Sea Monsters: Search for the Giant Squid Page #5

but each moment is a revelation

for Roper and his colleagues.

"The interesting thing here,

you can, you can hear that these

different coda that we're hearing,

um, each one is

slightly different and,

and every once in a while

we hear a buzz.

"Now the whales have stopped.

The, the camera is pointing

right down,

uh, right down into the skin

of the, of the whale

that's, uh, that's carrying

the crittercam.

"There see, now I'm hearing that,

hearing that buzz which is...

That's fantastic, that's so...

Yeah, that's a fantastic sound,

that long, long buzzing sound and,

uh, this is, uh, what, we believe is

the sonar that they're using for,

when they're actually hunting,

or have actually picked up

a prey organism

and they're zeroing-in on the prey

and getting closer and closer to it.

"Now they're starting

to move again and,

uh, have turned and turned back

towards the surface

because now we can see,

uh, the lighted,

uh, the background that's lighted.

So they're heading back up

to the surface.

"Whoa! There comes

a, a, a whale right across,

another one,

right across in front of the camera."

"There's two more.

Look at that!"

"And there's a, there's a third one

over on that side on the right.

So, that makes four whales...

The, the crittercam has been

knocked off,

that's how closely, uh, the whales were

to each other,

really rubbing along,

uh, side-by-side."

No giant squid was found.

But this and other crittercam dives

make the expedition a stunning success.

"We were able,

for the very, very first time,

to enter into the deep-sea domain

of the sperm whale.

By playing these instrument

on the whale, um,

we were able to get down to

many hundreds of meters deep

and how the animal actually behaves

down in those depths."

But the sperm whales seem blissfully

unaware of our efforts to enter

and understand their world.

They have appointments

to keep far below,

which we can still see

only our imagination.

One day,

in the not too distance future,

a whale may bring us

a living portrait of Architeuthis-

and one of the last great challenges

in natural science

and photography will be met.

But for the moment,

we must contemplate these great whales

as we always have,

fascinated by their physical powers,

tantalized by the secrets they hold

in their great brains.

Two-thirds of our planet lies

in the deep ocean,

and that mysterious realm

is their home.

In search of the giant squid,

Clyde Roper and his colleagues seem

undaunted by the obstacles they face

- happily engrossed in the hunt

for the creature that fascinates them.

Perhaps there is much truth

in John Steinbeck's observation,

that men need sea monsters

in their personal oceans-

that an ocean

with its nameless creatures

would be like sleep without dreams.

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