Squidlets

Every once in a while some random person drops off a creature at the marine lab.  Sometimes the creature is a goldfish that had been a take-home prize at a wedding over the weekend (now weddings taking place at the Seymour Center are not allowed to include live animals in centerpieces). Once it was a spiny lobster that spent the long drive up from the Channel Islands in a cooler, and became the Exhibit Hall favorite, Fluffy. This time the objects had been collected off the beach and brought in by somebody who thought they might still be alive.

These white objects are egg masses of the California market squid, Doryteuthis opalescens, that had been cast onto the beach at Davenport. Sometimes the masses are called fingers or candles, because they’re about finger-sized. Each contains dozens of large eggs. Squids, like all cephalopods, are copulators, and after mating the female deposits a few of these fingers onto the sea floor. Many females will lay their eggs in the same spot, so the eggs in this photo represent the reproductive output of several individuals. The cephalopods as a group are semelparous, meaning that they reproduce only once at the end of their natural life; salmons are also semelparous. After mating, the squids die. Not coincidentally, the squid fishing season is open right now, the idea being that as long as the squids have reproduced before being caught in seines, little harm is done to the population. Most of the time the squids are dispersed throughout the ocean, and the only time it is feasible to catch them in large numbers is when they gather to mate.

These egg masses look vulnerable, but they’re very well protected. The outer coating is tough and leathery, and the eggs must taste bad because nothing eats them. I’ve fed them to anemones, which will eat just about anything, and they were spat out immediately.

The eggs were brought to the Seymour Center because the person who brought them in thought they might make a good exhibit. I happened to be there that day and got permission to take a small subset of the bunch so I could keep an eye on them. And they did and still do make a good exhibit.

16 April 2018: I obtain squid eggs!

At this stage it is impossible to tell whether or not the eggs are alive. The only thing to do was wait and see.

30 April 2018: After waiting two weeks with apparently no change, I decided it was time to look at the egg fingers more closely again. Lo and behold, they are indeed alive! Look at the pink spots in the individual eggs–those are eyes. And if you can see the smaller pink spots, those are chromatophores, the ‘color bodies’ in the squids’ skin that allow them to perform their remarkable color changes.

9 May 2018: A week and a half later, the embryos definitely look more like squids! Their eyes and chromatophores have darkened to black now. The embryos are also more active, swimming around inside their egg capsules. You can see the alternating contraction and relaxation of the mantle, which irrigates the gills. Squids have two gills. More on that below.

At this point the squid fingers began to disintegrate and look ragged. They became flaccid and lightly fouled with sediment.

14 May 2018 (today): Almost a month after they arrived, my squid eggs look like they’re going to hatch soon! I didn’t see any chromatophore flashing, though.

In the meantime, some of the eggs on exhibit in the Seymour Center have already started hatching. The first hatchlings appeared on Friday 11 May 2018. The hatchlings of cephalopods are called paralarvae; they aren’t true larvae in the sense that instead of having to metamorphose into the adult form, they are miniature versions of their parents.

Peter, the aquarium curator at the Seymour Center, allowed me to take a few of the paralarvae in his exhibit and look at them under the scope. The squidlets are about 3mm long and swim around quite vigorously. Trying to suck them up in a turkey baster was more difficult than I anticipated. But I prevailed!

You can actually see more of what’s going on in a video:

The cup-shaped layer of muscular tissue that surrounds the squid’s innards is the mantle. When you eat a calamari steak, you are eating the mantle of a large squid.The space enclosed by the mantle is called the mantle cavity. Because the paralarvae are transparent you can see the internal organs. Each of those featherlike structures is a ctenidium, which is the term for a mollusk’s gill. The ventilating motions of the mantle flush water in and out of the mantle cavity, ensuring that the gill is always surrounded by clean water.

And now we get to the hearts of the matter. At the base of each gill is a small pulsating structure called a branchial heart (‘branch’ = Gk: ‘gill’). It performs the same function as the right atrium of our own four-chambered heart; that is, boosting the flow of blood to the gas-exchange structure. So that’s two hearts. Between the pair of branchial hearts is the systemic heart, which pumps the oxygenated blood from the gills to the rest of the squid’s body. This arrangement of multiple hearts, combined with a closed circulatory system, allows cephalopods to be much more active swimmers and hunters than the rest of their molluscan kin.

I expect that my fingers will hatch very soon. If and when they do, it will be a challenge getting them to eat. I’ve never tried it myself, and cephalopods are known to be difficult to rear in captivity. But I’m willing to give it a shot!