Jumbo Squid Invade San Diego Shores, Spook Divers

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 tourist-packed beaches.

The carnivorous calamari, which can grow up to 100 pounds, came up from the depths last week and swarms of them roughed up unsuspecting divers. Some divers report tentacles enveloping their masks and yanking at their cameras and gear. Stories of too-close encounters with the alien-like cephalopods have chased many veteran divers out of the water and created a whirlwind of excitement among the rest, who are torn between their personal safety and the once-in-a-lifetime chance to swim with the deep-sea giants.

The so-called Humboldt squid, which can grow up to 100 pounds, are native to the deep waters off Mexico, where they have been known to attack humans and are nicknamed “red devils” for their rust-red coloring and mean streak. Those who dive with them there chum the water with bait and sometimes get in a metal cage or wear chain mail to avoid being lashed by tentacles.

“I wouldn’t go into the water with them for the same reason I wouldn’t walk into a pride of lions on the Serengeti,” said Mike Bear, a local diver. “For all I know, I’m missing the experience of a lifetime.”

The squid are too deep to bother swimmers and surfers, but many longtime divers say they are staying out of the surf until the sea creatures clear out. Yet other divers, including Shandra Magill, couldn’t resist the chance to see the squid up close.

On a recent night, Magill watched in awe as a dozen squid with doleful, expressive eyes circled her group, tapping and patting the divers and gently bumping them before dashing away.

One especially large squid suspended itself motionless in the water about three feet away and peered at her closely, its eyes rolling, before it vanished into the black. A shimmering incandescence rippled along its body, almost as if it were communicating through its skin.

But the next night, things were different: A large squid surprised Magill by hitting her from behind and grabbing at her with its arms, pulling her sideways in the water. The powerful creature ripped her buoyancy hose away from her chest and knocked away her light.

When Magill recovered, she didn’t know which direction was up and at first couldn’t find the hose to help her rise to the surface. The squid was gone.

“I just kicked like crazy. The first thing you think of is, ‘Oh my gosh, I don’t know if I’m going to survive this. If that squid wanted to hurt me, it would have,” she said.

Other divers have reported squid pulling at their masks and gear and roughing them up.

Roger Uzun, a veteran scuba diver and amateur underwater videographer, swam with a swarm of the creatures for about 20 minutes and said they appeared more curious than aggressive. The animals taste with their tentacles, he said, and seemed to be touching him and his wet suit to determine if he was edible.

“As soon as we went underwater and turned on the video lights, there they were. They would ram into you, they kept hitting the back of my head,” he said.

“One got ahold of the video light head and yanked on it for two or three seconds and he was actually trying to take the video light with him,” said Uzun, who later posted a 3-minute video with his underwater footage on YouTube. “It almost knocked the video camera out of my hands.”

Scientists aren’t sure why the squid, which generally live in deep, tropical waters off Mexico and Central America, are swarming off the Southern California coast — but they are concerned.

In recent years, small numbers have been spotted from California to Sitka, Alaska — an alarming trend that scientists believe could be caused by anything from global warming to a shortage of food or a decline in the squid’s natural predators.

In 2005, a similar invasion off San Diego delighted fisherman and, in 2002, thousands of jumbo flying squid washed up on the beaches here. That year, workers removed 12 tons of dead and dying squid.

This summer, the wayward squid have also been hauled up by fisherman in waters off Orange County, just north of San Diego.

Research suggests the squid may have established a year-round population off California at depths of 300 to 650 feet, said Nigella Hillgarth, executive director of the Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Swarms off the coast — and the subsequent die-offs — may occur when their prey moves to shallow waters and the squid follow, and then get trapped and confused in the surf, said Hillgarth, who saw a dying squid on the beach last weekend.

“It was an amazing privilege to touch a creature like that and see how amazingly beautiful it was,” she said. “They have these wonderful eyes. … They look all-seeing, all-knowing.”

That’s the kind of description that pulls veteran divers such as Raleigh Moody back to the pitch-black water, despite the danger.

