Sign up for our mailing list! We also have t-shirts and mugs with our logo!

This week we visit the weirdest squid in the deep sea!

I was a guest on Tim Mendees's After Hours that's now up on YouTube! It's mostly about my writing but we talk about all kinds of stuff, including cephalopods! There is some bad language but it's not all that bad and it's mostly toward the end.

Further reading/watching:

Elusive Long-Tailed Squid Captured on Film for First time

See Strange Squid Filmed in the Wild for the First Time (ram's horn squid)

Multiple observations of Bigfin Squid (Magnapinna sp.) in the Great Australian Bight reveal distribution patterns, morphological characteristics, and rarely seen behaviour

Untangling the Long-Armed Mystery of the Bigfin Squid

Drawing of a long-arm squid and an actual long-arm squid:



Asperoteuthis mangoldae, which really should be called the long-tailed squid:

 

Verany's long-armed squid, with its tentacles mostly retracted (so not looking very long-armed):



Verany's long-armed squid with tentacles extended:



Drawing of a paralarval Verany's long-armed squid:



The ram's horn squid, floating along doop doop doop:



Drawing of the coiled internal shell of the ram's horn squid:



A clawed armhook squid mama with her egg cluster:



Bigfin squid!



Another bigfin squid! Good grief look at that!



Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

Before we get started, a quick announcement that I was a guest on a YouTube show called After Hours recently! I was there mostly to talk about my writing, but naturally animals came up too, especially cephalopods. There’s a link in the show notes if you want to watch the show. There is a little bad language, but not too bad and it’s more toward the end.

Anyway, in a not-exactly coincidence, this week we’re going to look at some of the weirdest deep-sea squids known. Yes, weirder than the flying squid we talked about in episode 101. We don’t know much about any of them, but they’re definitely not what you expect when you think about squid.

Let’s talk first about Asperoteuthis acanthoderma, the long-arm squid. It’s also sometimes called the thorny whiplash squid because it has little pointy tubercules in its skin and long, whiplike feeding tentacles. It lives in the deep sea and has been found in both the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans, although very rarely. Despite its name, its feeding tentacles are much longer than its arms, although its arms are pretty long too. A squid’s body is generally more or less torpedo-shaped and is called a mantle. It has eight arms and two feeding tentacles that are usually longer than the arms. Many squid species have relatively short arms compared to mantle length.

The feeding tentacles in long-arm squid are very slender and delicate, and they’re easily broken off after the animal dies and has washed around in the water for a while. One intact specimen has been found and measured, though. It had a mantle length of almost a foot and a half long, or 45 cm, but its total length, including the tentacles, was 18 feet, or 5.5 meters. The tentacles were 12 times the mantle length.

Using that ratio, one large specimen found in 2007, which was 6 1/2 feet long, or 2 meters, including both mantle and arms, is estimated to have measured up to 24 feet long when it was alive, or over 7 meters. Most of its length is due to its incredibly long, thin feeding tentacles.

So what does the long-arm squid eat with those long, delicate tentacles? We don’t know. We don’t know most things about the long-arm squid.

Another species of Asperoteuthis is Asperoteuthis mangoldae. So little is known about it that it doesn’t even have an informal name. It was only described in 2007 and has only been found around the Hawaiian islands in the Pacific Ocean. It looks similar to the closely-related long-arm squid but without the incredibl...