I was doing a story for National
Geographic magazine about squid they’re
kind of the James Dean of the sea they
live fast and die young but in that
brief period that they live they have
extraordinary lives so one of the
components for this squid story was for
me to go and photograph the Humboldt
squid this this alleged sea monster in
the Sea of Cortez of Mexico you know the
local fishermen in Mexico refer to these
things as Diablo Rojo the Red Devils and
they’re deathly afraid of them you know
there are tales of fishermen falling
over the upon days into the ocean and
never being seen again so I didn’t
really know what I would encounter and
these are squid that are typically six
to eight feet in length they’re big
animals they’re as big as I am but they
have about 24,000 teeth that line their
arms and they have a mouth that’s like a
parrot it’s a beak like I’m a car that
could take a quarter sized chunk of
flesh out of their prey my greatest fear
was that several of them would gang up
on me and and grab me and swim away and
I’d be taken down into a thousand foot
deaths or something so you can imagine
just encountering one of these things
never mind hundreds of them but that’s
what I dealt with
but I went out on two different missions
in both cases I was always working at
night because that’s when the squid will
come up into shallower water so what I
would do is I would wait and as the
school began to move up during the
evening I would begin to start diving
and they would just be flashing they
sort of glow they they they have this
luminosity to them where they sort of
flash in colors and you’d see a few arms
and tentacles and then they’d be gone
and it’s very spooky at any given moment
or squid can come at you from any
direction like I grabbed a couple of
times there was a couple of evenings
once when I was hanging out a line and
just waiting for something to happen and
I felt my arm just get towed out from my
side and come in and grab my camera
housing it sort of swam off with me
attached and I had to kind of wrestle it
back for them another a couple of times
where they sort of tested me where they
would flail out their arms and sort of
you know come at me and I just fend them
off with my camera housing but to see
these animals and see them changing
colors they go from white to bright red
and obviously shades in between they
would expel clouds of ink which you know
was a defense mechanism it was it was
quite amazing really really a special
experience
you
Geographic magazine about squid they’re
kind of the James Dean of the sea they
live fast and die young but in that
brief period that they live they have
extraordinary lives so one of the
components for this squid story was for
me to go and photograph the Humboldt
squid this this alleged sea monster in
the Sea of Cortez of Mexico you know the
local fishermen in Mexico refer to these
things as Diablo Rojo the Red Devils and
they’re deathly afraid of them you know
there are tales of fishermen falling
over the upon days into the ocean and
never being seen again so I didn’t
really know what I would encounter and
these are squid that are typically six
to eight feet in length they’re big
animals they’re as big as I am but they
have about 24,000 teeth that line their
arms and they have a mouth that’s like a
parrot it’s a beak like I’m a car that
could take a quarter sized chunk of
flesh out of their prey my greatest fear
was that several of them would gang up
on me and and grab me and swim away and
I’d be taken down into a thousand foot
deaths or something so you can imagine
just encountering one of these things
never mind hundreds of them but that’s
what I dealt with
but I went out on two different missions
in both cases I was always working at
night because that’s when the squid will
come up into shallower water so what I
would do is I would wait and as the
school began to move up during the
evening I would begin to start diving
and they would just be flashing they
sort of glow they they they have this
luminosity to them where they sort of
flash in colors and you’d see a few arms
and tentacles and then they’d be gone
and it’s very spooky at any given moment
or squid can come at you from any
direction like I grabbed a couple of
times there was a couple of evenings
once when I was hanging out a line and
just waiting for something to happen and
I felt my arm just get towed out from my
side and come in and grab my camera
housing it sort of swam off with me
attached and I had to kind of wrestle it
back for them another a couple of times
where they sort of tested me where they
would flail out their arms and sort of
you know come at me and I just fend them
off with my camera housing but to see
these animals and see them changing
colors they go from white to bright red
and obviously shades in between they
would expel clouds of ink which you know
was a defense mechanism it was it was
quite amazing really really a special
experience
you
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