Despite the name, however, Vampire Squids are not really squids. They are more closely evolutionarily allied with octopods, but they aren’t really octopods either. Vampire Squids are evolutionary all alone residing in thier own long branch of the tree of life.

If we look at this phylogeny from Lindgreen and coauthors from 2012 based on multiple genes.

And zoom in at the upper part of the tree

Let’s zoom in a little more

You can clearly see that Vampyroteuthis infernalis resides on alone on its own evolutionary branch. It shares its last common ancestor with the octopods but this a distant relative at best. Many think the Vampire Squid may be”phylogenetic relict” the last surviving member of order cephalopods long ago extinct.

One truly is the loneliest number. While you reflect on this evolutionary and ecological isolation of the Vampire Squid enjoy these videos from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.

The post The Lonely Existence of Vampire Squids first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The 18 species of Histioteuthid squids, the biggest no larger than a football, are often strawberry colored, with dark photophores resembling black seeds adding to the sweet fruit-like appearance.   All the species live in the mesopelagic, that region in the ocean between 200 and 1000 meters that goes from dimly lit to a full on dark habitat.  Light comes from above in the form of attenuated sunlight and below in the form of bioluminescence.  Given the drastic changes in light with depth, the mesopelagic is filled with a cornea-copia of truly amazing, dare I say monstrous, visual adaptations.  The Histioteuthid squids are no expectation.  The left eye can be twice the diameter of the right eye, a trait only acquired with adulthood.  The left eye can gain such proportions it actually pushes the head out of alignment with the squid’s body in some species.

New work by Kate Thomas and colleagues reveals why these strawberry squid’s different eyes have made such a spectacle of themselves.  The group found that the squids oriented the enlarged left eye upward and the smaller right eye slightly downward.   The squids often held a slanted angle with their body so the eye looking upward was near 45˚ and the downward near 120˚.  Given the field of view of the eyes, the large eye would receive light from directly above to 90˚ horizontal on the left side.  The small eye from 43-198˚ or from directly below to horizontally on the right side.

To keep these eyes aimed in the right area, the strawberry squids also demonstrate a peculiar behavior.  Squids would ratchet themselves, turning the body while the head maintain the same orientation.  The head would, at a precise stopping point, suddenly snap around to match the body orientation. “This may allow histioteuthids to compensate for the unbalanced fields of view created by [different sized] eyes and rapidly change which direction each eye is facing, or to scan their environment.”

But why two different eyes?  Thomas explains, “Eyes are metabolically expensive to grow, maintain, and use, so while larger eyes can improve both sensitivity and resolution, selection probably favors an eye just large enough to perform a necessary visual task but no larger.”  It is actually cheaper, in the total calories needed sense, to have the eyes perform to unique functions and allow one of them to be itty bitty.

And with that, my friends, eye take my leave.

The post The Little Strawberry Squid with the Big Eye first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Today is legendary! Why, you ask? Well, we are celebrating TEN YEARS of DSN posts. That’s right – if you go wayyyyyyyyy back in the archives you will note that the proto-Deep Sea News empire began with a little post by Dr. M on December 13, 2006.

What were we all doing in 2006? Well as for myself (this is Holly speaking), I was just starting my PhD research in good ol’ London towne. I was listening to a lot of Pussycat Dolls, and Christina Aguilera was going through that weird jazz phase. I was smoovely fixing nematodes on glass slides to the tune of Chamillionaire, and I had just signed up to this cool new website called Facebook.

As you can fathom, a lot has changed in 10 years. The DSN crew has moved forward and onwards in our careers, many of us metamorphosing from wee little student trainees into Real Scientists. Our list of contributors has changed and evolved. We write different types of posts now (should we remind Dr. M that he used to use DSN as a cruise blog?). In light of recent world events, our message and mission has become increasingly urgent.

But other things haven’t changed – our Core Values, although not formalized in writing until 2011, have always been a fundamental part of Deep Sea News. The passion, enthusiasm, and dedication of all of our past and present writers will never change. And of course I still listen to the Pussycat Dolls (because how can you NOT?)

So in celebration of our site’s 10 year anniversary, here we present you with our Top Ten (and then some) posts in DSN History:

2006 

Wetting my toes

Kim: Do I need to explain that the very first post on DSN is also that years highlight? It’s real, it’s sweet and it kicked off ten years of online shenanigans!

