A brand new kind of large squid has been found by researchers while voyaging around on a research cruise in the southern part of the Indian Ocean.

This large squid, almost a meter long, belongs to the chiroteuthid family.

The squid which form a part of this family are long and thin, and have organs which produce light. The light producing organs help them attract their meals.

This large squid was discovered during an analysis of thousands of different samples which were brought in from the Seamounts cruise last year. The cruise is being led by a conservation group known as IUCN.

The project began a year ago when experts in the area of marine biology set out on a six week science expedition in the Indian Ocean.

The aim of the expedition was to shed some light on the mysterious seamounts – mountains under the water – located in the southern part of the Indian Ocean, and to help manage marine resources and improve conservation plans in the area.

“For 10 days now 21 scientists armed with microscopes have been working through intimidating rows of jars containing fishes, squids, zooplankton and other interesting creatures,” explains a spokesperson of the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford, Alex Rogers.

“Many specimens look similar to each other and we have to use elaborate morphological features such as muscle orientation and gut length to differentiate between them.”

Loligo pealeii

Loligo pealeii, an ordinary run of the mill squid – most famous for being a source of food for many creatures in the sea – might just become a VIP in the science world, as it is making waves by providing tidbits and insights into the origin and evolution of the sense of hearing.

The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, housed in a militaristic style building, is home to T. Aran Mooney, a biologist who is exploring the interesting theory: Can squid hear? Can they actually hear predators or enemies coming up on them? How do squid and other aquatic animals depend on sound to communicate, migrate, and interact on a day to day basis? Will the increasing amount of noise pollution we are pumping into the world’s oceans have a catastrophic effect on the squid, and other animals hearing ability, and ultimately, their survival?

“The sound in the ocean is increasing…commercial shipping, oil and gas exploration…those make a lot of noise,” Mooney explains. “And you don’t know how that is going to affect the animal unless you know what it hears.”

A postdoctoral scholar at WHOI, Mooney, has taken it upon himself to partake in seminal investigations into the hearing of the squid. His results were recently released this past Friday in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

This research has taken on a whole new light, as many aquatic animals rely on the squid, and if we are endangering its hearing ability, we are not only endangering our chances of finding out more about the development of the sense of hearing, but we could potentially throw the whole balance of the world’s oceans out of whack.

The sea holds many mysteries for us, one of which was the mating habits of the deep sea squid. This mystery has now been unraveled, as scientists have discovered a male squid with a humongous elongated penis.

The male squid’s penis is almost as long as its entire body, making it one of the oceans’ studliest creatures…

With this discovery, it really comes as no surprise to learn how the male deep-sea squid impregnates females of the species. He simply uses his well hung penis to shoot out blobs of sperm, which then make their way into the female’s body.

This discovery may also shed some light on just exactly why these giant squid mate in the depths of the ocean.

Dr. Alexander Arkhipkin, a deep-water fisheries expert of the Falkland Islands Government Fisheries Department, has explained how he and his team made this momentous discovery, “The mature male squid was caught during a deep-water research cruise on the Patagonian slope. We took the animal from the catch, and it was moribund with arms and tentacles still moving, and chromatophores on the skin contracting and expanding. When the mantle of the squid was opened for maturity assessment, we witnessed an unusual event. The penis of the squid, which had extended only slightly over the mantle margin, suddenly started to erect, and elongated quickly to 67cm total length, almost the same length as the whole animal.”

This sudden arousal of the deep-sea squid specimen really took the scientific team by surprise, however, it did help us solve the age old mystery of just how exactly deep-sea squid procreate.

All cephlapods are hard put to actually “get down to business” as their bodies are comprised of a closed hood-type feature, which forms a cephalopods body and head.

The creatures utilize this hood-type feature to move about in the water, and they need to ventilate to breathe, to top it off, they also hide their sexual organs inside this structure!

Shallow water cephalopods got around this problem by developing an arm to go about the task.

Their penises are short and produce smaller blobs of sperm, and then one of their available appendages is then used to transfer this sperm into receptacles located on the female of the species.

The actual location of these receptacles varies, and is either on their skin, or internal.

However, the deep-water male squid have a much more direct method, which was just injecting the sperm right into the waiting female. This was the giant mystery, as up until now, the general assumption was that these deep-sea squid had penis sizes comparable to other squid.

However, it appears that not all squid are created equal, and unlike their small penis bearing brethren, they have developed a huge cannon for the job of impregnating the females.

The squid uses his impressive member to actually reach inside the female, and inject the sperm directly to where it needs to go, to prevent it from being washed away.

However, how the sperm actually gets to the female’s reproductive organs, is still shrouded in mystery.

