Somewhere in the stomach of a sperm whale lies a hard, horny beak. Everything else of the squid that owned it has dissolved. The beak is large enough that its owner must have been ten metres long, maybe more.
For a long time that was all anyone had. Nobody saw the animal alive, because it never comes up. It took underwater video, money for filming on a mass scale, and computers that could sift through days, weeks and months of footage before a ten-metre giant squid finally showed up on camera.
Alexander Osadchiev, an oceanologist and leading researcher at the Shirshov Institute of Oceanology, tells this story with a point to it. The squid is no secret of the deep. The gap is on our side: humans are not in the ocean. The average depth is four kilometres, and we have mostly looked at it through instruments and the stomachs of whales.
The siphonophore makes the same case. It is longer than a blue whale, up to forty metres against thirty-odd, but it is a fragile thread of a creature that falls apart when hauled up. It was caught on film, not in a net.
So why can't a person just go down and look? Osadchiev's answer is about fluids. A deep fish carries high pressure inside its own blood and body fluids, from dissolved gases, and that pressure pushes back against the weight of the water column. A diver does a crude version of it: the scuba tank pumps gases, nitrogen among them, into the blood under pressure. Bring the fish up and it is torn apart. It has no gas-filled cavity to burst. Its blood does it, and its capillaries tear. The mechanism, Osadchiev says, is not even clever. Humans are simply built differently.
What follows is an aside, and Osadchiev offers it as a daydream, not a plan:
If we could speed up evolution, somehow steer it, we would breed a kind of human who could control pressure without a scuba tank, which is very dangerous, and can only be done briefly.
Если бы мы могли бы эволюцию ускорять, там как-то управлять, мы бы вывели вид человека, который бы, мог бы контролировать давление не через акваланг, что очень опасно, и там недолго это можно делать
— Alexander Osadchiev, Gleb Solomin Podcast, 05:40
The picture is a person who takes a tank once and spends a whole life underwater, "like a whale or somebody else." That would be handy, Osadchiev says, because we would finally see what is down there. A human living in the ocean would have met the ten-metre squid long ago, from the earliest days of our time on the water.
Real deep-sea fish have not stopped at one trick. Woods Hole's Oceanus magazine reported in June 2026 that the hadal snailfish gave up its gas-filled swim bladder, grew soft bones and a gelatinous body, and makes a compound called TMAO, which keeps water from being forced into its proteins. A study in Cell in March 2025, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, found one and the same mutation in a gene called rtf1 in every deep-sea fish living below three thousand metres.
Those are the answers evolution has already written, in bone, jelly and genes. Osadchiev wants a human edition without waiting for the geological clock.
The part that sticks is how recent the squid is. A ten-metre animal was swimming in the same ocean as our ships all along, and it took cameras to find it. Surely, Osadchiev says, something else is swimming down there that we do not know about.