“My usual dive buddy, he didn’t want to come out,” said Moody, as he prepared for a night dive with another friend. “There are some divers (who) just don’t want to deal with it and there are some like me that, until they hear of something bad happening, I’m going to be an idiot and go back in the water.”

Dozens of Jumbo Squid Beached After Quake–Coincidence?

Ker Than
for National Geographic News

July 14, 2009

Residents near a San Diego-area beach awoke to find dozens of jumbo squid, also called Humboldt squid, flapping helplessly on the shore Saturday—about an hour after an earthquake had struck off the Californiacity at 7:34 a.m.

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• Jumbo Squid Invading Eastern Pacific (March 30, 2007)
• Jumbo Squid Mass “Suicide” Stumps California Scientists (February 23, 2005)
• Giant Squid Pictures, Facts, News, Map, More

According to local news reports, some beachgoers in the city of La Jolla attempted to throw the squid back into the water to save them from circling seagulls.

The mysterious jumbo squid stranding and the earthquake, though, are probably linked only by coincidence, experts say (jumbo squid picture wallpaper).

For one thing, scientists began finding beached squid at least three days before the Saturday earthquake, said squid expert William Gilly of Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station.

“So unless the squid were predicting the earthquake, I don’t think there’s any link,” he added.

(See “Can Animals Sense Earthquakes?”)

Giant Squid Impervious to Quakes?

Jumbo squid can grow up to seven feet (two meters) long and weigh as much as 100 pounds (45 kilograms).

Biologists don’t know of any squid bodily functions that would be affected by an earthquake. Unlike fish, for example, squid do not have air bladders, which can conceivably be compressed by an earthquake’s seismic waves.

“It’s hard to absolutely rule out, but it seems unlikely to me” that earthquakes could affect squid, said Danna Staaf, a Stanford marine biologist currently conducting research close to the squid stranding location.

RELATED

• Jumbo Squid Invading Eastern Pacific (March 30, 2007)
• Jumbo Squid Mass “Suicide” Stumps California Scientists (February 23, 2005)
• Giant Squid Pictures, Facts, News, Map, More

Giant squid expanding their dominance of the eastern Pacific

Sun, 08 Mar 2009 3:50p.m.   Off the California coast it has been getting harder to catch big fish like salmon but a whole lot easier to hook a deep sea monster – the Humboldt Squid. This huge tentacled creature grows to 185cm long, can weigh up to a 45kg, and watch out for that dangerous beak. In the Pacific there has been a population boom. Bruce Robison of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute uses an unmanned submarine to study the giant species where it hunts. “They squirt ink and grab anything in sight,” he says. The squid’s usual territory from Chile to Mexico has expanded dramatically over the last seven years. Once rarely seen off California, they are now strong-arming their way toward dominance. “This is an extraordinarily rapid change,” says Mr Robison. The betting is that this population explosion of giant squid is somehow related to global warming, but exactly what is going on remains a mystery of the deep. “It seems to be succeeding as the climate’s changing,” says William Gilly, Stanford University. Mr Gilly says one thing is for sure the squid are not picky eaters. “They can pretty much eat anything they want,” he says. And right now, millions of them are consuming whatever they can find off the California coast, even salmon. As the squid eat what we like to eat, our menu may change. “You will get accustomed to eating less salmon and more squid – I can guarantee that,” says Mr Gilly. For fishermen that means the tug on the end of the line may have tentacles instead of fins. “They are big, and they fight hard,” says Mr Robison. Our one defence against this giant squid invasion may be to eat them as quickly as they are eating everything else. CBS / 3 News

Squid invasion drawing commercial boats off La Jolla

By Ed Zieralski (Contact) Union-Tribune Staff Writer

4:29 p.m. February 27, 2009

A squid boat from the San Pedro fishing fleet is shown offshore near the Children’s Pool in La Jolla in a photo taken Feb. 29, 2008. – JOHN McCUTCHEN / Union-Tribune

More on the outdoors

Ed Zieralski gives his take on the great outdoors in his blog, Going Outside

SAN DIEGO — If you see a bunch of lights tonight off in the distance from La Jolla shores, it’s not an invasion.

