Science news:

Scientists have finally cracked a long-standing mystery about squid and cuttlefish evolution by analyzing newly sequenced genomes alongside global datasets. The research reveals that these bizarre, intelligent creatures likely originated deep in the ocean over 100 million years ago, surviving mass extinction events by retreating into oxygen-rich deep-sea refuges. For millions of years, their evolution barely changed—until a dramatic post-extinction boom sparked rapid diversification as they moved into new shallow-water habitats.

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Pretty fantastic video from Japan of a giant squid eating another squid.

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Regulation is hard:

The South Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Organization (SPRFMO) oversees fishing across roughly 59 million square kilometers (22 million square miles) of the South Pacific high seas, trying to impose order on a region double the size of Africa, where distant-water fleets pursue species ranging from jack mackerel to jumbo flying squid. The latter dominated this year’s talks.

Fishing for jumbo flying squid (Dosidicus gigas) has expanded rapidly over the past two decades. The number of squid-jigging vessels operating in SPRFMO waters rose from 14 in 2000 to more than 500 last year, almost all of them flying the Chinese flag. Meanwhile, reported catches have fallen markedly, from more than 1 million metric tons in 2014 to about 600,000 metric tons in 2024. Scientists worry that fishing pressure is outpacing knowledge of the stock.

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Here’s a fossil of a 150-million year old fish that choked to death on a belemnite rostrum: the hard, internal shell of an extinct, squid-like animal.

Original paper.

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The Hawaiian bobtail squid has bioluminescent bacteria.

The population needs better conservation.

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Some good news: squid stocks seem to be recovering in the waters off the Falkland Islands.

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This is a very weird story about how squid stayed on the menu of Byzantine monks by falling between the cracks of dietary rules.

At Constantinople’s Monastery of Stoudios, the kitchen didn’t answer to appetite.

It answered to the “typikon”: a manual for ensuring that nothing unexpected happened at mealtimes. Meat: forbidden. Dairy: forbidden. Eggs: forbidden. Fish: feast-day only. Oil: regulated. But squid?

Squid had eight arms, no bones, and a gift for changing color. Nobody had bothered writing a regulation for that. This wasn’t a loophole born of legal creativity but an oversight rooted in taxonomic confusion. Medieval monks, confronted with a creature that was neither fish nor fowl, gave up and let it pass.

In a kitchen governed by prohibitions, the safest ingredient was the one that caused the least disturbance. Squid entered not with applause, but with a shrug.

Bonus stuffed squid recipe at the end.

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Peru has increased its squid catch limit. The article says “giant squid,” but they can’t possibly mean that.

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I like this one.

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An exploration of the interesting question.

This is a video of advice for squid fishing in Puget Sound.

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A new species of squid. pretends to be a plant:

Scientists have filmed a never-before-seen species of deep-sea squid burying itself upside down in the seafloor—a behavior never documented in cephalopods. They captured the bizarre scene while studying the depths of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), an abyssal plain in the Pacific Ocean targeted for deep-sea mining.

The team described the encounter in a study published Nov. 25 in the journal Ecology, writing that the animal appears to be an undescribed species of whiplash squid. At a depth of roughly 13,450 feet (4,100 meters), the squid had buried almost its entire body in sediment and was hanging upside down, with its siphon and two long tentacles held rigid above the seafloor.

“The fact that this is a squid and it’s covering itself in mud—it’s novel for squid and the fact that it is upside down,” lead author Alejandra Mejía-Saenz, a deep-sea ecologist at the Scottish Association for Marine Science, told Live Science. “We had never seen anything like that in any cephalopods…. It was very novel and very puzzling.”

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Spock befriends a giant space squid in the comic Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: The Seeds of Salvation #5.

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