Man’s close encounter with dying giant squid
SOUTH AFRICA: James Taylor is used to adventure. The 39-year-old South African extreme sports fanatic regularly posts videos of his feats on his Facebook page. One day he is scaling cliffs in Thailand. The next week he is skydiving over another exotic location.
But recently he had an adventure he didn’t necessarily ask for. when he came across a giant squid while paddleboarding off the coast of Melkbosstrand, South Africa, and decided to catch it then and there.
‘‘It was quite badly injured and barely alive when I caught it,’’ he wrote on Facebook. ‘‘It didn’t even really try and get away, so we ended up putting it out of its misery when we got to the beach. It felt like the best thing to do at the time.’’
While attempting to wrangle it with a rope, the squid, which Taylor said was later determined to be a mature male, which can measure up to 10 metres in length, began wrapping its long tentacles around his paddleboard. At one point, Taylor was knocked off, which under normal circumstances may have endangered his life.
Taylor said the squid was missing some of its tentacles and covered in what appeared to be seal bite marks. Those injuries, combined with the squid’s overall lethargy, led Taylor to conclude that the animal had floated out of its deep-sea habitat to the surface to die.
He thought that if he could beach it, researchers from a nearby aquarium might be able to retrieve it for research.
‘‘It was unfortunately a holiday, and they did not have any staff on call to drive through, so we dissected it and took a bunch of videos and photos that we later sent to them so that they could at least have a look at what we found,’’ he said.
‘‘They sent these on to a professor who has been studying giant squid in South Africa for the last 15 years, and he was very excited about the find.
‘‘He told me the next day that he has only seen five wash up on South African shores since he started his studies.’’ - Washington Post