Off the coast of San Carlos, Sonora, Mexico. For the acoustics work, we suspended one live squid at a time beneath the vessel in a custom-designed harness read “put together on the spot” harness and exposed it to sound waves of 4 frequencies and recorded the acoustic reflections on scientific echo sounders. That's Chad Waluk, on the left, helping me rig up a squid harness. He works for Kelly Benoit-Bird, the acoustics diva.

We were all excited to see that an individual squid could readily be identified by the acoustic reflection, and we carried out measurement on about a dozen animals of different sizes. Some researchers have said that squid were terribly poor acoustic targets and therefore could not be studied very well by acoustic methods or hunted by marine mammals using sonar. But nobody had ever studied a squid as large as the Humboldt, and if we can see them with sonar, their mammalian predators probably can as well.

Although the experiments were going well, the squid proved more and more difficult to catch as the days went on. So finally on Wednesday night, after not catching any squid for more than 24 hours, we followed rumors that large numbers of squid had appeared 80 miles across the Gulf in Santa Rosalia, Baja California Sur, our usual study area. In the face of a strong wind we had a long bumpy ride overnight to the Baja coast -- but we indeed found squid, squid and more squid.