WASHINGTON — Just as Herman Melville's fictional Capt. Ahab searched the seas for the mythic great white whale called Moby Dick, real-life New Hampshire lobsterman turned Smithsonian Institution marine biologist Clyde Roper has been impelled by a similar dream.
He wants to look a living giant squid in the eye.
"The eye is as large as the human head," he said. "It's the largest eye in the animal kingdom."
Roper has just returned from a three-month expedition to the deep seas surrounding New Zealand, having hoped to become the first human to look upon a living giant squid.
FOR THE RECORD - Additional material published June 4, 1999:
Corrections and clarifications.
A story in Thursday's Tempo section gave an incorrect date for Smithsonian biologist Clyde Roper's lecture about giant squid at the Shedd Aquarium. The lecture is at 7 p.m. Tuesday, June 8. The Tribune regrets the error.
Unfortunately, though every calculation indicated a find was likely, the under-water search failed to turn up any of the fearsome creatures, which are estimated to grow up to 60 feet in length and as much as 2,000 pounds in weight. (The squid's two long main arms are not counted in measuring a giant squid's overall size, as they tend to stretch, like bungee cords.)
The beast has inspired many of the sea-monster legends of yore, which Roper would like to dispel with hard scientific fact. The giant squid, he says, is just like the squid we enjoy on dinner plates as calamari -- only several yards larger.
Somewhat smaller versions of the beast have turned up dead on beaches or in fishing nets for centuries, and Roper is convinced that some some day he will locate a live one.
In the meantime, he'll be sharing stories of his squid hunt Saturday night at Chicago's John G. Shedd Aquarium. The aquarium, in fact, has declared it "Squid Day."
Though no giant squid were spotted, Roper's search did set a record for depth reached by a manned submersible in New Zealand waters (2,200 feet), and he acquired astounding photographic slides and video footage of some other bizarre deep-sea denizens of squidville, including the elusive sea bottom hoki and the dinosaurlike prickly dogfish.
Though no one has ever reported an encounter with a live giant squid, whether in its habitat near the ocean bottom or meandering nearer the surface, various fishing craft pulled up no fewer than six slightly undersize giant squid the last year.
These squid were, unfortunately, dead. Roper, an expert on cephalopods (as squid are more properly known) at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History since 1966, needs to find a live one to answer some burning scientific questions:
How long do giant squid live? What do they eat? How deep can they survive, how big do they get, how fast can they swim? How do they fertilize their eggs and how many species of them are there?
All this, he says, requires observation of the creatures and their daily lives first hand, which has prompted another question Roper wants answered: Why can whales catch them when scientists can't?
The even more gigantic sperm whale is the giant squid's principal predator, and giant squid beaks, tentacles and other body parts have turned up in sperm whale stomachs.
"I suspect it (the giant squid) is probably a pretty gentle beast," said Roper. "The musculature suggests that it's sort of a slow-moving and lethargic animal. It doesn't need to be a powerful, fast-swimming animal, just because of its size."
Weighing 600 pounds at a minimum, it's the largest invertebrate on the planet.
"It's outgrown any potential predator that could exist in the habitats where it occurs -- with the single exception of the sperm whale," Roper said. "But when you look at the size of its beaks, the fact that its arms and tentacles are covered with big suction cups five centimeters across, then its size seems of monstrous proportions."
Still, the giant squid is no reason to avoid the water.
"It doesn't have a monstrous attitude," Roper said. "We don't know of any human being eaten by a squid."
It's taken a while for humans to accept that fact. In the 16th Century, when a few giant squid washed up on the shore of Norway, locals began spreading tales of monstrous "mermen" coming out of the sea -- tales that held currency all the way up to 1854, when a Danish professor and squid scholar named Japetus Steenstrup concluded that the monsters were really just big squid.
Nevertheless, seven years later author Jules Verne made a truly gigantic squid the nemesis of his underwater hero Capt. Nemo in his best-selling "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea."
Verne was inspired by a real-life encounter earlier that year between a French ship and a squid merely 25 feet in length, which the nervous crew shot full of cannon balls.
Giant squid have turned up as monsters-du-jour in a number of movies, and a 100-foot-long one was featured in Peter Benchley's "Beast," though it failed to have the scare power of the great white shark in "Jaws."
Even the crew of Melville's whale-hunting ship Pequod spotted "a vast pulpy mass . . . long arms radiating from its center and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas."
Part of the drive for Roper's quest comes purely from the fact that the animal exists.