Monsters of the Seas

In the Hollywood horror blockbusters "The Beast" and "Tentacles" I and II, audiences went cold with terror at the sight of utterly gigantic squid and octopuses that hunted not only everything that moved in the ocean depths but even boats and ships. Are encounters between people and such monsters really all that likely, or are they a product of the human imagination? Don't rush to conclusions: these giant monsters do actually exist, though not at Hollywood sizes...

"Oversized" inhabitants of the underwater world.
Some invertebrate inhabitants of the sea depths are known to reach quite impressive sizes. For example, a mollusc found on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, which has earned the sinister nickname "killer", sometimes weighs more than three hundred kilograms! If a diver, God forbid, gets his foot caught between its shells, there's no breaking free of that "vice".
On 14 August 1963, biologist Lionel Walford observed a translucent worm (or serpent?) 12 metres long off the coast of the state of New Jersey. Dr Karl Shuker reports a "Lion's Mane" jellyfish two metres in diameter. According to the American magazine "Fate" for November 2004, in 1978 the sailing ship "Kuranda" collided with a jellyfish of utterly incredible size: weighing 20 tonnes, with tentacles up to 40 metres long! The Dr Shuker mentioned above claims that, according to eyewitnesses, a "Lion's Mane" once swallowed a large shark!
And yet the most popular giants of the underwater world have always been, and still are, the heroes of countless sea stories — the famous sea serpent and the cephalopod mollusc, the eight-armed octopus (the kraken). Science knows of sea snakes over 15 metres long and weighing up to a tonne! An accurately measured octopus reached a length, tentacles included, of about 20 metres.
Richard Ellis's book "Monsters of the Sea" (1998) contains an astonishing account from Thomas Bill, ship's doctor on the whaler "Kent", of something that happened in 1898. That day the whaler was moored at the pier of Bonin Island (Japan). The doctor decided to take a stroll along the sandy shore and, after walking a hundred metres, suddenly saw a very large octopus lying there, more than two metres long not counting its massively thick tentacles. The reckless medic, without a second thought, went and stepped right on the monster's head. And he nearly paid for his carelessness with his life on the spot: the octopus grabbed the doctor by the arm with a tentacle and pulled him towards itself. Screaming wildly with fear and pain, the doctor tried to fight back, but at once another tentacle "swaddled" the troublemaker hand and foot! Luckily for him, there were sailors nearby armed with knives and axes. Two of them attacked the monstrous mollusc and, hacking off its terrible tentacles, freed the doctor, who had almost passed out from the pain. The octopus that had been resting in the sun measured almost 7.5 metres from body to tentacle tips. Naturally, a monster like that could easily wrap a single tentacle around a person and turn him into mincemeat. Discussing this episode, ichthyologists concluded that there had been no aggression on the octopus's part here. It was the ship's doctor who behaved aggressively.
As the "San Francisco Chronicle" reported on 27 December 1989, on New Year's Eve in Iligan Bay off the island of Mindanao (Philippines) a huge squid attacked... a motorised passenger vessel! A few hours later, fishermen found 12 surviving passengers clinging to the keel of the capsized launch. By then they had drifted 17 miles from the scene. According to one of the victims, 37-year-old lawyer Agapito Caballe, as soon as dusk fell, the water suddenly began to churn violently around the 22-tonne launch, which was moving at low speed, and in the light of lamps and flashlights the shocked passengers saw a monster surfacing! "Its eyes, the size of a good basin, literally hypnotised people," Caballe recounted after lengthy psychological rehabilitation. "With huge tentacles as thick as a 50-litre keg, the squid wrapped itself around the hull of the launch and, without any visible effort, turned it upside down! Swimming off a few metres, it seized three passengers with its tentacles — two women and a man — and sank into the depths..." Experts are convinced that the monster lives in the Mariana Trench, which reaches a depth of more than eleven kilometres! Indeed, nobody knows what horrors of nature may dwell in that gloomy bottomless abyss...

