Mysterious Squid
July 1-2, 2000

	Squid: “thousands of them” Photograph by Mike Guardino

Monterey Bay, near the Monterey Bay Aquarium The sub crew worked all morning to prepare Sub 7 for Steve Webster to dive, but first one thing then another kept delaying the launch until the afternoon approached. Steve finally ran out of time and had to leave the ship, but Mike took his place in the driver’s seat and wound up having “the dive of my life!” He found an old tire with a resident octopus; also, acres and acres of squid eggs. No living adults, however. Though not deep by DeepWorker standards, (90 to 160 feet [27 to 48 meters]), he was able to stay for more than three hours and thus longer—and warmer—than he ever had before in Monterey Bay. Also, at last he has fine film images to confirm what he saw.

	Siphonophore Jelly Photograph by Mike Guardino

July 2, Sunday. Monterey Bay, near the Monterey Bay Aquarium Marine biologist Dr. Baldo Marinovic has just joined the expedition, bringing with him a boatload of gear: nets, buckets, ice chests, a small duffel bag for clothes and a strange assemblage of odds and ends that mark him as a seasoned field scientist. As he has done many times in past years, he plans to use the McArthur’s acoustic equipment to locate patches of krill and to sample them with his special array of plankton nets. At 10:00 AM, two great blue whales slid by less than 100 yards off the starboard side during preparations for Mike Guardino’s dive. Marinovic glanced up just as a huge plume of exhaled whale breath burst from the ocean’s surface. “Did you see that! I’ve never seen blue whales so close to shore! What do you suppose they’re doing in here?” Like most good scientists, Baldo’s enthusiasm and sense of wonder have remained more or less intact since he was about 10 years old. We watched the whales cruise by and out to sea where they will probably find the same thing that brings Marinovic here—great swarms of krill.

	Market Squid Photograph from Corbis

Just before noon, we’re ready to close the hatch and send Mike Guardino over the side for a good, long afternoon dive. I hand him a small towel to mop up disconcerting drops of condensation that form on metal surfaces inside the sub and, since he’ll miss lunch, a chocolate bar. Then I whisper, “We’ll save you a sandwich, but I hope you’ll feed your soul, down there, Mike.” Three hours and five minutes later, a radiant Mike emerges. “Wait until you see the video,” he says. “I was surrounded by squid—thousands of them. There were siphonophores, too, one at least 10 yards long!”

I’m glad to hear that at least some squid have escaped capture by the huge number of squid fishing boats that assemble along the Monterey coast every night, lights blazing. Many sea creatures depend on squid as a major source of sustenance; we are new competitors with them in food chains that have developed over millions of years without us as a part of the equation. There are growing concerns that the large numbers of squid taken by fishermen at the very time that squid gather to reproduce may be having a profoundly adverse impact on their numbers, and on the fate of the fish, sea lions, birds and other creatures whose food source we are taking away. There are still many unknowns about the nature of even the common, so-called “market squid,” Loligo. After the young hatch, no one knows what happens to them until they return as adults, ready to breed and start the cycle over again. What we do know is that if we want to take any on a sustained basis, it is essential to resolve the mysteries about how they live and what they do throughout their entire life cycle.

—Sylvia A. Earle
Project Director
Sustainable Seas Expeditions

[Note: nationalgeographic.com does not research or copyedit dispatches.]