A giant squid was caught on video swimming around Toyama harbour in central Japan on 24 December. This latest footage was taken by professional underwater cameraman Takayoshi Kojima after someone at the marina called him about the squid sighting.
Kojima told the BBC he helped guide the squid back to deeper water and the open sea but was unsure whether the creature survived as it did not look very healthy.
A rising number of giant squid have been spotted on the coast, Kojima suggested this was because of rising sea temperatures. They are deep sea cephalopods, which are rarely seen near the surface. When they are sighted, that is because they are usually washed up dead or as a result of being caught in fishing nets.
This squid was around 3.7m long – tiny in comparison to the 13m they can grow to. The largest kind, the Colossal Squid, is thought to grow up to 14m long. They are even rarer than their smaller cousins, with only a few known specimen ever having been studied.
Yuki Ikushi, the curator of Uozu Aquarium in Toyama, told CNN there were 16 reports of giant squid trapped by fishing nets last season. This is the first sighting of the current season, running from November to March.
Giant squid are known to live in most of the world oceans but the first ever images of the creature, taken in 2004, and the first video in its natural habitat, filmed in 2012, both occurred off Japans coast.