2007 

Just Science Weekend: They Eat Their Young

Jarrett: I <3 DSN in 2007. You can feel the online science world trying to figure out what it was. DSN was a more news-y place, with a heavy dose of reportage on the deep sea, like this awesome interview of sub pilot David Guggenheim. But amidst that, DSN was also figuring out who it was going to become – and this gem of a piece from Peter Etnoyer epitomizes the future, showing us that not only are deep sea fish all around us in our everyday lives, but man, do they sure like to cannibalize their babies. Mmmmmm….babiez.

2008

Dumping Pharmaceutical Waste In The Deep Sea

Rebecca: 2008 was a year or short-and-sweet posts, punctuated by long and well-researched articles on everything from coral age to deep ocean waves. DSN found a unique voice in being a place not just to report on the latest news, but also provide a scientist’s perspective on the way news about the ocean is reported in the press. This was also a year of raising awareness, with Dr. M’s post on pharmaceutical dumping in the deep as a perfect example of how blogs can call attention to unique and important stories that the press might miss.  

2009 

Holly: My favorite thing about 2009 is the epicness of Kevin Zelnio, best summarized with these two posts:

TGIF: TOTELY AWSUM SEE KUKUMBR!!!11!!!!11!

This post is a HILARIOUS animated video about a very boring sea cucumber, complete with rock guitar soundtrack. I think I just re-watched it like five times.

Thank You for Caring About Ocean Education!

(the more serious and dedicated size of Zelnio, where he coordinated a campaign at DonorsChoose.org and raised over $4800 from our readers. This campaign funded Ocean Education projects in K-12 classrooms around the country!)

2010 

All the coverage of the Deep Water Horizon Spill

Kim: Let’s be real, the Macondo well blowout sucked for the Gulf. But in terms of science, DSN was on it providing weekly updates and posting readable summaries of technical reports. The entire archive is here folks.

How To Cuddle Your Lady Right, by Smoove A

In this epic post, Miriam describes how one microscopic crustacean makes all the right moves and makes the mating happen. All biology textbooks should be written like this.

2011

From the Editor’s Desk: The Giant Squid Can Be A Panda For The Ocean

Holly: First of all, I love the 2011 Editor’s Desk posts because Craig very epically summarized himself with a minimalist icon of his bald head and beard. Second, the Giant Squid is WAYYYY more awesome than those damn dolphins and whales that everyone keeps going on about. And I prefer my cuddly mascots with lethal beaks and suckers, thank you very much.

From the Editor’s Desk: The Future of Deep-Sea News

This is the post where we formalized our now infamous core values – they were the brain child of the very first DSN retreat at the Georgia Aquarium, a weekend of meeting rooms and champagne in a rotating sky hotel. One of those things turned out better than the other.

2012 

#IamScience: Embracing Personal Experience on Our Rise Through Science

Jarrett: This post embodies DSN at it’s best. Kevin Z. takes us on his deeply personal and emotional journey into science. It’s a kind of story rarely told, and one that so many need to hear.

How presidential elections are impacted by a 100 million year old coastline

In this post, Craig connects American history with geological history, and ties it all together to understand how both impacted the 2012 presidential election. This post exploded the internet.

2013 

Kim: 2013 was just so awesome, I couldn’t just pick one!

10 Reasons Why Dolphins Are A$$holes

Do I even need to explain?

A field guide to privilege in marine science: some reasons we lack diversity.

When Miriam left DSN, she went out with a deeply important and thoughtful list. If you are an ally and want to see marine science grow, read this piece.

How many people does Kaiju need to eat everyday 

Sure we love all the creatures of the deep, but we also love Hollywood’s imaginary beasts as well. Craig answers some serious questions regarding the metabolism of the monsters in Pacific Rim.

The 60 foot long jet powered animal you’ve probably never heard of

In case you didn’t know what Rebecca’s niche in the online ecosystem, this is it. Someone found a giant gelatinous tube in the sea, she identifies it, and the internetz go wild. Rebecca, helping jellies go viral since 2013.

True Facts about Ocean Radiation and the Fukushima Disaster 

SPOILER ALERT: unless you live within 100 miles of the reactor, radiation from the Fukushima Disaster is still not harmful. This post was meant to be a guide to understanding radiation in the ocean. It ended up being one of most shared posts ever and the one we received death threats over.

