O’Shea plans to start defrosting it in the second half of April, so that it will be ready to be displayed at Te Papa later this year. Of course this is the shot they use, and the whole damn world uses it.”Īt the time of this interview, O’Shea was steeling himself to preserve the biggest squid of all the 495 kg colossal squid hauled out of the Ross Sea on February 22, 2007, by far the heaviest squid ever captured and apparently 10 m long. Peter says, ‘How do you feel?’ and I burst into tears. Little lumps of snot at the bottom of the tank. In 2001-much to his embarrassment and the delight of the cameraman-he wept when he discovered that the paralarvae (baby giant squid) that he had finally managed to find after three weeks at sea had all died before they reached the shore. He also wears his heart on his sleeve, which is ideal for any documentary maker looking for a hero. When he described his next project, a colossal squid, as having “calamari rings the size of tractor tyres” and “eyes like dinner plates”, the analogies were repeated in media reports all over the world. O’Shea knows his squid intimately, having preserved more than 100 of them. He is the man the media turns to whenever someone lands a giant cephalopod. O’Shea is the nearest thing this country has to a celebrity scientist, having been the subject of magazine profiles and several documentaries, both here and overseas. When NZ Geographic visited this year it had moved into new premises to accommodate its rapidly expanding population, which now includes seven staff and 34 students. A few years ago, the institute was made up of O’Shea and a couple of students. O’Shea is the director of the Earth and Oceanic Sciences Research Institute (EOS) at the Auckland University of Technology, where research topics range from turtles, sharks and frogs to cephalopod systematics. “But an empty stomach is any empty stomach.”
“It would be dangerous to say they are starving,” he says. He is simply finding too many empty stomachs. Hence, he is increasingly certain that there are a lot of hungry cetaceans out there. If we’ve got 250,000 trawls a year, how many of those egg masses are being destroyed? All is not well in cephalopod world.” “These squid have gelatinous egg masses. Squid populations are either being directly depleted by commercial fishing or, less directly, by trawling methods that are wrecking their breeding patterns. “Now we’re finding none to 300 beaks…the stomachs are empty and the beaks we’re finding are largely from Antarctic species.” “A fully mature whale should have upwards of 1600 beaks in its stomach,” he says. He grabs a pair of tweezers and pulls out a squid beak it looks like the beak of a parrot, only larger, darker and considerably sharper. The problem, he argues, is that now there isn’t enough squid either. “But now there aren’t any fish left so they’ve switched to squid,” says O’Shea. Back then, according to those records, more than a third of a whale’s diet was commercial fish. No data on New Zealand whale diet has been collected since 1960s. The stomach contents of sperm whales help him to build his case. Along with his students, O’Shea has been studying the stomach contents of whales and other cetaceans for several years now and everything is pointing to a radical shift in the oceanic food-chain but hard evidence is still needed. O’Shea darts out of the room and returns with two large jars in which float the remains of whale supper. He’d gone specifically to find out what the thing had been eating. He’s spent a weekend under the blistering sun on the beach at Hikurangi, Northland, carving up a sperm whale that stranded there. Having shaved it bald recently, it’s now peeling away in large pink patches. It is the middle of January and Steve O’Shea, commonly referred to as the “squid man”, apologizes for the state of his scalp.
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