A 19.5 feet long squid – that’s almost 6 meter – has been caught in the Gulf of Mexico by a group of scientists from the NOAA’s* Southeast Fisheries Science Center and the Department of the Interior’s Minerals Management Service. This is only the second known giant squid caught in the Gulf of Mexico and the last one was collected 55 years ago.

The gigantic squid of 1954 was a dead specimen found floating around at the surface off the Mississippi Delta, while the 103 pound giant caught on July 30 this year was pulled up from a depth of more than 1,500 feet by NOAA’s trawling research vessel Gordon Gunter.

“As the trawl net rose out of the water, I could see that we had something big in there…really big,” said Anthony Martinez, marine mammal scientist for NOAA’s Fisheries Service and chief scientist for this research cruise. “We knew there was a remote possibility of encountering a giant squid on this cruise, but it was not something we were realistically expecting.”

“This is an incredibly rare find in the Gulf of Mexico,” said Dr. Michael Vecchione, director for NOAA’s Fisheries Service’s National Systemics Laboratory and a giant squid expert. “Giant squid have been found more commonly in areas of the world where there are deep-water fisheries, such as Spain and New Zealand, but this is the first time one has actually been captured during scientific research in the Gulf of Mexico.”

The capturing of the squid took place during a 60-day scientific study of sperm whale prey off the coast of Louisiana. The giant squid has now been preserved and sent to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum for Natural History.

*U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association

Since the early days of the 20^th century, marine biologists have pondered one of the world’s most puzzling questions – if a tree falls in the ocean, can the cephalopods hear it?

Fish use their swim bladder to hear, but cephalopods – a group of marine invertebrates that includes octopus, squid, cuttlefish and nautiluses – do not have any gas-filled chamber to use for this purpose and this has lead some scientists to suggest that these creatures are incapable of detecting the pressure wave component of sound.

A team led by sensory physiologist Hong Young Yan of the Taiwan National Academy of Science in Taipei has now, for the first time in history, been able to show that cephalopods can hear sounds underwater using their statocysts.

A statocyst is sac-like structure containing sensitive hairs and a mineralised mass. Fish can use their statocysts to detect sounds, so Yan suspected that other underwater creatures might do the same. After successfully showing that prawns use their statocysts to detect sounds underwater, Yan extended his experimentation from to prawns to cephalopods.

A quandary when researching cephalopods is their delicate bodies. When researchers wish to determine if an organism is capable of hearing or not, they normally attach electrodes to exposed nerves and measure how the nervous system electrically responds to sound. This type of invasive procedure can however easily injure a cephalopods and Yan was therefore forced to come up with a better method. Instead of attaching electrodes to exposed nerves, Yan placed the electrodes on the cephalopods’ body and measured the electrical activity in the brain. Thanks to this method, Yan could show that cephalopods do have a sense of hearing.

The lack of any gas-filled chamber means that cephalopods can’t amplify sounds the way a fish can, but their hearing is probably as good at that of prawns and similar invertebrates.

Yan now wish that his discovery will be used to further the understanding of cephalopod behaviour.

“The key question which I would like to investigate is what kind of sounds are they listening to?” says Yan. “Perhaps they listen to sound to evade predators and can eavesdrop to sounds made by their prey. […]Squid are heavily preyed upon by toothed whales including

dolphins. So perhaps their hearing would aid them to avoid the pinging sounds made by

dolphins. […] Or, perhaps they even could make sounds to communicate among themselves. “

The discovery of three new species of fossilized octopi in Lebanon has caused scientists to suspect that the first octopus appeared tens of millions of years earlier than previously thought.

In a paper published in a recent issue of the journal Palaeontology, researchers Fuchs, Bracchi and Weis describes three new species of fossil octopus placed in two new genera: Keuppia and Styletoctopus. The species have been given the names Keuppia levante, Keuppia hyperbolaris and Styletocopus annae.

The descriptions are the result of the fortunate discovery of three astonishingly well preserved octopus fossils from the Cenomanian, i.e. octopus that lived at some point between 93 and 100 million years ago.

Studying the history of octopi is difficult since the octopus, unlike dinosaurs for instance, is composed almost entirely of soft tissue; predominantly muscle, skin and viscera. When an octopus dies the body rapidly decomposes and vanishes, and extraordinary conditions are necessary for the animal to leave any fossil record behind.

Fortunately for science such extraordinary conditions must have been at hand in Lebanon some 100 million years ago, because the three newfound fossils are so well preserved that even traces of muscles, suckers, internal gills and ink can be distinguished.

This type of fossil is so rare that Mark Purnell, for the Palaeontological Association, remarked that finding an octopus as a fossil “is about as unlikely as finding a fossil sneeze”.

Before these three species were discovered, only one species of fossil octopus was known to science.