Just as they did last winter, market-size squid have shown up in big numbers as close as three miles from La Jolla. And now those commercial light boats are going to illuminate the night skyline off the beach as they fish for the tasty calamari.

The word is out: Commercial squid boats landed 100 tons of squid last night and more boats are expected tonight, with vessels coming from San Pedro and Oxnard to load up on the easy catches.

Meanwhile, kayak and inshore boat fishermen who have had the stuff to themselves will now be sharing it. There’s been a very stealthy run on white sea bass and home-guard yellowtail in recent days, with anglers catching squid and using it for bait.

A commercial passenger sport boat also made squid bait in that area Thursday night.

Nothing like a showing of squid to electrify both the sport and commercial fishing industries.

Merry Squidmas!

Rough Sex at 40,000 Leagues Under the Sea

 

What do you do to pass on your genes to the next generation if you are really hard up, it’s too dark to see clearly and you are literally under enormous pressure. The short answer: play rough and weird.

Species of deep-sea squid that strut their stuff in the blackness that prevail thousands of feet beneath the ocean surface encounter few opportunities to  mate and so every tryst must count.

So what’s a guy (squid) to do? Males of the speciesTaningia danae use sharp beaks or hooks on tentacles to make cuts into their mates of more than two inches before depositing sperm packets called spermatophores, Australian biologists tell the German magazine Der Spiegel.

Males may get really agro because of an inferiority complex, the pub reports: They are generally smaller and, if they don’t play hard, fast, or clever they may get eaten by the Big Mamas. At these depths, size may matter a lot to make sure those little packets of love really stay put. 

The researchers report they found spermatophores that had been “injected” into a female by a three-foot-long penis, that sometimes misses its mark. In one case of bad aim, a squid accidentally injected himself under the skin, providing perhaps the most literal example in the animal world of shooting oneself in the foot. (Another species of squid just injects the sperm into water near their  female and a chemical in the sperm packet dissolves female tissue, allowing the sperm to enter.)

Some of these wimpy squid males apparently try brains instead of brawn. The men of Ancistrocheirus lesueurii are cross dressers, taking on the appearance of females, possibly as a ploy to get closer to the real thing before pouncing. Females who hail from the clan Heteroteuthis dispar are models of thrift. They store sperm in their body that accounts for up to 3 percent of their body weight. 

For female squids, sex is truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience—and an apparently horrible one at that. The female releases millions of tiny eggs into the water along with the sperm contributed by the one male who got his hooks into her, and usually never goes back for seconds, the researchers found. Afterward, they never let a male get close—a behavior that even has led to the technical term “traumatic fertilization.”

Warning lights of the sea

COLUMN ONE

By Pete Thomas
Times Staff Writer

March 26, 2007

Aboard the New Del Mar — A long night scouring a deep, dark ocean is proving uneventful — until the luminous red dots begin drifting across the sonar screen.

Banter in the wheelhouse suddenly stops and grubby fingers point to the dots clustered along the bottom, as if trying to locate the enemy.

On deck, a fisherman lurches forward as his rod dips seaward. Another fisherman is jerked against the rail, then another.

“What else can it be?” says Capt. Ricky Carbajal of the vessel New Del Mar, which is pitching in a brisk wind, five miles beyond the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

It can only be the same bizarre denizen that has been turning up in large numbers throughout Southland waters: Dosidicus gigas, a.k.a. Humboldt, or jumbo, squid.

It is a colossal cephalopod that reaches 7 feet long, can weigh more than 100 pounds, and jets through the water at speeds up to 25 mph.

It has probing arms and tooth-lined tentacles, a raptor-like beak and an insatiable craving for flesh — any kind of flesh, even that of humans.

It shows up briefly off California every four or five years, spurred by a warm current or some other anomaly, providing a boon for sportfishing businesses.

But amid this latest influx, to points as far north as Bodega Bay, there is a deepening concern among scientists that Humboldt squid are entrenching themselves off California, and may expand northward, eating their way through fisheries as they go. The same thing is happening in the Southern Hemisphere, where squid are being blamed for depleting the hake fishery off Chile.

