Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/05/friday-squid-blogging-giant-squid-live-in-the-waters-of-western-australia.html
Evidence of them has been found by analyzing DNA in the seawater.
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Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/04/friday-squid-blogging-how-squid-survived-extinction-events.html
Science news:
Scientists have finally cracked a long-standing mystery about squid and cuttlefish evolution by analyzing newly sequenced genomes alongside global datasets. The research reveals that these bizarre, intelligent creatures likely originated deep in the ocean over 100 million years ago, surviving mass extinction events by retreating into oxygen-rich deep-sea refuges. For millions of years, their evolution barely changed—until a dramatic post-extinction boom sparked rapid diversification as they moved into new shallow-water habitats.
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Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/04/friday-squid-blogging-new-giant-squid-video-2.html
Pretty fantastic video from Japan of a giant squid eating another squid.
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Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/04/friday-squid-blogging-squid-overfishing-in-the-south-pacific.html
Regulation is hard:
The South Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Organization (SPRFMO) oversees fishing across roughly 59 million square kilometers (22 million square miles) of the South Pacific high seas, trying to impose order on a region double the size of Africa, where distant-water fleets pursue species ranging from jack mackerel to jumbo flying squid. The latter dominated this year’s talks.
Fishing for jumbo flying squid (Dosidicus gigas) has expanded rapidly over the past two decades. The number of squid-jigging vessels operating in SPRFMO waters rose from 14 in 2000 to more than 500 last year, almost all of them flying the Chinese flag. Meanwhile, reported catches have fallen markedly, from more than 1 million metric tons in 2014 to about 600,000 metric tons in 2024. Scientists worry that fishing pressure is outpacing knowledge of the stock.
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Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/04/friday-squid-blogging-jurassic-fish-chokes-on-squid.html
Here’s a fossil of a 150-million year old fish that choked to death on a belemnite rostrum: the hard, internal shell of an extinct, squid-like animal.
Original paper.
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Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/03/friday-squid-blogging-jumbo-flying-squid-in-the-south-pacific.html
The population needs better conservation.
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Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/03/friday-squid-blogging-increased-squid-population-in-the-falklands.html
Some good news: squid stocks seem to be recovering in the waters off the Falkland Islands.
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Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/03/friday-squid-blogging-squid-in-byzantine-monk-cooking.html
This is a very weird story about how squid stayed on the menu of Byzantine monks by falling between the cracks of dietary rules.
At Constantinople’s Monastery of Stoudios, the kitchen didn’t answer to appetite.
It answered to the “typikon”: a manual for ensuring that nothing unexpected happened at mealtimes. Meat: forbidden. Dairy: forbidden. Eggs: forbidden. Fish: feast-day only. Oil: regulated. But squid?
Squid had eight arms, no bones, and a gift for changing color. Nobody had bothered writing a regulation for that. This wasn’t a loophole born of legal creativity but an oversight rooted in taxonomic confusion. Medieval monks, confronted with a creature that was neither fish nor fowl, gave up and let it pass.
In a kitchen governed by prohibitions, the safest ingredient was the one that caused the least disturbance. Squid entered not with applause, but with a shrug.
Bonus stuffed squid recipe at the end.
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Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/02/friday-squid-blogging-squid-fishing-in-peru.html
Peru has increased its squid catch limit. The article says “giant squid,” but they can’t possibly mean that.
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Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/02/friday-squid-blogging-squid-cartoon-3.html
I like this one.
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Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/02/friday-squid-blogging-do-squid-dream.html
An exploration of the interesting question.
Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/02/friday-squid-blogging-squid-fishing-tips.html
This is a video of advice for squid fishing in Puget Sound.
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Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/01/friday-squid-blogging-new-squid-species-discovered.html
A new species of squid. pretends to be a plant:
Scientists have filmed a never-before-seen species of deep-sea squid burying itself upside down in the seafloor—a behavior never documented in cephalopods. They captured the bizarre scene while studying the depths of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), an abyssal plain in the Pacific Ocean targeted for deep-sea mining.