2014

The Ever Increasing Size of Godzilla: Implications for Sexual Selection and Urine Production

Beth: Where Craig discusses the body size characteristics of godzilla over time, and the logical implications this would have on the millions of gallons of urine that massive godzilla would generate. This post has the thing that makes me love DSN – using scientific reasoning to explain a totally ridiculous thing. And it features Craig’s weird obsession with the size of things.

Runner up:

Sex, snails,sustenance…and rock and roll 

Where Craig uses great metaphors to explain some cool scientific studies on how snails reproduce based on food availability, featuring inappropriate references to rock stars and sex, and with a bonus soundtrack!

2015 

Ten Simple Rules for Effective Online Outreach

Alex: It’s like we all wrote a blog post… together. And then published it for realsies.

2016 

On Being Scared.

Alex: In which Craig verbalizes the place we have all been. I love and admire the vulnerability in this post and that he ended it so positively… that even when shit hits the proverbial sea fan, we get to choose how we respond. We get to choose how we show up.

Runner up:

The Twelve Days of Christmas: NASA Earth Science Edition

Alex: When you get retweeted by NASA… you get a spot on the list.

(Runner up #2)

The worst ocean environments to catch them all

Rebecca: When you love Pokémon but hate crushing barometric pressure.

The post A Decade of Deep Sea Decadence first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Superheroes?  Who gives a heck.  I was too busy reading marine biology text books than to waste my time with the imaginary – and usually blatantly contradictory – special powers of comic book superheroes.  In the real world, becoming invisible is an easy task for an octopus:
Maybe you are caught unaware.  No problem, just blend into whatever looks good, like a strand of red algae:
Maybe your cloak of invisibility is not enough to hide from a predator, what to do?  Get really angry, very large, and look tough enough to scare them off. Bluffing is 9/10 of survival (something I learned in that Turkish prison):
Becoming invisible (or looking really pissed off) requires three simple things: (1) you will need an excellent sense of vision to relay your local environment to your brain to modify your (2) layers of stacked pigment cells called melanocytes to expand or contract, varying the color & shading of your body to re-create the color of your surroundings, and (3) relaying the physical aspect of your environment to tiny muscle fibers that instantly change to texture of your skin to mimic your substrate. Boom, gone (but still in plain sight).
 One layer of specialized cells, iridiophores, glam up the octopus with iridescent blues & greens.  These aren’t pigments, but cells that contain specialized components which take in ambient light and refract only the blue spectrum.  What lame-ass superhero can even bend light like that?  None. Moreover, this little Blue-Ringed Octopus has some nasty venom, so the pulsing blue rings warn a potential predators, but may also be irresistable to little kids poking around in tide pools.  Oops.

Having the superpower to flash colors & textures and immediately change shape aren’t just for fighting super-villains, but in this fast-paced world of evolution, cephalopods have come up with some excellent ways of just staying alive by a quick color change and expansion of muscles. Our friend the Mimic Octopus uses what’s called a ‘startle behavior’ in an attempt to scare off a potential predator (in this case, the underwater cinematographer):
The Mimic Octopus brings up its game by using the ability to quickly change into other sea animals. Here it looks like the feathery striped fronds of the vemomous Lionfish’s fins, and the black & white banding pattern of a highly-venomous sea snake, the Banded Sea Krait:

