance sank from just one strike of the tentacle on the water.
The Kraken is mentioned as one of the most terrifying sea monsters. But there is someone to whom even he must obey. It is called differently in different nations. But all the legends say the same thing - this is the God of the seas and the ruler of all sea creatures. And it doesn’t matter what you call this super creature - one of his orders is enough for the kraken to throw off the shackles of a hundred years of sleep and do what he was assigned.
In general, legends often mention a certain artifact that gave a person the ability to control the kraken. This creature is by no means lazy and absolutely good-natured, unlike its owners. Without orders, a Kraken can sleep for centuries, or even millennia, without disturbing anyone with its awakening. Or it can change the appearance of an entire coast in a few days if its peace is disturbed or if an order is given to it. Perhaps, among all creatures, the kraken has the greatest power, but also the most peaceful character.
One or many
You can often find references to the fact that there are many such creatures in the service of the Sea God. But it’s very hard to imagine that this is true. The huge size of the kraken and its strength make it possible to believe that this creature can be on different ends of the earth at the same time, but it is very difficult to imagine that there are two such creatures. How terrifying could a battle like this be?
In some epics, there are references to battles between krakens, which suggests that to this day almost all krakens died in these terrible battles, and the Sea God commands the last survivors. A creature that does not produce offspring, free to eat and rest, has reached such enormous dimensions that one can only wonder how hunger has not yet driven it to land and why it has not yet been encountered by researchers. Perhaps the structure of the kraken's skin and tissues makes it impossible to detect it, and the creature's hundred-year sleep hid it in the sands of the seabed? Or maybe there is a depression left in the ocean, where researchers have not yet looked, but where this creature is resting. We can only hope that even if it is found, the researchers will be smart enough not to awaken the wrath of the thousand-year-old monster and not try to destroy it with the help of any weapons.
