Fishermen in the Ross Sea got quite a surprise early in February when they hauled something resembling the awesome beast Norwegian seafarers in the 12th century called Kraken up from the sea. A creature also featured in the movie success “Pirates of the Caribbean”

Jules Verne’s book “Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” also features a beastly squid much similar to what the Norwegian seafarers called Kraken. This story was allegedly based on an encounter between a French naval vessel and a giant squid in the 17th century.

There is also an account of sailors being attacked by a giant squid after their ship sunk during the Second World War. At least one sailor was supposedly eaten.

But this time it was all to real for the New Zealand fishermen, the colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni) was eating a hooked toothfish when it was hauled from the deep by the vessel San Aspiring, and is now lying frozen in a Timaru coolstore.

The Colossal squid they hauled to the surface is the biggest specimen of a colossal squid ever found, it was more than 150kg heavier than the next biggest specimen found and an estimated length of about 10 metres.

Dr Steve O'Shea, a world renowned squid expert with the Auckland University of Technology, said the specimen eclipsed the previous largest find - another colossal squid that weighed 300kg found in 2003.

This squid was about 450kg and barely alive when it reached the surface and the vessel's crew thought it would be very unlikely to survive if released.

Sadly only a handful of these colossal squids have ever been sighted, and New Zealand researcher Dr Steve O'Shea really caused a stir in 2003 with the photographs of an immature female, also caught while attacking a toothfish, the first "live" capture. This immature female weighed about 300kg.

Dr. Steve O'Shea, said

"This squid is a really nasty aggressive sort of squid. . . a gelatinous blob with seriously evil arms on it. … If calamari were made from the squid the rings would be the size of tractor tires"

This is thought to be the most intact of the seven specimens recorded, most of the other was found in the stomach of its worst enemy, the sperm whale.

Colossal squid are not related to giant squid, which also grow up to 12m long, and colossal squid have much larger body and smaller tentacles than the giant squid, and are a much heavier animal.

The colossal squid has swiveling hooks in the suckers at the tips of its tentacles, suggesting it is an aggressive hunter, while giant squid have suckers lined with small teeth.

The animal was first described in 1925 from just two tentacles found in the stomach of a sperm whale. The colossal squid makes up three quarters of the diet of large sperm whales and it therefore are thought to be large numbers of them in Antarctic waters.