Perhaps the most famous sea monster is the kraken. According to legends, he lives off the coast of Norway and Iceland. There are different opinions about how he looks.
Some describe it as a giant squid, others as an octopus. The first handwritten mentions of the kraken can be found in the Danish bishop Eric Pontoppidan, who in 1752 recorded various oral legends about it. Initially, the word "kgake" was used to refer to any deformed animal that was very different from their own kind. Later it passed into many languages and began to mean precisely "the legendary sea monster."
In the writings of the bishop, the kraken appears as a crab fish, which is huge in size and is capable of dragging ships to the bottom of the sea. Its dimensions were truly colossal, it was compared to a small island. Moreover, it was dangerous precisely because of its size and the speed with which it sank to the bottom. From this, a strong whirlpool appeared, which destroyed the ships. The kraken spent most of the time hibernating on the seabed, and then a huge number of fish swam around it. Some fishermen allegedly even took risks and threw nets right over the sleeping kraken. It is believed that the kraken is to blame for many sea disasters.
According to Pliny the Younger, the remoors stuck around the ships of the fleet of Mark Antony and Cleopatra, which served to some extent to his defeat.
In the XVIII-XIX centuries. some zoologists have suggested that the kraken may be a giant octopus. The naturalist Karl Linnaeus, in his book "The System of Nature", created a classification of real-life marine organisms, into which he also introduced the kraken, presenting it as a cephalopod. Later, he struck it out.
In 1861, a piece of the body of a huge squid was found. Over the next two decades, many remains of similar creatures were also found on the northern coast of Europe. This was due to the fact that the temperature in the sea changed, which made the creatures rise to the surface. According to the stories of some fishermen, the carcasses of sperm whales caught by them also had marks that resemble giant tentacles.
Throughout the XX century. repeated attempts were made to catch the legendary kraken. But it was possible to catch only young individuals, whose growth in length was about 5 m, or only parts of the bodies of larger individuals came across. Only in 2004 did Japanese oceanographers photograph a rather large individual. Before that, for 2 years, they followed the routes of sperm whales that eat squid. Finally, they managed to bait a giant squid, whose length was 10 m. For four hours, the animal tried to break loose from the bait, and oceanologists took about several hundred photographs, which show that the squid has very aggressive behavior.
Giant squids are called architeutis. To date, not a single live individual has been caught. In several museums, you can see well-preserved remains of individuals that were found already dead. So, in the London Museum of Natural History, a nine-meter squid, preserved in formalin, is presented. The general public has access to a seven-meter squid in the Melbourne aquarium, frozen in a piece of ice.
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But could even such a giant squid harm ships? Its length can be more than 10 m. Females are larger than males. Squid weight reaches several hundred kilograms. This is not enough to damage a large ship. But giant squids are predatory, so they can still harm swimmers or small boats.
In the movies, giant squids pierce the skin of ships with tentacles, but in reality this is impossible, since they are devoid of a skeleton, so they can only stretch and tear their prey. Outside the aquatic environment, they are very helpless, but in the water they have sufficient strength and can resist marine predators. Squids prefer to dwell on the bottom, rarely appear on the surface, but small individuals can jump out of the water to a sufficiently large height.
Giant squids have the largest eyes among living creatures. Their diameter reaches more than 30 cm. The tentacles are equipped with strong suction cups, the diameter of which is up to 5 cm. They help to firmly hold the prey. The body of the giant squid contains ammonium chloride (ammonia), which keeps it at zero buoyancy. True, such a squid should not be eaten. All these features allow some scientists to believe that the legendary kraken may be just a giant squid.