One of the more commonly known facts about squid is that they squirt ink. When I ask kids, "Why do you think they do that?" the answer is usually "to escape predators" or something similar.

This simple truth masks a myriad of wonders. Ink can help squid escape predators in so many different ways! Visually, it can serve as a smokescreen or a decoy; chemically, it can disgust or delight.

Cephalove just wrote up a great post about a whole different dimension of ink: one squid's warning to its fellow squid that there's reason to be alarmed.

Seems to be a time for retrospectives! I couldn't resist the chance to muse on the history of Squid A Day . . .

I started posting sixteen months ago, on September 1st, 2009, having been brought to the site by a writing contest for graduate students. I didn't win the grand prize, but I did get a nifty little flip video camera . . .

Strange but true! Oil supertankers cool themselves by pumping water from the ocean through their overheated innards, but as it turns out, there's more than just water in the ocean.

Market squid have been clogging the saltwater cooling pumps of these mammoth ships, causing overheating and interfering with the transfer of oil from the ships to the shoreline.

So sportfishing boats saved the day by anchored near the supertankers with even brighter lights, attracting the squid away from the pumps into the relative safely of . . . the sportfishing boats. Yup.

A couple of recent articles on the closure of the California market squid fishery focus on the southern (Van Zant in the Long Beach Press-Telegram) and northern (me in the Monterey Weekly) fishing grounds.

From the state's Market Squid Fishery Management Plan, which is available in its entirety here, comes a nice map showing the concentration of squid landings in the two primary fishing grounds: Monterey Bay and the Southern California Bight:

Apparently, the New Zealand Air Force just released a bunch of documents pertaining to UFO investigations over the past 50  years.

They include a well-known sighting from 1978 in which a cargo plane said it was being followed by strange lights - and was backed up by radar images from air traffic controllers. However, an Air Force report at the time explained it away as lights from Japanese squid boats reflecting off clouds.

If you ask kiwi UFO aficionado Jeff Stone, this explanation is completely bogus.