Indie Squid Kid

From NBC Bay Area via Pharyngula

The Humboldt Squid (Dosidicus giga) is a large predatory squid found all along the Pacific coast of North America. Also known as the Jumbo Squid, the Jumbo Flying Squid, and the Red Devil, Humboldts can grow up to 7 ft long and weigh as much as 100 lbs. They generally inhabit deep water, but come to the surface at night to feed. They can be very aggressive, and have reportedly attacked divers and fishermen.

Could a realatively minor earthquake (magnitude 4.0) really cause a school of squid to beach themselves? The experts seem to think it is just a coincidence, and point out that these type of strandings, while rare, have happened before.

Sepiadarium austrinum

[Image originally published in Cephalopods: A World Guide by Mark Norman.]

PZ Myer’s Pharyngula is a blog about evolution, development, and a myriad other aspects of the biological sciences. Myer is a fellow cephalopod enthusiast, and every Friday he posts an image of a cephalopod (such as the one shown above, from today) as part of a feature called, oddly enough, Friday Cephalopod.

Pharyngula is a member of the ScienceBlogs family, the source of many of the subscriptions in my blog reader.

A study by a Tiwanese scientist that has found that squids and octopi can hear, a question that has been debated for nearly a century. Sensory phyiologist Hong Young Yan of the Taiwan National Academy of Science in Taipei found through his experiments with the common octopus (Octopus vulgaris) and the Bigfin reef squid (Sepioteuthis lessoniana) that cephalopods use an organ called the statocyst is used to register sound.

A school of Bigfin reef squid.

BBC Earth News reports;

Yan’s team had to overcome particular technical challenges to investigate the cephalopods’ hearing ability. The usual way to prove that an organism can hear is to measure how its nervous system electrically responds to sound. But that can involve directly attaching electrodes to exposed nerves, an invasive procedure that could harm delicate cephalopods.

So Yan invented a non-invasive method, which involves placing electrodes on an animal’s body to measure the electrical activity in its brain. In this way, he could measure within just a couple of hours whether the brain of an octopus or squid responds to sound.

So, between a squid and an octopus, which has the best hearing? The scientists found that squid can register a wider range of sound, but that both species hear best at a frequency of 600Hz.

Read the full BBC article.