The Spectacular Strobe Squid

[n2doc]

By Brian Switek June 14, 2011 | 3:26 pm | Categories: Laelaps, Science Blogs


As drawn by author and artist Richard Ellis, the deep-sea squid Taningia danae is an especially adorable cephalopod. Depicted on page 151 of his book The Search for the Giant Squid, the squishy creature has big eyes and broad fins that would make Sister Bertrille envious. The squid almost looks like a Pokémon character, and certainly has a fitting name for the anime franchise – “Taningia, I choose you!”

But Taningia danae isn’t actually as cuddly as it looks in Ellis’ book. In addition to arrays of chitinous hooks lining the tentacles of this seven-foot squid, Taningia danae also possesses a pair of lemon-shaped organs on two tentacle tips that can be fired like strobe lights. This is a squid that dazzles before it kills.

Up until about twenty years ago, much of what squid experts knew about Taningia came from occasional specimens hauled up in fish nets and partially-digested individuals found in the guts of whales and other predators. Teuthologists – those scientists dedicated to the study of squid – knew more about what was eating Taningia than what the peculiar, eight-armed squid was hunting and how the squid did so. The squid’s pair of lightbulb-like organs were obviously light-producing structures called photophores, but no one really knew whether they actually emitted light or how the squid used them.

The fortuitous capture of a relatively small Taningia solved the mystery. In 1975 teuthologists Clyde Roper and Richard Young captured a roughly two-foot specimen off the coast of Hawaii and kept it alive long enough to place the animal in a shipboard aquarium. Curious to see if the supposed photophores really did emit light, the two scientists turned off the lights, and, as explained in a 1993 paper by Roper and colleague Michael Vecchione, “one observer slowly moved his hand around in the aquarium in an effort to stimulate a response.”

more

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/06/the-spectacular-strobe-squid/