For more information, see the paper published in Palaeontology: Fuchs, D, G Bracchi and R Weis (2009) New Octopods (Cephalopoda: Coleoidea) from the Late Cretaceous (Upper Cenomanian) of Hakel and Hadjoula, Lebanon. Palaeontology 52, pp. 65–81.

A Taiwan research team has successfully extracted a brain-boosting nutrient from squid skin, according to an announcement made by the Council of Agriculture’s Fisheries Research Institute.

The nutrient in question is phospholipid docosahexaenoic acid, commonly known as PL-DHA, a substance known to improve a persons memory and enhance learning ability.

According to the institute official, PL-DHA is superior to TG-DHA another form of docosahexaenoic acid commonly found in deep-sea fish oil — when it comes to inhibiting degradation of the intellect since PL-DHA can cross the blood brain barrier and be absorbed directly by the brain.

Researchers at the institute have also showed that PL-DHA is effective in reviving neural cells and enhancing the content of three oxidation-resistant enzymes — GSH, CAT and SOD. In addition to this, the fatty acid will moderate the oxidative damage to neural cells that can be induced by free radicals in the body, which means that it will decrease the pace of plaque and tangle accumulation in brain cells.

Quoting medical reports, the institute official stressed that Alzheimer’s and other forms of senile dementia is known to be associated with the accumulation of plaque and tangles in the brain.

On January 22, 48 sperm whales were found stranded on Perkins Island, off the northwest coast of Tasmania, Australia Despite efforts to rescue the whales, only five specimens were alive by late Friday and three of them died during the night. Rescuers now hope that at least these two whales will be able to return safely to the sea.

The reason behind the stranding is believed to be a special wind pattern that brings nutrients up to the surface. Karen Evans, a government scientist, said the winds occur in a 10-year cycle in this region. As the winds bring nutrients up through the water column, squids and other suitable sperm whale prey follows and this is what lures the whales too close to the shallows. In November, two large groups of pilot whales stranded in the same region.

“I’ve flown over this area where the sperm whales are, and it’s almost like a whale death trap,” says Evans. “There are lots of wide sandbars and beaches, all kinds of traps for animals that go into it.”

The Sperm Whale (Physeter macrocephalus or Physeter catodon) is the largest of all toothed whales and largest living toothed animal. Some of the animals that where found stranded on Perkins Island were more than 30 feet (over 9 metres) in length, but male sperm whales can actually reach a length of at least 67 feet (over 20 metres). Sperm whales feed mainly on squid and fish, including Colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni) and Giant squids of the genus Architeuthis.

A ROV (remote operated vehicle) owned and operated by the oil company Shell have caught video of a very rare squid while filming a mile and a half (two and a half kilometers) underwater on the drilling site known as Perdido in the gulf of Mexico. The squid known as a Magnapinna squid has a unique look due to the fact that it has “elbows” on its arms. Little is known about these enigmatic squids that can grow to be between 5 to 23 feet (1.5 to 7 meters) long.

See video – See pictures

A total of four species of these squids have been found so far but there are likely more species still waiting to be discovered.

Magnapinna pacifica was the first species to be described and was described in 1998 by Michael Vecchione of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and University of Hawaii biologist Richard Young based on juvenile squids. Michael Vecchione and Richard Young later released a report that showed that Magnapinna squids are common in deep sea areas around the world. (Below about 4,000 feet (1,219 meters).)

The second species, M. talismani, was described in 2006 and the year after a third species M. atlantica was described. Both these species have been found in the Atlantic.

The last known species has yet to receive a scientific name.

Otto the Octopus, an eight-armed resident of the Sea Star Aquarium in Germany, baffled his caregivers by deliberately short-circuiting an annoyingly bright light that shone into his otherwise cosy aquarium.

According to staff, the marine exhibition began to suffer from mysterious blackouts to which the puzzled electricians could not find any reasonable explanation. This prompted the aquarium staff to take shifts sleeping on the floor in hope of solving the mystery. “It was a serious matter because it shorted the electricity supply to the whole aquarium that threatened the lives of the other animals when water pumps ceased to work,” a spokesman of the aquarium explains.

During the third night, a befuddled aquarium crew found out the reason behind the incidents – an annoyed octopus that had realised that he could extinguish the irritating lamp by climbing onto the rum of his tank and squirting a jet of water at it.

“We knew that he was bored as the aquarium is closed for winter, and at two feet, seven inches Otto had discovered he was big enough to swing onto the edge of his tank and shoot out a the 2000 Watt spot light above him with a carefully directed jet of water“, says the spokes man.

Octopuses are clever and curious animals and they can easily grow bored in captivity. If you wish to keep an octopus, it is very important to constantly provide it with challenging tasks and things to explore to keep it happy and healthy. An octopus must also have suitable caves or similar in the aquarium where it can relive stress, carry out its natural behaviours – and hide from pesky lights. You can read more about octopuses in captivity here.