Octopus, squid, and cuttlefish all share highly muscularized tentacles, basically specially modified divisions of their boneless foot.  Octopus have suckers with an impressive ability to grip, and an amazing level of fine dexterity to solve problems like this:
Squid tentacles may have a combination of suckers alone, or suckers with piercing hooks or sharp saw-toothed edges to grip and maim their prey, as seen in these Humboldt squid: Octopus move with jets of water squirted through their siphon, and the intensity and direction of the blasts accelerates and steers the animal as smoothly as a hoverboard.
Squid aren’t that different from a personal spacecraft in those sci-fi comics, and these have a certain similarity to George Jetson‘s space car (but without George). With their siphon blasting jets of water and the fins along the side of the head undulating in waves that steer them, they can hover in place and instantaneously dart in any direction, and use their tentacles for streamlining, signaling, or attacking:
Now take this these concepts of color change, tentacles, and a personal hover-suit, and turn your little cephalopod body into some crazy disco predator. Using a neural network that coordinates the melanocytes and iridiophores into pulsating waves of light visually confuse – or possible mesmerize – prey enough to give you a split second to shoot your incredibly elastic predatory tentacles right in their face and pull them into your sharp killer beak. This is why the marine world is better than any comic book.
Ok, so maybe you want to be seen.  You’re a hot, sexy, ripe squid with gametes a-plenty and it’s the season for love.  But in the deep, dark ocean it’s hard to find the right mate. No problem, some squid have specialized bioluminescent cells in your skin where a tiny internal chemical reaction emits light energy in little glowing spots.  Your species may have a special pattern that identifies the right mates for you.  Not interested in love?  Those same light spots may attract prey that you can feast on until the moment is right for that special copulatory embrace:

So it’s been a while since the squid love-fest, and now your life is taken up with caring for the kids.  Sure, most squid just mate then dump a fertilized egg capsule on the ocean bottom and let those li’l squidlets hatch on their own, but not with Gontaus.  She may not be the world’s best mom, but unlike other squid, she carries her egg mass around to protect her little brood until the time they hatch.  When they do, she pulsates the eggs gently kicking them out into the big dark world below, like shaking sand off a beach blanket.  Once they are out, they are on their own and she has nothing more to do with them: Again, not the greatest mom, but better than most:

Next up, cephalopods have the highest cute factor of any invertebrate, more than flatworms, more than gastropods, and even more than those fancy-pants Peacock Spiders. I enter into evidence this contest between two little squid tucking themselves in for the night.  Looking like they were designed by a Japanese toymaker, the Pyjama Squid (Sepioloidea lineolata) and the Tropical Bobtail Squid (Sepiadarium kochi) will burow into your hearts:
Don’t need any fancy bed because the sea floor is soft enough? Well then dig right in with a few blasts of water.  No turn-down service required:

Most of all cephalopods just want to be left alone.  When color changing, jetting away, burrowing into the sand, or impersonating more dangerous sea creature doesn’t work, there’s always just losing your shit and kicking ass:

The post Cephalopods: Masters of W.T.F? – Enough GIFs to Kill a Kraken first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Extra Crispy

Behold, the Crusty Nautilis (Allonautilus scrobiculatus), a name so great it could become your next secret agent moniker or CB handle. The tempura-like coating on its shell is a thick periostracum, the outer layer that protects the inner shell, that can get even more crusty with the addition of small marine organisms that sometimes grow on the periostracum. All modern-day nautiluses are related to another group of shelled cephalopods called the Ammonites, once an abundant, widespread, and morphologically & ecologically diverse group that numbered in the thousands of species but suddenly became extinct about 65 million years ago. But the Crusty Nautilus is a survivor, and is the most ancestral or “primitive” of the living nautiloids, having evolved more than 100 million years ago and squeaking through the mass extinction that wiped-out their Ammonite cousins.

Crusty Nautiluses live in deep-waters off eastern Indonesia, New Guinea and in the Solomon Islands. Their shells, empty ones washed ashore after the decomposition of their dead owners, were known to early scientists since the 1700’s, but is wasn’t until 1984 that whole living Crusty Nautiluses were captured, allowing scientists to study their soft anatomy and leading to the understanding of their deep antiquity on the cephalopod family tree.

In Nautilus, you live inside shell, in Spirula, shell live inside YOU! [pronounced with your best Yakov Smirnoff impersonation]

While driving on New Zealand’s 90-Mile Beach I came across a drift of hundreds of these tiny curled shells, not more than a couple of centimeters wide, piled between two sand dunes. They are the inner shell of a squid so distinct that they constitute a single species in a single genus in a single family, in an entirely unique order of cephalopod, the Spirulidae. The Ram’s Horn Squid (Spirula spirula) is a small deep-sea predator with an internal shell divided into gas-filled chambers that act as an internal floatation device as they rise and fall each evening in the Deep Scattering Layer far offshore. Eaten by seabirds, dolphins, porpoises, fur seals, and fishes, the undigestible shell is defecated or regurgitated and rises to the surface of the water, floating atop the ocean until they wash ashore on a beach.

