Ecology & Zoology

. . . Wait! Stop the presses! They're not enormous, they're just somewhat large. They don't stab their prey, they just chew and swallow. Maybe that sounds nitpicky--big is big and sharp is sharp, right? But it actually makes quite a difference. Consider these sentences from the Victoria Times: Jumbo squid hunt in packs and use sharp suckers on their eight arms to hold their prey while stabbing them repeatedly with their sharp beak . . . Adult Humboldt squid can grow as large as 10 to 13 metres long (33 to 43 feet). Now consider the facts. Jumbo (Humboldt) squid use their beak for taking bites…

I was delighted to receive a message yesterday from a teacher on the Oregon coast who had seized the opportunity to dissect a Humboldt squid with her students. First--how cool is that? Good teaching! Second, they found worms in the squid's stomach, and instead of ignoring them to focus on the squid, they put them under the microscope. Good science! Third, when they didn't know how to identify the worms, the teacher started looking in books, getting in touch with professors and (hey why not) me. Good research! From her description and my own experience, I'm pretty sure the worms are juvenile…

Thank you, Slate, for taking this opportunity to remind us of the dangers of angering the giant squid: The giant squid hates everything: It hates Kirk Douglas, it hates the crew of the Pequod, and it especially hates scientists who make it look stupid. The warning was originally sounded in 2005, just after Japanese scientists made the first-ever observations of a live giant squid in the wild. With the aid of a very long string and a bag of mashed shrimp, Tsunemi Kubodera and Kyoichi Mori have taken 500 pictures of the giant squid at home. Stripping all the mystery and dignity from this great…

Spotted hyenas aren't smarter than chimpanzees but they cooperate better and it shows on cooperative problem-solving tests, says a new article about a very old study that just recently got some notice. Captive pairs of spotted hyenas (Crocuta crocuta) that needed to tug two ropes in unison to earn a food reward cooperated successfully and learned the maneuvers quickly with no training. Experienced hyenas even helped inexperienced partners do the trick. When confronted with a similar task, chimpanzees and other primates often require extensive training and cooperation between individuals may…

Jeff writes: "[Do] squid or cephalopods have any weird parasites similar to the isopops that replace the tongues on a number of fish . . . ?" (Heh. I am still chuckling over "isopops." Although probably coined accidentally, it is a perfect term for the tongue-replacing isopod. In fact, I'm envisioning a new line of shaped frozen treats . . .) To answer: cephalopods often find themselves hosting the same classic parasites that plague the rest of us: tapeworms, roundworms, protozoans, and the like. In addition, they have some of the pickiest parasites in the world all to themselves. One entire…

On Tuesday, BBC News' Day In Pictures included a photo of a northern bottlenose whale, washed up dead on a beach in Southern England. (The bottlenose whale is a member of the beaked whale family, Ziphidae, whereas the bottlenose dolphin belongs to the dolphin family, Delphinidae. (Now I am singing to myself: "Ziphidae-do-dah, Del-phi-ni-dae!" Try it, the meter is perfect! (Er, now stop singing to look at the sad picture.))) Now that you are distracted from my atrocious use of nested parens, consider the picture's caption: It is thought it died of starvation due to a lack of squid. That is…

Not to beat a dead squid, but a reasonable question came up in a conversation with one of my labmates today: Who's to say that the Architeuthis collected in the Gulf of Mexico this summer was alive and kicking to begin with? Scientists assume the rapid ascent through the changing depths caused the squid to die. But that's only an assumption. The squid certainly doesn't look too good in the pictures. It could have accrued all that damage as a result of being trapped in the net, but it's also plausible that the creature started out injured, sick, or just plain dead. Such factors would also make…

Yup, they found a giant squid. And this is exactly why I get snarlish about people referring to Humboldt squid as giant squid. If you cry "giant!" every time Humboldts appear, then when you get a real Architeuthis, people will think, "What's the big deal about finding one giant squid in the Gulf of Mexico? There are swarms of them off Washington!"/rant Anyway, back in July, a standard trawl on a NOAA research cruise hauled in a giant squid--much to everyone's excitement, I'm sure. Curiously, NOAA waited two months before issuing a press release. (I don't really know why, probably there's a…

A Google Image search for "cute squid" returns, amidst the cartoons and handmade objects, numerous photographs of real animals: - 1 baby octopus (cute, but not a squid)- 1 dumbo octopus (cute, and it does have fins, which one usually associates with squid, but dumbos actually belong to a whole group of midwater octopuses that do have fins--so, still not a squid)- 2 reef squid (the fin undulating along the entire length of their bodies would usually tag them as cuttlefish, but I think these are actually in the squid genus Sepioidea, the "cuttlefish mimics")- 2 piglet squid (squee! nuff said.)…

I'm starting to suspect that my study organism, Dosidicus gigas, is a bit of a diva. It seems like every other day there's a news story on Humboldt squid, jumbo squid, or (my favorite!) giant squid. (D. gigas is still not a giant squid.) I haven't been covering all of these articles here because, well . . . I didn't want to be a diva by association. But this article is the most thorough I've seen yet, including all the interviews and topics that have been covered piecemeal in earlier articles, so it seemed like a good time to jump in and clarify a few items. Item One: It's not strictly true…