The first verified capture off Alaska occurred three years ago. A year later, mass strandings made news in British Columbia, where wolves on outer island beaches were seen gnawing on rubbery squid carcasses.

Strandings and the subsequent deaths of squid, such as those along Orange County beaches in March 2005, have historically preceded infestations of local waters. In other words, these peculiar beings, which have a life span of less than two years, seem on their way to establishing residence along the length of the eastern Pacific.

“We really need to mount a research initiative soon,” warns William Gilly, a professor at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station.

The reasons for the phenomenon have not been pinned down, although gradual ocean warming, pollution and over-fishing of large predators are suspected factors.

Nor is it known what the ramifications might be. But there is already proof that the squid are ingesting small rockfish, anchovies, sardines and much smaller market squid, which is the type prized as calamari.

IN fact, very little is known about Humboldt squid because they spend most of their lives at depths of 650 to 3,000 feet.

But when they rise, they can provide some big surprises.

Four divers found that out when they tried to document the squids’ behavior in the Sea of Cortez 17 years ago. While a non-diving passenger battled to land a 14-foot thresher shark on rod-and-reel, Alex Kerstitch of Arizona and three friends submerged in the nighttime sea, carrying cameras. The divers settled near the dim fringes of the boat’s lights. They could see the weary shark being pulled toward the boat. Below, dozens of squid began flashing iridescently, red-white-red.

The flashing is carried out via millions of chromatophores within the skin, opened to reveal red, closed to reveal white; it is believed by some scientists to be a means of communication.

A five-foot squid flung itself onto the shark and tore an orange-sized chunk from its head.

Another squid zoomed forth, tentacles clasped before its beak, and snatched a long needlefish, leaving in its wake a trail of blood and scales.

The frenzy built and Kerstitch, as the lone diver shooting still photographs and with no bright movie lights to deter the predators, was set upon.

A squid grabbed his right swim fin and pulled downward. He kicked it away but another grabbed his head. The cactus-like tentacles found his neck, the only part of his body not covered with neoprene.

He bashed the squid with his dive light, far less bright than the movie lights, and it let go, but it swiped both the light and the gold chain he’d been wearing.

Another squid wrapped its tentacles around his face and chest. Kerstitch dug his fingers into its clammy body.

It slid down and around his waist and pulled him downward in pulsing bursts. Then it suddenly let go, but made off with his compression meter.

For whatever reason, the attack ceased and Kerstitch got to the surface dazed and oozing blood from neck wounds, thankful to be alive.

The incident became legendary among divers, the first of many painful but, so far, nonfatal encounters by divers with Humboldt squid.

SCIENTISTS were aware of the squid’s periodic forays into the Sea of Cortez before the Kerstitch mugging.

In 1982, Nelson Ehrhardt, a professor at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, embarked on a project aboard a purse-seine vessel and, in an interview three years ago, described what he saw when the boat’s large net was hauled up:

“The biomass of Dosidicus was so large that the animals could not swim or pump water through their respiratory systems, suffocating them. What was terrifying was the frenzy that this situation created…. Cannibalism took place as a natural reaction and certainly if any animal of any type, including humans, would have fallen into the net, it would have been consumed in a matter of minutes.”

Humboldt squid, which historically inhabited waters within the Humboldt current off South America, were at this time entrenching themselves in the narrow gulf that separates Baja California from the Mexican mainland.

Stanford’s Gilly, who has been studying squid in the Sea of Cortez for 28 years, knows of no reference to Dosidicus gigas before the 1950s.

Fishermen recalled strandings of large squid in the 1950s and ’60s, and encounters with live specimens, sporadically, beginning in the 1970s.

At the same time, yellowfin tuna schools stopped venturing as far up the gulf as they once did. They might have been put off by changes in oxygen levels likely caused by agricultural runoff, which produces dense phytoplankton blooms.

Gilly has learned that Humboldt squid thrive in this oxygen minimum layer, or OML, generally at great depths. The OML contains tiny lanternfish, on which the squid rely for sustenance.

In addition, Gilly says, “Inhabiting the OML may protect juvenile or smaller Dosidicus gigas from predation” by other fish.

