I started looking for a seasonally appropriate squid cartoon, and found this cute little flash game called Halloween Squid.

"Mr. Squidly" follows your cursor around an underseacape littered with pumpkins, candy, and dead costumed children (really). When it swims over things, it picks them up--implying that those eight arms are all covered with suction cups, as they should be. The goal is to keep the candy and avoid the kids.



The squid is cute, but missing its tentacles. Being able to shoot out two tentacles would greatly aid in candy capture! But greatly tax the game's physics engine, I fear.

Skunked again today.
Squid are here--but so are storms.
It's not called "catching."

Okay, even though nobody commented on my post about the Ocean Bloggers Challenge (funding marine science for classrooms in need), enough donations have accrued to completely fund one of the projects: Invertebrates in my Tank! So, as a thank-you to all these people, here is another squid cartoon.

A fine question! As is so often the case in science, the answer is both yes and no, depending on what kind of squid you are.

Squid come in two metaphorical flavors: Myopsida and Oegopsida. They are usually characterized by lifestyle differences as neritic and pelagic squid, so you might wonder why the taxonomic labels aren't simply Neritica and Pelagica. It turns out they are named instead for the most prominent anatomical difference between them: the presence (in myopsids) or the absence (in oegopsids) of a cornea.

Hey, my boss is in the news! Kinda sorta, if you count tiny local papers you've never heard of. And why not--especially when they run articles about people you know?

Together with the Noyo Harbor Commission, Dr. Gilly and Supervisor Kendall Smith will be discussing, in depth, the Humboldt squid, nicknamed "red devil" for its red color and fierce nature to attack everything in sight from fish to scuba divers, and their migration towards Northern California from their natural South American habitat.