Pacific monsters.
In the Pacific Ocean, the largest octopuses ever caught weigh up to 210-220 kg and measure 7-9 metres including the tentacles. American scuba divers Clayton Fisher and John Lashelle managed to film a 6-metre "baby" weighing 97 kg in an underwater cave at a depth of 120 metres off the coast of Juneau (Alaska). A few years ago, diver Jack McLean dared to dive under a swimming octopus and release air from his breathing tanks beneath it. The mollusc shot up to the surface, where it was hooked with gaffs from a boat drifting nearby. Measurements showed that the monster's greatest length was 8.37 metres, and its weight reached 214 kilograms! In March of the following year, the same Jack McLean, at the same spot (Pharaoh Bay, California), saw a 10-metre "eight-armed" monster clearly weighing no less than 300-320 kilograms. McLean doesn't remember how he got back to the boat waiting for him, because he kept looking back at the octopus, which was clearly angry about something.
The newspaper "Honolulu Advertiser" (Hawaiian Islands) of 27 July 1986 reported a sighting off the Solomon Islands (Pacific Ocean) of an octopus... 12 metres long! As it turned out, this giant had been lured to the surface from a depth of 300 metres by a half-dead five-metre porbeagle shark. Having let the stunned passengers and crew of the motor ship "Ururi" take a look at it, the unflappable "master of the waters" slowly sank with its prey to the rocky bottom.
On 14 May 1999, the same newspaper published two photographs of a giant octopus at least 11-12 metres long, reporting that such creatures appear off the coast of Hawaii quite regularly.
Observations have established that squid (also known as krakens) and octopuses often attack even fairly large sharks. And they fight sharks of 5-6 metres, fight desperately, escaping a sad fate through active defence. Be that as it may, at all times giant squid and octopuses have been and remain the bitterest of enemies.
Octopuses also feed on green turtles, which reach a third of a centner in weight and are clearly of gastronomic interest to the eight-armed robbers. Octopuses deal with these shelled creatures quite easily, and according to biologists' observations, octopuses often gather around places where turtles live and breed and keep watch there for a long time, waiting for a victim that has let its guard down...

Who are they, the unknown monsters of the deep.
In August 2001, the sea washed up on the coast of the island of Newfoundland in the Atlantic a mass of an amorphous creature seven metres across and weighing three tonnes! This creature seemed to have ribs and a spine, but no head. The strangest feature of the find was a covering of white hair over the whole body.
Mysterious remains of unidentified sea creatures, often with tentacles, have been found by residents of coastal areas of seas and oceans since time immemorial.
Whom these remains belonged to - sharks, whales or giant squid - was unknown. However, the famous zoologist Adam Verrill confidently identified a find off the coast of Florida as the remains of a gigantic octopus, overgrown in places with moss from old age.
What causes the death of giant squid and octopuses is a mystery for naturalists. It is known for certain that the females of some species of octopus inevitably die after laying their eggs. Incidentally, some other, smaller animals and insects share this trait.
One of the largest squid ever recognised by science was a monster that appeared off the coast of Newfoundland on 2 November 1878. A local resident, Stephen Sperring, and two companions were fishing when they suddenly noticed a fairly large object not far from the shore. At first the fishermen decided it was a piece of wreckage from a sunken ship. But on approaching the object, which turned out to be a cephalopod stuck in the coastal mud at low tide, they hooked the creature with a gaff and dragged it ashore. It was a most remarkable specimen of a kraken, with a body 6 metres long and 10-metre tentacles. The squid's eyes were almost half a metre in diameter, and its suckers, 11 centimetres in diameter, were armed with terrible claws in the middle. The find was examined by a local priest, who reported it to the newspaper "Boston Herald". As for the monster, the fishermen chopped it up for dog food.
Seas and oceans quite often throw up monsters similar to the squid in question. And even bigger ones. A few years ago in the Indian Ocean, Australian whalers caught a sperm whale twenty-three metres long with numerous wounds on its body: marks from the suckers of a giant squid almost half a metre in diameter! So the fierce fighter, the sperm whale, had itself been battling an equally tough opponent, no less than forty metres long!

By the way...
Researchers have divided sea monsters into several categories.
"Long-necks" - reach 15 meters. They are found in the oceans at great depths. They reach speeds of about 60 km/h. So far these long-necks have been encountered 48 times.
"Sea horse" - a mammal that lives at a depth of 30-40 meters and feeds on fish. It got its name because of its long mane. To date this creature has been observed 39 times in equatorial waters.
"Many-humped" - a 25-30-meter monster as thick as a railway tank car. It swims very fast, and as soon as it spots ships nearby, it immediately disappears under the water. It lives in the warm waters of the North Atlantic Gulf Stream current. It has been observed 33 times.
"Many-finned" - a creature resembling the extinct plesiosaur, it reaches 30 meters in length and has a huge snake-like head on a long and relatively thin neck. It has a distinctive feature: a snorting wheeze comes from its nostrils. It has been encountered in the Indian Ocean 20 times.
"Super-otter" – a creature up to 25 meters long, covered in shiny fur, living near the water's surface in the northern seas. It has been encountered 14 times, the last one on 27 May 1999 near Spitsbergen.
"Super-eel" - about 30 meters long. It lives in deep cold waters and attacks sperm whales. It has been seen 12 times.
"Sea lizard" - a terrible animal resembling a giant crocodile. It lives exclusively in tropical seas. It has been seen three times off the coast of India and four times off the southeastern shores of Australia.