The Bloody Pirate Life of One of the Ocean’s Most Elusive Creatures

When the current dragged the giant squid toward a Spanish beach in October 2016, the creature was already near death. Wounded and suffocating, she stayed alive in the shallows—far from the deep, frigid ocean she came from—long enough for a tourist to snap some photos. Then she died and washed ashore.

Realizing he’d seen something unusual, the tourist, Javier Onicol, called up the president of a conservation nonprofit, who immediately called the marine ecologist Ángel Guerra. “It was incredible to me,” says Guerra, who outlined this chain of communication. Roughly one giant squid () washes up dead in northern Spain each year, but none had ever been glimpsed alive outside of Japanese waters. Any live sightings of these cephalopods are vanishingly rare.