It's Shark Week! Not that I begrudge the elasmobranchs their ten thousand minutes of fame, but come on, Discovery Channel, you do Shark Week every year. When are you going to switch it up and do Squid Week?

Anyway, sharks eat squid (along with everything else*) so there is an interesting cephalopod tie-in, reported by Philip Friedman:

Patrick Douglass from the Shark Diver is convinced that the reason anglers now see more Humboldt squid in the local waters is the lack of sharks. . . . Many anglers believe that the recent sand bass and barracuda drought was a direct result of large numbers [of] jumbo squid in Southern California. They point to the fact that there were no Humboldt squid here this year—and this has been the best local fishing year in at least five years.

This is where you expect me to be all, "noooo you have it wrong!" right? But actually, it's an eminently plausible connection. I don't think there are any hard ecological data to support it, but there's plenty of soft anecdotal stuff.

The problem with really proving it is that there are so many environmental factors, beyond simple predation, affecting the abundances of squid, sand bass, and barracuda . . .


* Ambiguity intentional.