In honor of all the hullaballoo about California market squid (hullaballoo which I will soon be adding more to, stay tuned!) here are some pictures I took a few years ago. The subject is a baby market squid viewed through a microscope.

First it opens its mantle, or body cavity, to fill it with water:


Then it squeezes all the water out and goes zoom! This picture was taken milliseconds before it disappeared from view:

I had a beautiful dream on Thursday night.

Having recently graduated, I was cleaning up and moving out of my lab, and in particular, I was deciding what to do with the animals in the aquarium room. I had several small aquariums with young squid in them--not Humboldt squid, oddly, but glass squid, those ethereal denizens of the deep.

News of the California market squid fishery closure is spreading.

"We have had a banner year for market squid this year," said Dale Sweetnam, a Fish and Game marine biologist who oversees the commercial squid market. "The colder-than-normal water conditions we have observed since February have provided optimal conditions for squid spawning."

A key question in ecology is: who eats whom? This can be fairly straightforward to answer, by observing predatory or grazing activities, by opening up stomachs or sifting through feces, or even by analyzing chemical signals.

A more challenging follow-up question is then: how many do they eat? Calculating a rate of consumption is considerably trickier!

Big squid news, in California at least: the state Department of Fish and Game announced that the fishery for California market squid is hitting its harvest limit and is scheduled to be closed on Friday.

This is big news because A) market squid is the biggest fishery in California, worth tens of millions of dollars, and B) the harvest limit has not been hit basically ever.

I say "basically" because the rules of the game--the fishery management plans--were revamped eight years ago, and the harvest limit hasn't been hit since then.