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Scientists have observed the elusive giant squid in the wild for the first time, watching as one of the world's largest predators coiled two serpentine tentacles around its prey.

Giant squid are legendary monsters of the deep, and have frightened sailors for centuries with their grasping tentacles and eyes the size of dinner plates. Until now, they have eluded researchers' desperate attempts to learn more about them.

The Japanese biologists who discovered this squid weren't in a submersible, but captured it in action with a camera attached to a baited fishing line that stretched down 900 metres in the North Pacific.

One of the creature's tentacles got snagged on a baited hook, and it struggled for four hours to break free, coming in and out of camera range.

The tentacle eventually broke, and a severed section more than five metres long remained attached to the line.

The arm was still moving when it was reeled on board, "repeatedly gripping the boat deck and any offered fingers," said Tsunemi Kubodera of the zoology department at the National Science Museum in Tokyo.

His adventure is a scientific coup. Other researchers have spent hundreds of hours and millions of dollars looking for giant squid in the open sea.

They have used manned submersibles and attached cameras to sperm whales in their efforts to catch a glimpse of the world's largest invertebrate.

More than 100 of the creatures have been found on beaches and coastlines around the world, including Newfoundland. Commercial fishermen have brought up others, either dead or close to death. Two years ago, a French sailor taking part in an around-the-world race said that one of the animals attached itself to the hull of his boat.

"I saw a tentacle through a porthole," veteran yachtsman Olivier de Kersauson said. "It was thicker than my leg and it was really pulling the boat hard." The squid let go once he stopped the yacht.

Giant squid can reach lengths of up to 20 metres -- from the top of their heads to the tip of their longest tentacle. The one the Japanese team caught on camera is about eight metres long, a medium to small specimen, said Steve Carr, a biologist at Memorial University in Newfoundland.

Up until now, researchers weren't sure how giant squid obtained their food. Some believed they were sluggish creatures that dangled their tentacles like fishing lines. The new footage shows they are aggressive hunters, coming at their prey horizontally, tentacles outstretched.

"It appears that the tentacles coil into an irregular ball in much the same way that pythons rapidly envelop their prey within coils of their body immediately after striking," Dr. Kubodera said.

It is unlikely that those arms will ever coil around human prey, Dr. Carr said. Scientists haven't put much stock in the stories of giant squid attack fishing boats and sailors. There is no compelling evidence giant squid are the malevolent beasts portrayed in movies and novels, including Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

"Without wishing to be mean to anybody, if you aren't a trained observer, and you don't bring something back, it is difficult to credit those stories of attack," Dr. Carr said.

Dr. Kubodera published the details of his encounter with the giant squid, which took place a year ago, in the most recent edition of the Proceedings of the Royal Society, a British scientific journal.

He and his team had spent three seasons trolling for squid near the Ogasawara Islands, south of Tokyo, searching areas frequented by sperm whales, which feed on giant squid.

They say they are certain they observed a true giant squid because they sequenced part of its genetic code and compared it to five specimens collected around Japanese waters.

A strange creature

Giant squid have the largest eyes in the animal kingdom. They can be 25 centimetres in diameter, or the size of a human head.

They eat their prey, including smaller squid and fish, with tough, parrot-like beaks.

They grow quickly, reaching up to 20 metres in length in five years.

They have 10 tentacles -- two long ones and eight shorter ones.

They reproduce by producing a vast number of eggs.