Giant Squid. A Faceless Eel. A Bony-Eared Assfish. All Live Four Kilometers Deep Off Australia.

Researchers just found evidence of giant squid in the deep-sea canyons off Western Australia's coast. They didn't see one. They found its DNA floating in the water, 4 kilometers down, and that detail may be the most unsettling part.

The team came back with 226 species, including deep-diving whales and fish nobody had ever bothered to look for here before. The method is called environmental DNA, or eDNA: genetic material naturally shed by animals into seawater, allowing scientists to document what lives in deep habitats without ever seeing or capturing it.

The expedition, led by the Western Australian Museum aboard the Schmidt Ocean Institute's R/V Falkor, explored the Cape Range and Cloates submarine canyons about 1,200 kilometers (745 miles) north of Perth. Among the most striking finds were traces of the giant squid (Architeuthis dux) detected in both canyons across six separate samples. It is the first record of the species in Western Australian waters using eDNA protocols and the northernmost confirmed record of Architeuthis dux in the entire eastern Indian Ocean.

The squid got the headlines, but the supporting cast deserves a moment. The guest list included a sleeper shark, a faceless cusk eel and something called the slender snaggletooth, none of which had ever been recorded in Western Australian waters. The researchers also recorded the bony-eared assfish, which needs no further comment.

The survey found that biodiversity in these canyons is not uniform: different depths host fundamentally different communities, and neighboring canyons can support distinctly different ecosystems. Some of the creatures detected may still be unknown to science.

We've been to the moon. We've mapped the surface of Mars. And off the coast of Western Australia, there's a canyon full of creatures shedding DNA into the dark. eDNA is making the dark legible.

Read the full story at ScienceDaily, May 14, 2026

Hot Take: The bony-eared assfish and the faceless cusk eel didn't need to be seen to be counted. Every deep ocean survey should add eDNA to their toolkit.