Residents of Saint Helena Bay, which is approximately 150 kilometres north of Cape Town, woke up on Sunday to the rare sight of a giant squid stranded on Britannia Bay Beach.

The squid was still alive, and can be seen to move slightly at various points in the video, but the men who found it were unable to roll the squid back into the water.

That’s not unsurprising when you consider that Richard Davies, who made the discovery on Sunday morning, estimates that this giant squid weighed between 200 and 300 kilograms, and was measured to be 4,19 metres in length.

Davies says they gave up on trying to save the squid, deciding to let it “die in dignity”. He spoke with News24:

“It was sad because I could see it was dying,” Davies told News24. “It was still pumping out ink and I touched one of its tentacles which sucked onto my hand and I actually had to use some force to remove it.”

After Googling the creature known as architeuthis dux in Latin, Davies realised a giant squid washing up on a beach in South Africa was a rare occurrence and a “once-in-a-lifetime sighting”.

Here’s the footage Davies filmed:

Beautiful to see one, but a great pity that it couldn’t be rescued and returned to the water.

Back in March 2017, paddle boarder James Taylor had a very close encounter with a giant squid in Melkbosstrand, but sightings remain rare:

According to Dr Wayne Florence, a marine biologist and curator of marine invertebrates for the Iziko Museums of South Africa, giant squid were found at depths of 300 to 1 000m in all the world’s oceans, except at the poles…

According to Florence, the largest squid found stranded in South Africa measured 9.1m. It was found in Kommetjie, Cape Town, in 1992.

“It’s rare. In South Africa, we have had less than a handful of strandings. Surprisingly, despite our museum being almost 200 years old, our earliest stranded giant squid specimen is from 1972,” he told News24.

Squids only live for around five years, and by Florence’s estimate, the specimen above was roughly two years old.

Consider for a second that the squid was 4,19 metres, and then consider the scale of one that measured in excess of nine metres.

That’s basically four and a half Eben Etzebeths stacked end to end.

The Saint Helena Bay specimen has now been sent to the Iziko Museums of South Africa to add to its marine invertebrate collection.

[source:news24]