The function of the shell in the body of this 4 centimeter-long squid is a not a mystery – the shell float holds the squid upright in the water – but the large bioluminescent organ atop its head is quite a puzzle. Unlike light-emitting organs in other deep-sea squid, it doesn’t seem to attract prey (as it points light away from the mouth), it doesn’t illuminate the feeding tentacles, and it doesn’t seem to provide the invisible cloak of countershading that balances the downwelling light above with the darkness below. Few live Spirula have been caught and studied in captivity, and there are virtually no studies of them in the wild. There are still mysteries in the sea, and plenty of projects for future graduate students.

 

The Tentacle That Rocks the Cradle

The Brown Paper Nautilus (Argonauta hians) is actually a small sea-going octopus, and like all octopus (octopi, octopuses, octopods, octogenarians, whatever) it has neither an internal nor an external shell. Yet, the female produces this beautiful shell-like structure that is essentially a maritime baby buggy. Her care-free childless year ends after mating with a male that only breeds once before dying, then this merry widow secretes a thin, light, boat-like spiral shell that she fills with a cargo of her eggs. She hops in and pilots this stroller as it floats from the ocean’s surface to hundreds of feet down into the sea, adding and expelling air as a buoyancy mechanism, scooting backwards with jets of water from her siphon.

Mother Paper Nautilus wields a strange pair of tentacles that look like fleshy tennis rackets made by Salvador Dali. These organs secrete the minerals that increase the size of the shell, and she can actually expand these elastic organs to encompass the entire shell, and quickly withdraw them back into the shell of she senses danger. With mom taking up so much space in the crib, most of the young that hatch find the shell too crowded and leave to begin their pelagic larval existence, but a few may hang around for several days, and by then, the female sheds this vessel and begins another year as a free-swimming octopus. During this time she will feed on small invertebrates and baby fish, look for a new mate, and avoid the tuna, dolphins, albatross, and other ocean predators that feed on her kind. In the meantime, the discarded shell floats atop the ocean and may be cast ashore, like the one in the photo, and found by a lucky beachcomber.

Polly Wanna Kraken?

The age-old connection between cuttlefish and parrots may seem strange, but through a long convoluted history of humans, birds, and mollusks, it’s perfectly normal for parrots to chew the living heck out of the dead endoskeleton of a cuttlefish.Cuttlefish, not a fish at all but a family of cephalopods (Sepiidae) more closely related to squid than to anything else, contain what is functionally an internal life jacket. The cuttlebone is a hard oblong structure that spans the length of the body cavity of the cuttlefish, and made of a calcium carbonate structure microscopically infused with tiny air cells. This personal flotation device counter-balances the weight of their dense flesh and tentacles and makes them neutrally buoyant in the water. Lessened of the tethers of gravity, cuttlefish can do what they do best: levitate around seagrass beds or reefs like psychedelic, pulsating zeppelins, zapping small prey with lightning-fast elastic tentacles and living a complex social life with other cuttlefish worthy of a Mexican telenovella.

While that makes perfect sense, here’s where parrots come in. Humans have held parrots captive since Egyptian, and later, Grecian and Roman times, likely traded up along the Nile from eastern Africa or even from western Asia. Caged birds have needs that domesticity can’t deliver like their wild habitats and diets used to. But cuttlefish, an esteemed seafood by their human captors for centuries, brought cuttlebones for entirely different uses. The crunchy mineral nature of the cuttlebone acts like an abrasive emery board for parrots to file down their ever-growing beak. It also provides a much-needed calcium supplement for regrowth of new plumage and for formation of eggs in breeding females, and the satisfying feeling by a frustrated parrot driving its beak deep into the cuttlebone is the avian equivalent of us popping sheets of bubble-wrap. Cuttlebones are a multi-million dollar global industry, with cuttlebones shipped from the Mediterranean, Indonesia, the Philippines, and India to pet shops around the world for those jailed parrots that need that little hunk of a dead cuttlefish to keep them healthy.

The post Malacology Monthly: Cephalopod Compendium first appeared on Deep Sea News.

On April 1, 2003, a massive squid was pulled up from the sub-antarctic waters south of New Zealand, and while a bit mangled by the fishing lines that captured it and suffering from additional damage from packing and travel, it still measured 5.2 meters (nearly 18 feet long) and weighed 300 kilos (660 pounds), making it one of the largest invertebrates ever studied. This specimen made its way to the Te Papa Museum in Wellington, New Zealand where it became the object of intense study among those with a particular obsession with squid. It turned out this was just a young one.

