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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Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/11/friday-squid-blogging-flying-neon-squid-found-on-israeli-beach.html
A meter-long flying neon squid (Ommastrephes bartramii) was found dead on an Israeli beach. The species is rare in the Mediterranean.
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Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/11/friday-squid-blogging-new-squid-sneaker.html
I did not know Adidas sold a sneaker called “Squid.”
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Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/11/friday-squid-blogging-pilot-whales-eat-a-lot-of-squid.html
Short-finned pilot wales (Globicephala macrorhynchus) eat at lot of squid:
To figure out a short-finned pilot whale’s caloric intake, Gough says, the team had to combine data from a variety of sources, including movement data from short-lasting tags, daily feeding rates from satellite tags, body measurements collected via aerial drones, and sifting through the stomachs of unfortunate whales that ended up stranded on land.
Once the team pulled all this data together, they estimated that a typical whale will eat between 82 and 202 squid a day. To meet their energy needs, a whale will have to consume an average of 140 squid a day. Annually, that’s about 74,000 squid per whale. For all the whales in the area, that amounts to about 88,000 tons of squid eaten every year.
Research paper.
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Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/11/friday-squid-blogging-squid-game-the-challenge-season-two.html
The second season of the Netflix reality competition show Squid Game: The Challenge has dropped. (Too many links to pick a few—search for it.)
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