if a story has sucker pads and mashed shrimp odor lures i will certainly share it with you..

For decades, scientists and sea explorers have mounted costly expeditions to hunt down and photograph the giant squid, a legendary monster with eyes the size of dinner plates and a nightmarish tangle of tentacles lined with long rows of sucker pads.

The goal has been to learn more about a bizarre creature of no little fame - Jules Verne's attacked a submarine and Peter Benchley's ate children - that in real life has stubbornly refused to give up its secrets.

While giant squid have been snagged in fishing nets and dead or dying ones have washed ashore, expeditions have repeatedly failed to photograph a live one in its natural habitat, the inky depths of the sea. But today two Japanese scientists, Tsunemi Kubodera and Kyoichi Mori, report in a leading British biological journal that they have made the world's first observations of a giant squid in the wild.

Working about 600 miles south of Tokyo off the Bonin Islands, known in Japan as the Ogasawara Islands, they photographed the creature with a robotic camera at a depth of 3,000 feet. During a struggle lasting more than four hours, the animal, about 26 feet long, took the proffered bait and eventually broke free, leaving behind an 18-foot length of tentacle.

The giant squid, the researchers conclude, "appears to be a much more active predator than previously suspected, using its elongate feeding tentacles to strike and tangle prey." The tentacles could apparently coil into a ball, much as a python envelops its victims.

A bag of mashed shrimps acted as an odor lure.