Diatribune

Reposted from Biomes Blog

A local trawler called and said they caught a huge squid and are keeping it in their onboard freezer if I was interested. I was.

So we thawed it out and then dissected it with our high school intern and a photographer from the Providence Journal present.  We haven't figured out the exact species yet, but it is related to the Pacific Humboldt Squid.  It was caught off the New England coast in a trawl taken at about 1300 feet in depth.  I missed the first part of the dissection because I was dealing with a school group but I'll link to the whole photo essay once my staff gets all the pics to me.  Below are some shots I managed to take myself.

The squid weighed in at 36 pounds and was six feet one inch including tentacles.  Here's a shot well into the dissection.  Note the common Loligo squid next to it.  This little one would be classified as "large" if purchased in a seafood shop.

When we first opened it up we discovered right away that it was a female.  The body cavity at the tail end was packed with eggs.  (The big sac on the right is the stomach, which we'll get to in a moment.)  The "pen" of a squid is a thin plastic-like structure that runs along the dorsal side of the body.  It is a remnant of the molluscan shell and helps to keep the soft body rigid.  In the small squid the pen would be about five inches long.  Rebecca is holding the pen we pulled out of this baby during the early part of the dissection:

The eight main tentacles were a bit over a foot long each, but the two feeding arms were at least double this length.  All the arms were, of course, covered with suction cups, and these were largest on the ends of the feeding arms.

Looking closely at the suction cups revealed dozens of razor-sharp teeth studding the entire circumference of the cups.  These were very sharp and caused us to go through a lot of rubber gloves.

The eyes of this thing impressed me the most.  Unfortunately they were deflated due to either water pressure changes as it was pulled up or the weight of all the other "regular" squid in the net.  The lenses were the size of large marbles and we lost one of them during the procedure (I blame the cat).

Like all cephalopods, squid have a powerful beak which looks like that of a parrot's (only upside down).  This one could easily take off a finger.

After we removed the gills, eggs, ink sac (still intact and full of ink), the huge liver and the rest of the organs, we decided to play with the stomach.  We saved this for last guessing that once we opened it up the smell was going to be nasty. By the way, the organs were in perfect condition as the fishermen flash-froze it literally minutes after it was brought on board. Here's me (freshly shaven), holding up the unopened stomach:

The squid was frozen grasping a large mackerel with it's head missing, so we assumed it was feeding on fish.  The mackerel must have been mixed in with the catch and grabbed at random in the net because there was no fish in the stomach.  All of the stomach contents were chopped up pieces of Ilex squid, a smaller species that grows to about a foot in length.  That beak really does its job at slicing and dicing and we guessed the stomach contained at least two or three dozen squid.  Aren't the little squid eyes mixed in cute?

I should note that the above picture has an approval rating slightly higher than 29%.

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