Furthermore, large sharks were becoming scarce because of over-fishing in the Sea of Cortez, and this might have favored the cephalopods.

A squid-fishing industry established at Santa Rosalia on the Baja California coast north of Loreto has flourished in the last decade. Hundreds of skiff fishermen depart nightly during the summer, and use multi-pronged jigs and monofilament lines to haul the beasts up, hand-over-hand.

The fishery processes 100,000 tons of squid annually, most going to Asian markets, although U.S. markets are being explored.

Gilly has estimated that 10 million squid occupy a 25-square-mile area beyond Santa Rosalia.

Nobody has estimated the number of squid currently off Southern California, but given that they have shown in great abundance simultaneously off San Diego, Orange County, Catalina Island and Palos Verdes, it could easily be in the millions.

BACK aboard the New Del Mar, the squid fishing is going strong despite the midnight hour, a bone-chilling wind and the relentless rocking.

Squid measuring nearly 4 feet are being gaffed and hauled overboard. Their squirming arms and tentacles are useless to them now. They flash incessantly as they expire. The animals are hoisted by their thick mantles and stuffed into burlap sacks — soon to be carved into steaks.

“When you grow up, you hear all about giant squid, but these things aren’t anywhere near giant,” says Robert Carbajal, the captain’s nephew, after bagging his first one. “But it’s still bigger than anything you’ve ever seen before. And they’re freakish.”

Finally, the captain notes the late hour and orders an end to fishing.

He sets a course for port, and for at least a mile two lines of red dots — one at 150 feet and the other at 600 feet — fill the sonar screen.

The weary skipper shrugs at the sight. “Well,” he says, “they shouldn’t be hard to find tomorrow.”

——————————————————————————–
pete.thomas@latimes.com

Colossal Squid May Be Headed for Oven

Associated Press

March 22, 2007

A colossal half-ton squid believed to be the largest ever caught may be destined for the microwave oven. But researchers say they don’t want to cook the massive creature, just to defrost it so they can study it better.

Scientists at New Zealand’s national museum, Te Papa Tongarewa, have taken possession of the beast that took fishermen two hours to land after it was netted by chance in Antarctic waters last month and was frozen soon afterward to preserve it.

Expert Steve O’Shea said the squid had weighed in at 1,089 pounds and measured 33 feet long – heavier but shorter than initial estimates of 990 lbs and 39 feet. It is by far the largest specimen of the rare and mysterious deep-water species Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, or colossal squid, ever caught. The previous largest was a 660 pound female squid found in 2003, the first ever landed.

Experts say the creatures, which have long been one of the most mysterious creatures of the deep ocean, may grow even bigger, up to 46 feet long. O’Shea said scientists at the museum are considering using a giant microwave oven as among options to defrost the animal so they can study it.

Copyright © 2007, The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Copyright © 2007, InterestAlert

Missing links in food chain

Strange things are swimming in the deep blue sea.

http://www.latimes.com/sports/la-sp-outdoors2feb02,1,4696949,full.column?coll=la-headlines-sports

A primitive-looking frilled shark surfaced recently in a marine reserve off Japan, providing scientists with rare footage of this “living fossil.”

It brought to mind the 15-foot oarfish, likewise an occupant of lightless depths, that emerged among swimmers not long ago off Santa Catalina Island.

That same week, fishermen to the north, near Santa Cruz Island, discovered remnants of a freshly dead 20-foot giant squid, proving that Jules Verne knew what he was writing about in “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.” Then, another large oarfish washed ashore off Baja California.

No telling what raised these mysterious creatures. Perhaps age or illness. Or maybe, and this is just speculation, their surfacing represents further evidence of a marine world tilting increasingly off-kilter because of global warming, pollution and over-fishing, or some combination thereof.

Things definitely aren’t as they were. The increasing abundance locally of Humboldt squid, a South American species of mollusk much smaller than giant squid, is but one hint.

Now comes news that perhaps dozens of killer whales from the Puget Sound area off Washington are foraging in California. They’ve been seen as far south as Santa Cruz, 1,000 miles from home.

