Rare footage shows a giant squid coming face to face with Japanese divers. These divers were able to get very close to a rare giant squid just off the coast of Japan. The divers were Yosuke Tanaka and his wife, Miki. The couple was out swimming when they encountered the rarely-seen abysmal giant.

10 Two Japanese scuba divers came face to face with a very rare giant squid and got some amazing footage of the creature

After only 30 minutes of swimming, Yosuke Tanaka, a scuba diving instructor, and his wife Miki was scuba diving in Japan when they came face to face with a huge sea creature: an 8-foot giant squid. Divers are usually scared when they see a rare giant squid, but they get a great video of it. “We swam together and took pictures. I was so happy that the squid was within my reach, but... It was so big that I started to feel scared,” Miki said.

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9 Yosuke Tanaka and his wife Miki were scuba diving in a bay on Japan’s west coast when they came face to face with a giant squid that was 8-foot-long

The beautiful sea creature was seen on the surface of the water near the Nekozaki Peninsula in the city of Toyooka in the Hyogo Prefecture of western Japan. The squid, which can grow up to 13 meters long, was floating in the water off Toyooka City’s coast, according to Yosuke’s underwater camera footage.

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8 Yosuke shared this encounter on his blog- Takeno Diving

Yosuke wrote about the encounter on his blog, Takeno Diving. He said that a ferryman friend of his had first told him about the creature. The ferryman called him and told him that there was a strange big squid and asked if he would like to go see it. The animal was swimming near the water’s surface in an area where there was a lot of seaweed. Tanaka stated that “It’s very rare to see them alive.”

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7 Yosuke was really excited and terrified at the same time

Yosuke took a video of the giant squid swimming just below the surface of the water with its long tentacles stretched out behind it. Yosuke said, “I was so excited, and I felt terrified because it had very thick arms—if I was caught, I would not be able to escape.”

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6 The squid maybe 1-2 years old

Tanaka and his wife run Dive Resort T-style in Toyooka City, Hyogo Prefecture, which is in the western part of Japan. Tsunemi Kubodera, an honorary researcher at Tokyo’s National Museum of Nature and Science, explained that the squid was probably 1 or 2 years old based on its size.

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5 Despite its large size, the squid was still small for its species

Tanaka said the squid was small for its species, even though it was over 8 feet long. Jon Ablett, the senior curator of mollusks and cephalopods at London’s Natural History Museum, stated that giant squids could grow up to 39 feet long.

Ablett said- “It is thought that the colossal squid, Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, may reach an even larger size in terms of mass and possibly also in length than that of the giant squid, although no one has found a fully mature specimen.”

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4 Giant squids have the longest tentacles of any squid

Most of their extraordinary length is made up of their extremely long tentacles. Each tentacle has hundreds of 2–5 cm suction cups. They are surrounded by serrated rings of chitin, which help the giant squid catch its prey and fight off predators like sperm whales, killer whales, and sharks.

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3 No one knows how long they will live

People think they become sexually mature at around 3 years old, but the maximum age isn’t known yet. Giant squids have a built-in accelerometer that works like your inner ear. A mineralized deposit moves around inside a sensory organ to tell the squid which way is up.

This deposit, called a “statolith,” gets bigger as the animal grows older. If you count the layers, you can figure out how old the animal is. The beaks also get bigger over time. Based on these two facts, the oldest specimen discovered was thought to be about 14 years old. However, the question of their lifespan is still a mystery because most estimates are based on a lot of assumptions.

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2 Giant squids are extremely rare

Even though they can grow to colossal sizes, giant squids are notoriously hard to find, making it hard to guess how many there are. Assumptions can only be made by looking at what’s in the stomachs of sperm whales, which are the main animals that eat giant squids. Ablett says, “A study by Clyde Rober and Elizabeth Shea estimated up to 131 million giant squid are fed upon by sperm whales each year.”

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1 They dwell in many oceans around the world

Even though squid can be found in all of the world’s oceans, they are most common in the waters around New Zealand, Japan, the North Atlantic, and Africa. But since they are hard to find, not much is known about this species. Knowing these facts, Tanaka said, “I feel very lucky to have met him even once in my life. I hope that this will shed some light on the mystery of this squid, and I hope many divers visit this area.”