The Colossal Squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni) was first described in 1925 on the basis of several tentacles taken from the stomach of the squid-eating sperm whale; these tentacles and the distinctive sharp hooks on the suckers were unique enough to warrant designation as a new species.  In the intervening decades juveniles and chunks of larger individuals were collected and described, and yet an entire adult specimen was not to be known until decades later. Whaling stations routinely examined sperm whale stomachs to identify what – and possibly where – they were eating, and while longer arms and tentacles from other squid species had been examined from whale bellies, the relatively modest tentacles from the first Colossal Squid didn’t really indicate what a massive beast the squid would turn out to be until the 2003 specimen was found.

In February 2007 another Colossal Squid was accidentally snagged as it pilfered Patagonian Toothfish from a longliner plying the Antarctic waters of the Ross Sea south of New Zealand. Barely alive but relatively undamaged, the dying specimen was filmed, photographed, and readied for travel to the Te Papa. This adult, weighing some 495 kilos – more than half a ton – was easily the largest squid ever captured, If not as long as the Giant Squid (Architeuthis dux), its sheer mass made it the largest non-vertebrate animal alive on the planet. Today, this Colossal Squid is in eternal repose, inanimate and floating in a formalin-filled glass-topped casket for public viewing in the Te Papa Museum, not unlike the embalmed corpse of Vladimir Lenin inside his brick mausoleum in Russia’s Red Square, but far more interesting. Since 2007, several more Colossal Squid were received by the Te Papa, including one obtained just last year, but are housed in the off-site collections facility several blocks from the museum, and none are as large as this one.

Prior to construction of Te Papa’s Colossal Squid exhibit, an exhaustive anatomical study was performed on the animal.  Dissection of one of the internally-lit eyes that could project illumination toward its tentacles made it clear that was it adapted for hunting fish & other squid in the deep, dark Antarctic waters, and by deep, we’re talking more than a kilometer underwater. It was, in fact, the largest eye of any animal yet known.  The relatively small tentacles of this species were made more lethal due to the serrated suckers on the eight arms of the squid – a common feature in many species of large squid – but also sharp hooks on the tentacular clubs that could swivel, thus keeping a firm hold on struggling prey. Most startlingly, the large beak of this squid was smaller than beaks of the same species taken from Sperm Whale stomachs, evidence that super-colossal Colossal Squid are alive and hunting in the southern seas.

The post Super Colossal first appeared on Deep Sea News.

The prospect of sex under jet propulsion?

Or does he think it all slightly spectacular,

This flying embrace so tightly tentacular?

Or perhaps he is shy, so he cleverly thinks,

“Any loving we do will be hid by our inks.”

But when they embrace, whether flying or hid,

They’re a couple of crazy and mixed-up squid.

-Arch E. Benthic Id of the Squid and Other Outrageous Rhymes About Oceanography

The post The Id of the Squid first appeared on Deep Sea News.

We threw a lot of expensive shit in the ocean. Starting with this mooring. It was called Peggy.

Then we threw this drifter and its drogue into the sea. It follows all the currents.

And for good measure, we chucked in this ARGO float. OK I lied, we gently placed it in.

And then it was SUR-SUR-SURVEY time. And we were all like….

At each stop in the survey, we had definite plan of sampling attack.

Step 1: Get your water from the Niskin bottles on the Rosette.

Step 2: FILTER ALL THE CHLOROPHYLLS!

STEP 3: Capture the sea beasties zooplankton with our bongo nets.

STEP 4: Process the ensnared sea beasties.

STEP 5: Examine the rest under the embiggening machine (biologists call this a microscope).

STEP 6: Mandatory dance party.

But eventually it had to end. And we headed back into shore.

Because nothing is quite as nice after a two week cruise as having a beer and watching the trash eagles of Dutch Harbor.

I might have created this post because I love animated gifs. I might have created this post in response to this curmudgeonly post. In any case hope you enjoyed it.

This cruise was part of the EcoFOCI program, a joint program between NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory and NOAA Alaska Fisheries Science Center to study the physical and biological relationships in the marine ecosystem and the survival of commercial valuable fish in the eastern Bering Sea. 

