Edith Widder Quotes

I guess if I had to pick one interest that is unique, it would be giant squids - I'm disturbingly fascinated by them and even wrote a story about the hunt for them.

I have in hands, now, specimens of bottom from t he Gulf Stream, obtained by Lieutenant Craven, and I can say that they are among the most interesting that I have ever seen.

I'd like to see the giant squid. Nobody has ever seen one. I could tell you people who have spent thousands and thousands of pounds trying to see giant squid. I mean, we know they exist because we have seen dead ones. But I have never seen a living one. Nor has anybody else.

As a child, William Beebe was my hero, and I used to read about him going down in the bathysphere, and I wanted to do that too. And I told my family, I said, 'I'd like to go down and be like William Beebe,' and they said, 'Well, maybe you can take up typing and get to be the secretary of William Beebe or somebody like him.'

The corals do not look much worn, but still appear to have been dead. There are some delicate shells of molluscs from depths beyond 500 fathoms, where they were certainly living.

I think there's so much we don't know and the unknown in the ocean; every 10 years or so, we find some fossil that's been there before mankind.

Of course there is still unexplored terrestrial territory, but most of it is waterlogged. Submersed secret places, such as the Challenger Deep, which today lure hi-tech adventurers like Richard Branson and James Cameron, will undoubtedly provide welcome fodder for 'National Geographic.'

If you're going to make a lot of films about a particular group of animals, you might as well pick one that's fairly common. And octopus are: they live in all the oceans. They also live deep. And I can't say octopus are responsible for my really strong interest in getting in subs and going deep, but whatever the case, I like that.

I really feel that there are things in the ocean that we have no idea about.

Zero of Animal Life probably about 300 fathoms.

I've had the joy of spending thousands of hours under the sea. I wish I could take people along to see what I see, and to know what I know.

The Deep Flight Challenger technology is a game-changer for ocean exploration.

The giant squid is the perfect embodiment of a sea monster: it is huge, it has tentacles, it has big eyes, and it is absolutely frightening-looking. But, most important, it is real. Unlike the Loch Ness monster, we know it's out there.

I had wanted to place the Eye-in-the-Sea at an oasis on the bottom of the ocean, in some site rich with life that was likely to be patrolled by large predators. The first time I got to test the camera at such a place was in 2004, in the north end of the Gulf of Mexico, at an amazing location called the brine pool.

The one thing I've learned exploring the deep is that you just can't even begin to imagine some of the bizarre creatures that are down there.

One of the things that's frustrated me as a deep-sea explorer is how many animals there probably are in the ocean that we know nothing about because of the way we explore the ocean.

Since my first dive in a deep-diving submersible, when I went down and turned out the lights and saw the fireworks displays, I've been a bioluminescence junky. But I would come back from those dives and try to share the experience with words, and they were totally inadequate to the task. I needed some way to share the experience directly.

If I go out in the open ocean environment, virtually anywhere in the world, and I drag a net from 3,000 feet to the surface, most of the animals - in fact, in many places, 80 to 90 percent of the animals that I bring up in that net - make light. This makes for some pretty spectacular light shows.

The giant squid has the biggest eyes of any animal on the planet. It's a visual predator.

Giant squid aren't rare. Based on the number of beaks that have been found in the stomachs of sperm whales, it's thought that there are actually millions of them in the ocean, and yet, we haven't seen them.

I would love to see a giant squid. Very few people have seen them. And only about half a dozen people have seen one alive.

With its untold depths, couldn't the sea keep alive such huge specimens of life from another age, this sea that never changes while the land masses undergo almost continuous alteration? Couldn't the heart of the ocean hide the last–remaining varieties of these titanic species, for whom years are centuries and centuries millennia?

I wanted to be an oceanographer, actually. It's a way of going underwater. I've always been interested in how deep it was, you know.

There’s fish in here that I’ve read about that are so see-through that they’re invisible. So I don’t even think they know they exist.

Their brilliant audio expert, who is a marine biologist, should really be looking after Flipper