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Japanese Fisherman Catches Extremely Rare Giant Squid

Jan 16, 2014, 03:41 IST

Shigenori Goto, a fisherman out near Sadogashima island in northern Japan, found something unusual in his net last Wednesday - a 13-foot-long squid.

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The Yomiuri Shimbun reports that Goto was looking to catch yellowtails, or Japanese amberjacks, but what he caught instead was a rarely seen "daio ika" giant squid.

"When I hauled up the net, the squid slowly came floating up," Goto told reporters. "This is the first time I've seen such a large squid."

Giant squids have been a part of folklore for centuries - the sea creatures are feature in "Moby-Dick" and "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" - but real-life specimens are so rare and live in such deep, inhospitable water that for some time there was doubts that they existed.

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Last January, Japanese scientists published the first live footage of a giant squid in its natural habitat. The specimen was found in the northern Pacific ocean at a depth of around 2,000 feet.

National Geographic reports that the largest ever discovered was 59 feet in length and weighed nearly a ton.

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