We’re in Guaymas, Mexico, for three weeks of squid tagging. (That's me, fishing for the elusive humboldt squid). And acoustic testing. (More on that in the next posting.)

Other than driving for 19 hours in a 26-year-old Toyota pickup, nothing too scary has happened. The most fun so far for me was seeing the Foxnews online headline about our squid and sperm whale tagging paper that came out – “Beer and Tacos Lead to Marine Science Breakthrough” or something like that. Ricketts and Steinbeck must have smiled too.

For a long time I’ve lamented the fact that science did not have a Hunter Thompson and was saddened when he became unavailable to accompany us on a field trip. But perhaps new seeds have been sown. Hey, we survived the “70 cases of beer in the hold” and “marine scientists break into Ed Ricketts lab” coverage in conjunction with our 2004 Sea of Cortez Expedition and Education Project. We even had sandwiches named for us in a San Carlos shop as part of that outing.

A week ago, we went out with a local fisherman, Jose Ramirez, who owns a restaurant in a small fishing village, La Manga, a few miles north of San Carlo (a large-scale tourist community about 10 miles north of Guaymas). We went shortly after dusk to meet him at his restaurant, which was totally dark – probably because the village does not have electricity. The few lights in houses must have been powered by batteries. The panga that he had was huge – twice the size of the typical boats that the commercial squid fishermen use. And unlike the boats of the squid fishermen, his was new, clean and had a sturdy canvas shade strung from a frame made of galvanized pipe. But the big outboard was covered with an old t-shirt, and the only lighting was a single 12 v bulb that should have been in the dome light of a car – tell-tale signs of his commercial fishing background. He now fishes only for his restaurant and takes tourists out to see whales and sharks – and the occasional tagging scientists.

We is our Mexican collaborator, Unai Markaida. (That's him in the orange jacket with me figuring out the sex and age of a squid.) My graduate student, Danna Shulman. Volunteer assistant and ace photographer, Ashley Booth. Rigoberto Rosas and Raul Ramirez, who are students of another colleague, Cesar Salinas, from CIBNOR -- Centro de Investigaciones Biologicas de Noroeste. (That's Rigo in the photo on the right.)

So, we spent our first week (last week) figuring out where the squid are (commercial fishing seems to have taken a lull, or perhaps stopped for the season unusually early); and tagging four squid with pop-up satellite tags. Last Wednesday night, we deployed two in five minutes last night. The squid were caught simultaneously and were the only large squid caught in four hours of fishing. So this is the first time that we have tagged multiple squid that really seemed to be in the same school (which are probably fairly small by squid school standards).

We want to deploy tags for a short time (2 weeks) to improve chances of recovering the tags after they pop off. It is difficult if the squid has migrated 100 miles away in the time it was tagged. The 2 weeks is a gamble – we hope it doesn’t go anywhere horizontally. By recovering the tags we get the archival time-series data of pressure and temperature sampled every 2 seconds – so we get a really high-resolution look at the squid swimming up and down through hundreds of feet of water. We want to compare results off Guaymas in the winter (cold water) to those we have collected off Santa Rosalia in the fall (warm water) and mid-summer (boiling water).

Stay tuned for next week’s blog, and we’ll let you know if we were successful.

It’s always great to be in Mexico – Steinbeck said: “There is an illogic to Mexico that I need.” Some truths are eternal.

* photos by Ashley Booth