Tag Archives: squid

Friday Squid Blogging: New Squid Species

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/09/friday-squid-blogging-new-squid-species-2.html

An ancient squid:

New research on fossils has revealed that a vampire-like ancient squid haunted Earth’s oceans 165 million years ago. The study, published in June edition of the journal Papers in Palaeontology, says the creature had a bullet-shaped body with luminous organs, eight arms and sucker attachments. The discovery was made by scientists in France, who used modern imaging technique to analyse the previously discovered fossils. The ancient squid has been named Vampyrofugiens atramentum, which stands for the “fleeing vampire”. The researchers said that these features have never been recorded before.

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Friday Squid Blogging: We’re Genetically Engineering Squid Now

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/09/friday-squid-blogging-were-genetically-engineering-squid-now.html

Is this a good idea?

The transparent squid is a genetically altered version of the hummingbird bobtail squid, a species usually found in the tropical waters from Indonesia to China and Japan. It’s typically smaller than a thumb and shaped like a dumpling. And like other cephalopods, it has a relatively large and sophisticated brain.

The see-through version is made possible by a gene editing technology called CRISPR, which became popular nearly a decade ago.

Albertin and Rosenthal thought they might be able to use CRISPR to create a special squid for research. They focused on the hummingbird bobtail squid because it is small, a prodigious breeder, and thrives in lab aquariums, including one at the lab in Woods Hole.

Is this far behind?

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Friday Squid Blogging: China’s Squid Fishing Ban Ineffective

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/08/friday-squid-blogging-chinas-squid-fishing-ban-ineffective.html

China imposed a “pilot program banning fishing in parts of the south-west Atlantic Ocean from July to October, and parts of the eastern Pacific Ocean from September to December.” However, the conservation group Oceana analyzed the data and figured out that the Chinese weren’t fishing in those areas in those months, anyway.

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blockquote>In the south-west Atlantic moratorium area, Oceana found there had been no fishing conducted by Chinese fleets in the same time period in 2019. Between 1,800 and 8,500 fishing hours were detected in the zone in each of the five years to 2019. In the eastern Pacific zone, China’s fishing fleet appeared to fish only 38 hours in the year before the ban’s introduction.

“Ending squid fishing in areas where there is no fishing does nothing to protect squid,” said Oceana’s campaign director, Max Valentine.

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blockquote>

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

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Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Brand Fish Sauce

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/08/friday-squid-blogging-squid-brand-fish-sauce.html

Squid Brand is a Thai company that makes fish sauce:

It is part of Squid Brand’s range of “personalized healthy fish sauces” that cater to different consumer groups, which include the Mild Fish Sauce for Kids and Mild Fish Sauce for Silver Ages.

It also has a Vegan Fish Sauce.

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Friday Squid Blogging: NIWA Annual Squid Survey

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/08/friday-squid-blogging-niwa-annual-squid-survey.html

Results from the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research Limited annual squid survey:

This year, the team unearthed spectacular large hooked squids, weighing about 15kg and sitting at 2m long, a Taningia—­which has the largest known light organs in the animal kingdom­—and a few species that remain very rare in collections worldwide, such as the “scaled” squid Lepidoteuthis and the Batoteuthis skolops.

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Friday Squid Blogging: Chromatophores

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/07/friday-squid-blogging-chromatophores.html

Neat:

Chromatophores are tiny color-changing cells in cephalopods. Watch them blink back and forth from purple to white on this squid’s skin in an Instagram video taken by Drew Chicone…

It’s completely hypnotic to watch these tiny cells flash with color. It’s as if the squid has a little sky full of twinkling stars on its skin. This has to be one of the coolest looking sea creatures I’ve seen.

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Friday Squid Blogging: Giant Squid Nebula

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/07/friday-squid-blogging-giant-squid-nebula.html

Pretty:

A mysterious squid-like cosmic cloud, this nebula is very faint, but also very large in planet Earth’s sky. In the image, composed with 30 hours of narrowband image data, it spans nearly three full moons toward the royal constellation Cepheus. Discovered in 2011 by French astro-imager Nicolas Outters, the Squid Nebula’s bipolar shape is distinguished here by the telltale blue-green emission from doubly ionized oxygen atoms. Though apparently surrounded by the reddish hydrogen emission region Sh2-129, the true distance and nature of the Squid Nebula have been difficult to determine. Still, a more recent investigation suggests Ou4 really does lie within Sh2-129 some 2,300 light-years away. Consistent with that scenario, the cosmic squid would represent a spectacular outflow of material driven by a triple system of hot, massive stars, cataloged as HR8119, seen near the center of the nebula. If so, this truly giant squid nebula would physically be over 50 light-years across.

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Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Can Edit Their RNA

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/06/friday-squid-blogging-squid-can-edit-their-rna.html

This is just crazy:

Scientists don’t yet know for sure why octopuses, and other shell-less cephalopods including squid and cuttlefish, are such prolific editors. Researchers are debating whether this form of genetic editing gave cephalopods an evolutionary leg (or tentacle) up or whether the editing is just a sometimes useful accident. Scientists are also probing what consequences the RNA alterations may have under various conditions.

I sometimes think that cephalopods are aliens that crash-landed on this planet eons ago.

Another article.

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Friday Squid Blogging: Light-Emitting Squid

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/06/friday-squid-blogging-light-emitting-squid.html

It’s a Taningia danae:

Their arms are lined with two rows of sharp retractable hooks. And, like most deep-sea squid, they are adorned with light organs called photophores. They have some on the underside of their mantle. There are more facing upward, near one of their eyes. But it’s the photophores at the tip of two stubby arms that are truly unique. The size and shape of lemons­—each nestled within a retractable lid like an eyeball in a socket­—they are by far the largest photophores known to science.

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Friday Squid Blogging: Peruvian Squid-Fishing Regulation Drives Chinese Fleets Away

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/05/friday-squid-blogging-peruvian-squid-fishing-regulation-drives-chinese-fleets-away.html

A Peruvian oversight law has the opposite effect:

Peru in 2020 began requiring any foreign fishing boat entering its ports to use a vessel monitoring system allowing its activities to be tracked in real time 24 hours a day. The equipment, which tracks a vessel’s geographic position and fishing activity through a proprietary satellite communication system, sought to provide authorities with visibility into several hundred Chinese squid vessels that every year amass off the west coast of South America.

[…]

Instead of increasing oversight, the new Peruvian regulations appear to have driven Chinese ships away from the country’s ports—and kept crews made up of impoverished Filipinos and Indonesians at sea for longer periods, exposing them to abuse, according to new research published by Peruvian fishing consultancy Artisonal.

Two things to note here. One is that the Peruvian law was easy to hack, which China promptly did. The second is that no nation-state has the proper regulatory footprint to manage the world’s oceans. These are global issues, and need global solutions. Of course, our current society is terrible at global solutions—to anything.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

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