[ed. note -- Stanford University graduate student Danna Shulman accompanied Bill Gilly on the squid expedition. She's studying the early life stages of the amazing Humboldt squid. Here's her description on how she does it.]

I'm studying the early life stages of Dosidicus [that's the genus name of the Humboldt squid. The entire name is Dosidicus gigas.....gigantic squid]. They're called “paralarvae” just after hatching, and “juveniles” once they've developed a little further. However, wild paralarvae can't be found very reliably, so I've taken to making my own.

All it takes is one mature female with some stored sperm from previous matings, and I can fill many petri dishes with artificially fertilized squid eggs. I made mothers of four separate squid during our time on the boat: two on Sunday, one on Monday (she'd been kept alive overnight for the acoustics work), and one on Thursday (the night of the great squid carnage). The first paralarvae hatched from these eggs while we were on the ship, but most eggs were still developing when we came into port. I packed them up and brought them to CIBNOR, where I'm continuing my observations.

Paralarvae are notoriously difficult to raise (primarily because we haven't yet figured out what they eat), so I can't yet get them to develop to juveniles in the lab. But on this trip we had the incredible good fortune of coming across a veritable swarm of tiny juveniles!

On the night of Tuesday, the 20th, collaborator and champion dip netter Unai Markaida (above) scooped over a hundred juveniles out of the water, all about 1-2 cm long.

Little is known of Dosidicus' reproductive biology, but some of these squid were of a size that marks the transition from paralarva to juvenile (1 cm), so we guess that we were witnessing the outcome of a mass spawning event that occurred up to one month ago. - Danna Shulman