What do you think of this fact?
An eye the size of a football. Sounds like a movie monster, but it belongs to a real animal that lives in the icy depths around Antarctica: the colossal squid.
Record eyes from the deep
According to Te Papa, New Zealand’s national museum, which holds a specimen of this squid, one of its eyes measures about 27 centimeters (almost 11 inches) across. That’s roughly the size of a football. The lens alone is 80 to 90 millimeters wide, as big as an orange.
Guinness World Records lists it as the largest eye in the animal kingdom and gives 27 to 28 centimeters. It was measured on a squid caught in the Ross Sea in Antarctica in 2007.
Why such huge eyes?
The colossal squid lives very deep, Te Papa says about 1,000 meters down. It’s almost completely dark there. Big eyes catch more of what little light there is, such as the glow of other animals.
The twist: the squid has its own light organs, called photophores, right on its eyes. According to Te Papa, they work like headlights. When the squid looks in a direction, it can also shine light there.
Bonus fact: According to Te Papa, the colossal squid’s eyes face forward. That gives it depth perception, so it can judge the distance to its prey. Its relative, the giant squid, has its eyes on the sides of its head instead.
Te Papa offers a comparison that shows how dark it is down there: human eyes can only detect light down to about 500 to 600 meters. The squid lives almost twice as deep.
The light from its light organs comes from a chemical reaction involving bacteria. According to Te Papa, it stays on all the time. So the squid basically cruises through the deep sea with its low beams permanently on.
So whenever a football flies across a pitch, picture this: somewhere near the bottom of Antarctica, an eye that exact size is staring into the darkness.