comber

Raimondi’s team created a Web site for interested divers and tide-pool combers to contribute photographs and observations of sea stars in the wild.

Out there was the gray beach with the slow combers rolling dull and leaden and the distant sound of it.

It is a fabulous place: when the tide is in, a wave-churned basin, creamy with foam, whipped by the combers that roll in from the whistling buoy on the reef.

John McCarthy, of WA Coastal & Marine, thanked scallop divers, beach combers, dive clubs and also scientists at the Scottish Association of Marine Science, near Oban, for their help with the research.

The giant squid’s fame, its tentacles touching Norse mythology, monster sightings by sailors and beach combers and the science fiction of Jules Verne, flows in large part from the animal’s mystery.