Squid A Day

Oh criminy, are we still confused? Didn't we go over this like a zillion times? Wasn't Deep-Sea News' excellent primer on how Humboldt Squid are Not The Same Thing as Giant Squid clear enough?Sigh. Just let a few fishermen catch a few hundred Humboldt squid, and suddenly the headlines are blaring: GIANT SQUID INVADE CALIFORNIA ZOMG!1!!

I have been known to admit that I fell in love with cephalopods because they are the closest things to aliens coexisting with us on our home planet. (I love aliens.) Clearly I am not the only person to come to this conclusion:The giant Humboldt squid could be some sort of alien species from a 1980s science fiction film. Flashing white and red like a Klingon stealth cloak, they blanket an area to attack and devour any creature they can, including each other. They employ long tentacles covered with suckers and claw-like "teeth" to grasp their prey and bring it in to a large, hard black beak, which resembles that of a demon macaw.

Not a whole lot of squid news this week, although the cephalopod mailing list continues to host a lively discussion, spurred by that coconut octopus story, of concepts like "tool use" and "intelligence". Everyone's got a different perspective! One of my favorite questions: is an archerfish that spits a jet of water to knock an insect off a branch a "tool user"? Is "using" a jet of water different from "using" a rock or a coconut shell?

Hey, I'm back! I went to a rockin' party and an awesome conference and now I am full of interesting tales. Also, I am full of determination to finish my thesis this year, and an unfortunate byproduct of that resolution is a need to cut down on my blogging. Therefore, as you can see from my mutilated banner, squid-a-day is temporarily squid-a-week, until I finish my degree.So once a week I will be delivering a concentrated dose of squid! Are you ready for the first? It's extra concentrated, since I had to cover the first twelve days of the new year . . .

Despite spending this holiday season at home, where the sun is shining, the grass is green, and the orange and palm trees sway, I've been metaphorically snowed under. Between wrestling a paper into submission (that was a pun! submission, like to a journal? hah? hee?) and preparing data for a conference presenation, squid blogging has fallen somewhat by the wayside.But squid news continues relentlessly, never pausing for its chronicler's busy schedule. So, I give you the tentacular highlights that have accumulated over the last few weeks, starting with PW Style's truly large, totally amazing homemade squid presents:

I think this may be the best pop-sci treatment of the jumbo squid invasion that I've seen yet. Go, Christian Science Monitor!For example, most invasion articles don't take the time to explain the nuanced history of the squid's presence in California, but here we learn:When scientists dug through historical records, they discovered that the squid's northward advance wasn't entirely unprecedented. There were accounts from the 1930s of the creatures in Monterey Bay. But never in numbers comparable to what scientists observed now – schools many hundreds strong. And no one had ever seen them as far north as Alaska.

My google news alert for "squid" frequently pops up recipes and restaurant reviews, most of which I dismiss out of hand. But a critical mass of alerts mentioning squid ink pasta, risotto, and other dishes finally drove me to a more thorough investigation.

An opinion piece in the Boston Herald criticizes the squid dissection component of an overnight family education event at the New England Aquarium:The barbaric highlight of the night was when the children were instructed to use the squid’s pseudo-spine to puncture its ink sac and then write their names on the carcass. [My son] Ari rolled his eyes at this vanity ritual in disbelief, calling it “mean” and “crazy.” I’ll go one step further and brand it “borderline satanic.”

A nifty news story about students in a Florida classroom watching a giant squid dissected in Melbourne, Australia, led me to hunt down an article about the dissection itself. Was it really a giant squid, I wondered wearily, or merely a very large squid?It was indeed a true giant squid! And the article is quite good, gushing alliteratively about "the museum's mollusc master" using "surgical sweeps of the scalpel" to investigate. Just a few points to clarify:

Some discussion over the identity of Nemo's little octopus friend Pearl has led me into a deep investigation of Grimpoteuthis (dumbo octopuses) and Opisthoteuthis (flapjack octopuses). Both are shortened on the antero-posteral axis (which, yes, takes some head-scratching to figure out--octopuses are even more difficult than squid when it comes to axes of symmetry) but this shortening is carried to the greatest extreme in flapjacks. Hence the name. From the Tree of Life web project:

The Associated Press, that bastion of scientific knowledge, shares with us a list of "pests that are benefiting or could benefit from global warming", starting with:_Ticks that transmit Lyme disease are spreading northward into Sweden and Canada, once too cold for them._Giant Humboldt squid have reached waters as far north as British Columbia,threatening fisheries along much of the western North American coast.

Today's scapegoat for my rant about the place of cephalopods in society is, as I predicted, Squidward Quincy Tentacles, of Spongebob Squarepants fame:What IS that? Six appendages, a misplaced mouth, and a floppy nose? Where'd the nose come from? Where are his fins and tentacles? But oh, it turns out Squidward isn't even meant to be a squid. The Spongebob wiki quotes Squidward's voice actor: He's an octopus, but they call him Squidward. I never understood. I guess Octoward just never worked for a name, though.