Entries Tagged "squid"
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Friday Squid Blogging: Humboldt Squid Invasion
Thousands of jumbo flying squid, aggressive 5-foot-long sea monsters with razor-sharp beaks and toothy tentacles, have invaded the shallow waters off San Diego, spooking scuba divers and washing up dead on beaches.
They’re aggressive:
One diver described how one of the rust-coloured creatures ripped the buoyancy aid and light from her chest, and grabbed her with its tentacles.
…a powerful, outsize squid that features eight snakelike arms lined with suckers full of nasty little teeth, a razor-sharp beak that can rapidly rip flesh into bite-size chunks, and an unrelenting hunger. It’s called the Humboldt, or jumbo, squid, and it’s not the sort of calamari you’re used to forking off your dinner plate. This squid grows to seven feet or more and perhaps a couple hundred pounds. It has a rep as the outlaw biker of the marine world: intelligent and opportunistic, a stone-cold cannibal willing to attack divers with a seemingly deliberate hostility.
[…]
Humboldts—mostly five-footers—swarmed around him. As Cassell tells it, one attacked his camera, which smashed into his face, while another wrapped itself around his head and yanked hard on his right arm, dislocating his shoulder. A third bit into his chest, and as he tried to protect himself he was gang-dragged so quickly from 30 to 70 feet that he didn’t have time to equalize properly, and his right eardrum ruptured. “I was in the water five minutes and I already had my first injury,” Cassell recalls, shaking his head. “It was like being in a barroom brawl.” Somehow he managed to push the squid-pile off and make his way to the surface, battered and exhilarated. “I was in love with the animal,” he says.
That article is a really fun read.
This isn’t the first time they’ve invaded the waters of Southern California, and they’ve been spotted as North as Seattle.
Info on cooking them.
Friday Squid Blogging: Bottled Water Plus Squid
Only in Japan:
Bandai toy company from Japan has finally realized that bottles of water just aren’t cute. As Japan is the cute capital of the world, this just wouldn’t do. To fix the problem, they developed these adorable floating squids that can be added to any bottle of water. Thank god for Japanese innovation. Of course, they’re only available in Japan, but at least they’re affordable at only $6 each.
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Also See Through Non-Eye Organ
The UW-Madison researchers have been intrigued by the light organ’s “counterillumination” ability—this capacity to give off light to make squids as bright as the ocean surface above them, so that predators below can’t see them.
“Until now, scientists thought that illuminating tissues in the light organ functioned exclusively for the control of the intensity and direction of light output from the organ, with no role in light perception,” says McFall-Ngai. “Now we show that the E. scolopes squid has additional light-detecting tissue that is an integral component of the light organ.”
The researchers demonstrated that the squid light organ has the molecular machinery to respond to light cues. Molecular analysis showed that genes that produce key visual proteins are expressed in light-organ tissues, including genes similar to those that occur in the retina. They also showed that, as in the retina, these visual proteins respond to light, producing a physiological response.
“We found that the light organ in the squid is capable of sensing light as well as emitting and controlling the intensity of luminescence,” says co-author Nansi Jo Colley, SMPH professor of ophthalmology and visual sciences and of genetics.
Friday Squid Blogging: Flying Squid
Ommastrephid squids “glide over the ocean surface.”
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Pasta
Step by step instructions on how to make squid pasta.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.