Edie Widder was eating lunch in the mess hall of the Research Vessel Point Sur on Tuesday when her colleague Nathan J. Robinson dashed in. He didn’t have to say anything — in fact, he wasn’t yet quite able to say anything. She ran from the table, made certain by his flailing arms and the look on his face that their expedition had turned up something big.

Dr. Widder, the founder of the Ocean Research and Conservation Association, was part of the team of scientists that in 2012 recorded the first video of a giant squid swimming in its natural habitat, off Japan’s Ogasawara archipelago. For that expedition, she developed a new camera system called Medusa. It employs red light, which most sea creatures can’t see, and, at the end of a mile-long plastic line, an optical lure in the form of a ring of LED lights that resembles a bioluminescent jellyfish.

Dr. Widder had hypothesized that the sounds and lights of remote-operated vehicles and submersibles were scaring away large sea creatures, and preventing researchers from observing deep-ocean life as it is really lived.

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Dr. Robinson, the director the Cape Eleuthera Institute in the Bahamas, had been watching the videos that Medusa recorded on its latest expedition — a 15-day journey through the Gulf of Mexico, funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, and called Journey Into Midnight: Light and Life Below the Twilight Zone. As part of the expedition, Dr. Widder was putting her Medusa camera lure to the test, to see if it could capture another squid in a different part of the world.