This might be easily explained, as these federally endangered “southern resident” orcas of the Pacific Northwest may simply be running out of food.

They’re increasingly looking to the south for salmon, which themselves are struggling to survive. Near the California-Oregon border, for example, the Klamath River runs of coho and Chinook salmon are collapsing because of dams and diversions.

Further south, the San Joaquin and Sacramento River system runs in the San Francisco Bay area are faring better, so presumably the famous killer whales, perhaps like Humboldt squid, are expanding their territory out of necessity.

“That’s the crux of the situation,” Kelley Balcomb-Bartok, a spokesman for the Whale Research Center in Friday Harbor, Wash., said in reference to the orcas.

“On the one hand, it’s good news to hear that they’re off California because now we know where they are. It’s not necessarily good news that they have to go to California to feed.”

Sightings of southern residents in California date to January 2000, when a positive ID was made near Monterey. The most recent photo identifications, of an orca labeled K20 and her 3-year-old calf, K38, were made Jan. 24 west of San Francisco.

It raises concern because Bay Area salmon runs are already being hammered by California sea lions, which are so numerous and bold that they’ve begun to jeopardize commercial and sportfishing operations.

Meanwhile, in Sacramento, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is gleeful amid praise this week from the Joint Ocean Commission Initiative, largely because of the state’s pioneering role in closing large parcels of ocean to commercial and recreational fishing.

That might grow a few fish, but it won’t help the southern resident orcas or the salmon. It won’t chase away the Humboldt squid, and it surely won’t delve deep enough to aid the denizens of darkness, if in fact they’re in trouble.

And given the warming of their realm, the continuous influx of polluted water via storm drains, and who knows what else, it’s safe to assume they are.

Thick as thievesSea lions, whose numbers are so high that some scientists believe a die-off is imminent, have become pests to fishermen and now, it seems, even to migrating gray whales.

Dozens of the pinnipeds have been harassing the leviathans off the Palos Verdes Peninsula and observers last Sunday witnessed what appeared to be an act of revenge.Hugh Ryono, a volunteer with the Gray Whale Census and Behavior Project at Point Vicente, said about six sea lions were resting on their backs when a large whale altered its course, sounded, then emerged among them, scattering them in a panic.”We had a good laugh!” Ryono said via e-mail.

On the move
The gray whale migration, which is slowly getting later because of climatic changes, is beginning to peak off Southern California. The Point Vicente volunteers this week have been posting daily counts in the 20s and 30s.

Hazardous for humpbacks

Thousands of humpback whales have arrived in Hawaii, only to find their seasonal paradise a virtual vessel minefield. Three have been struck already by boats — compared with six known collisions all of last winter — and there are four months left in this breeding-calving season.Around Molokai, Lanai and Maui, as many as 10,000 whales gather and currently, “every moment there’s a blow somewhere in a given view,” said Jeffrey Walters, co-manager of the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary.

“It’s reasonable to suspect there will be more collisions.”Fishing notesThe Saltwater Sportsman National Seminar Series will be at Long Beach State’s Carpenter Performing Arts Center on Feb. 10 from 9-4. Experts Fred Archer, Barry Brightenburg, Greg Stotesbury, Jimmy Decker, David Brackmann and Jim Hendricks will join hosts George Poveromo and Tom Waters for a show focusing on small and big game.

The cost is $55. Registration information is available by calling (800) 448-7360.Bob Kurz of Laguna Niguel has been recognized by the International Game Fish Assn. as one of fewer than 50 people to have achieved the “royal billfish slam” by catching all nine billfish species. He completed the task, after 36 years, in September when he caught a white marlin off Venezuela.

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pete.thomas@latimes.com

SquidBrain ties

Your brother or father was always a little different. So a boring department store tie just won’t do this season. These hand printed ties are made in Detroit and feature awesome old graphics that border between the weird and wonderful. Printed in subtle colors, they are sure to catch peoples’ eye and make that man in your life stand out in a crowd! Poly-blend available in pink and olive.To find out more or view other items from this Partner in Craft, simply click on the link!

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