The post A Research Cruise in 12 Animated Gifs first appeared on Deep Sea News.

In the Japanese pygmy squid, Idiosepius paradoxus, mating includes neither a pleasant courtship nor aggressive behavior. Males copulate freely with females. Pygmy squid males will dart toward a female, grasp hold of her, and attach a capsule (the spermatangia) contain sperm to the base of her arms. However, females will often remove the spermatangia. Females will stretch out their buccal mass (mouth and pharynx) to search for the spermatangia at the base of the arms. Once picking up these spermatangia with their beaks, females with either eat them or blowing them away from water from the funnel.

So when does a pygmy squid female choose to keep or discard spermatangia? In a recent study, Sata et al. found the elongation of the buccal mass of females post copulation was predicted by the length of the male partner and the duration of the copulation. Males who were longer than 8-9mm or lasted longer than 3 seconds faired poorer than their shorter, in every possible way, male competition. Why small males and quickies? Both of these may be a evolutionary result decrease risk from predators. Shorter pygmy squid males may stay hidden more easily amongst seagrass. Likewise, mating can make squid pairs more conspicuous to predators and quickies would be favored or long tromps.

And because the females does this all post coitus, the males are none the wiser.

Noriyosi Sato, Takashi Kasugai, & Hiroyuki Munehara (2013). Sperm transfer or spermatangia removal: postcopulatory
behaviour of picking up spermatangium by female
Japanese pygmy squid Marine Biology, 160, 553-561 : 10.1007/s00227-012-2112-5

Noriyosi Sato, Takashi Kasugai, & Hiroyuki Munehara (2013). Female Pygmy Squid Cryptically Favour Small Males and Fast Copulation as Observed by Removal of Spermatangia Evolutionary Biology : 10.1007/s11692-013-9261-4

The post Pygmy Squids Females Favor Small Males and Fast Copulation first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Squid attain some of their most dramatic speeds and accelerations during escape responses, known as escape jetting. This occurs by water jet propulsion.  The main body of the squid, referred to as the mantle, is highly muscular.  Indeed, squids are essentially free-living muscles!  Squids take water into their body cavity and by contracting the muscle can quickly and forcibly expel it through the tubular siphon. A squid as the ability to control the direction of this siphon much like the jet engines on a Harrier Jet.  This same jetting can propel a squid out of the water (see above photo).The squid initiates aerial flights by forcefully ejecting water from the mantle.  This behavior underwater is seen as jet propulsion because the mantle can refill with water.  Above the water, however the mantle cannot refill with an aqueous propellant.   “So their launch into air is technically rocket propulsion.“ state O’Dor and coauthors.

In once case, the Orangeback Flying Squid, less than 2.4 inches in length, is able to fly under squid rocket power for 3.5 feet. This distance is nearly 18 times its body length.  This is equivalent of me launching my body more than the entire distance of a regulation basketball court.  But the flight doesn’t stop there.  These squids can continue to glide and soar like an eagle to the point of holding their arms to form a fin shape.  In flight they can reach speeds of 5.3 miles/hour, about the pace of leisurely run or jog.

O’Dor and colleagues suggest these flights are not by accident.  “WTF how did I get here?  OMG CAN’T BREATHE!”  From photographic evidence, the behavior, posture, and color of the squid change just before the launch.

So why do squids want to be rockets?

1. Who wouldn’t want to be a rocket?  Why be an astronaut when you can be a rocket?

2. To take to the aerial escape from predators not so gifted with the power of flight.

3.  Because flight is easier than swimming!  The lower drag of a rocket squid in air versus water means that reduces the cost of transports by a 20%.  The costs could even be lower if squids are actively flapping their fins as well.  How do we test this?  “Getting squid to fly in a wind tunnel seems more problematic, but perhaps not impossible.” For Science!

Ron O’Dor, Julia Stewart, William Gilly, John Payne, Teresa Cerveira Borges, Tierney Thys “Squid rocket science: How squid launch into air.” Deep Sea Research Part II: Topical Studies in Oceanography, Volume 95, 15 October 2013, Pages 113–118

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.dsr2.2012.07.002

*crediting Ron O’Dor et  al for this wonderful and simply elegant sentence

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