The team described the encounter in a study published Nov. 25 in the journal Ecology, writing that the animal appears to be an undescribed species of whiplash squid. At a depth of roughly 13,450 feet (4,100 meters), the squid had buried almost its entire body in sediment and was hanging upside down, with its siphon and two long tentacles held rigid above the seafloor.
“The fact that this is a squid and it’s covering itself in mud—it’s novel for squid and the fact that it is upside down,” lead author Alejandra Mejía-Saenz, a deep-sea ecologist at the Scottish Association for Marine Science, told Live Science. “We had never seen anything like that in any cephalopods…. It was very novel and very puzzling.”
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Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/01/friday-squid-blogging-giant-squid-in-the-star-trek-universe.html
Spock befriends a giant space squid in the comic Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: The Seeds of Salvation #5.
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Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/01/friday-squid-blogging-the-chinese-squid-fishing-fleet-off-the-argentine-coast.html
The latest article on this topic.
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Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/01/friday-squid-blogging-squid-found-in-light-fixture.html
Probably a college prank.
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Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/12/friday-squid-blogging-squid-camouflage.html
New research:
Abstract: Coleoid cephalopods have the most elaborate camouflage system in the animal kingdom. This enables them to hide from or deceive both predators and prey. Most studies have focused on benthic species of octopus and cuttlefish, while studies on squid focused mainly on the chromatophore system for communication. Camouflage adaptations to the substrate while moving has been recently described in the semi-pelagic oval squid (Sepioteuthis lessoniana). Our current study focuses on the same squid’s complex camouflage to substrate in a stationary, motionless position. We observed disruptive, uniform, and mottled chromatic body patterns, and we identified a threshold of contrast between dark and light chromatic components that simplifies the identification of disruptive chromatic body pattern. We found that arm postural components are related to the squid position in the environment, either sitting directly on the substrate or hovering just few centimeters above the substrate. Several of these context-dependent body patterns have not yet been observed in S. lessoniana species complex or other loliginid squids. The remarkable ability of this squid to display camouflage elements similar to those of benthic octopus and cuttlefish species might have convergently evolved in relation to their native coastal habitat.
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Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/12/friday-squid-blogging-petting-a-squid.html
Video from Reddit shows what could go wrong when you try to pet a—looks like a Humboldt—squid.
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Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/12/friday-squid-blogging-giant-squid-eating-a-diamondback-squid.html
I have no context for this video—it’s from Reddit—but one of the commenters adds some context:
Hey everyone, squid biologist here! Wanted to add some stuff you might find interesting.
With so many people carrying around cameras, we’re getting more videos of giant squid at the surface than in previous decades. We’re also starting to notice a pattern, that around this time of year (peaking in January) we see a bunch of giant squid around Japan. We don’t know why this is happening. Maybe they gather around there to mate or something? who knows! but since so many people have cameras, those one-off monster-story encounters are now caught on video, like this one (which, btw, rips. This squid looks so healthy, it’s awesome).
When we see big (giant or colossal) healthy squid like this, it’s often because a fisher caught something else (either another squid or sometimes an antarctic toothfish). The squid is attracted to whatever was caught and they hop on the hook and go along for the ride when the target species is reeled in. There are a few colossal squid sightings similar to this from the southern ocean (but fewer people are down there, so fewer cameras, fewer videos). On the original instagram video, a bunch of people are like “Put it back! Release him!” etc, but he’s just enjoying dinner (obviously as the squid swims away at the end).
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Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/12/friday-squid-blogging-vampire-squid-genome.html
The vampire squid (Vampyroteuthis infernalis) has the largest cephalopod genome ever sequenced: more than 11 billion base pairs. That’s more than twice as large as the biggest squid genomes.
It’s technically not a squid: “The vampire squid is a fascinating twig tenaciously hanging onto the cephalopod family tree. It’s neither a squid nor an octopus (nor a vampire), but rather the last, lone remnant of an ancient lineage whose other members have long since vanished.”
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