Edith Widder is not a giant-squid expert — she studies bioluminescence. How she became part of a crew that captured the first video footage of the elusive giant squid Architeuthis in its natural habitat, a triumph announced Monday, is a tale that begins with simple curiosity.

“I’ve spent my life diving in submersibles, and always wondered how many things are there out beyond the reach of my lights that I’m scaring away before I even get to see them,” Widder said Tuesday, speaking from her research station in Florida.

Using inventive, unobtrusive technology Widder pioneered while trying to address that concern, she and a Japanese-led team in July filmed a three-metre-long Architeuthis swimming 900 metres below the sea surface. It was a huge achievement in the hunt for a species believed to have inspired mythic sea monsters like the Kraken.

For marine scientists, “it’s about the same as seeing a unicorn,” said Boris Worm, a marine biologist at Dalhousie University. “There are few creatures as enigmatic.”

For Widder, CEO and senior scientist of the Ocean Research & Conservation Association, giant squid are just the beginning. “We’ve only explored about 5 per cent of the ocean. And we’ve been exploring in a way that we’re probably scaring things away. How much other stuff is there down in the depths of the ocean that we don’t know about?”

Widder’s underwater camera technique involves two novel elements. The first is a bioluminescent lure she invented that mimics the behaviour of a common deep-sea jellyfish. Its 16 blue lights swirl like a pinwheel. Widder was concerned the dead creatures she was using as bait were only attracting scavengers.

The second improvement is the use of near-infrared light, a wavelength barely visible to humans underwater and totally invisible to deep-sea creatures, unlike the bright white light more commonly used.

In 2004, using both on a camera in the Gulf of Mexico, Widder captured footage of a squid totally unknown to science. That and other successes got her invited to the giant-squid-hunting expedition near Japan’s Ogasawara islands last year, a mission led by Tsunemi Kubodera, the zoologist who was the first to capture still images of an Architeuthis in its habitat.

In July, using a submersible equipped with the near-infrared beams, Kubodera sank below the surface. When a hazy outline appeared on the on-board camera, the crew risked turning on the bright white beams — and were able to film several minutes of an Architeuthis just metres away.

“It was stunning. I couldn’t have dreamt that it would be so beautiful,” Kubodera, a zoologist, told Reuters.

The footage will be aired by Japan’s national broadcaster NHK and the Discovery Channel, which funded the trip.

In 2005, Widder co-founded her research and conservation organization with the goal of finding technological solutions to ocean conservation challenges. She was inspired to create it after a major report on the deteriorating state of the oceans was released the same year she filmed the still-unidentified squid in the Gulf of Mexico. “I felt like we were destroying the ocean before we know what’s in it,” she said.

With the giant squid success behind her, Widder hopes to develop these imaging techniques to study even more mysterious creatures of the deep.