Squid!

Sue was coming back from taking a shower in the boatyard shop building the other evening when she heard a loud squawk. She looked up to see a large gull (a great black-backed) hassling an osprey that was carrying food back to its nest. Great black-backeds, like many gulls, are incorrigible food stealers and will harass pelicans, other gulls, seabirds, and raptors into giving up their precious fish or gooey shellfish treats.

Common or Longfin Squid

Sure enough, this particular osprey let go its dinner, which dropped about fifty feet, bounced off a carport roof, and splatted down in the gravel yard. Sue wandered over, towel and toiletries in hand, curious to see what kind of fish might be found in these parts. Not a fish! In the gravel was a 10-inch purplish, translucent squid, with 2- to 3-inch arms and a pair of squat, triangular fins near the tail. A large silvery eye looked up at Sue. She called to Curtis to come see, and Mikey (the boatyard owner) came over too.

Mikey lifted the squid gently, and we all took a closer look (and feel). The underside of the tentacles felt sharply rough like a rasp. A small, dark-colored beak was hidden among them. One tentacle still flexed weakly, but the creature was missing an eye, and there were tatters of skin hanging from its body where the osprey's talons had pierced it. Purple ink dripped from its arms.

According to Wikipedia, squid have two true tentacles (bearing barbed suckers), along with eight other arms. They move by means of jet propulsion, drawing water in through a siphon and expelling it forcefully to "shoot" themselves in the opposite direction. Squid evolved from mollusks and at some point lost their protective shells, although a remnant of the shell persists in the form of the "pen," an internal piece of chitin that functions like a backbone. When threatened, squid release a cloud of dark ink to confuse predators. Their skin is covered with chromatophores that let them change color quickly to match their surroundings. Their eyes are very sophisticated and function similarly to those of humans, except that they move their lenses forward and backward to focus the image rather than reshaping the lenses as we do.

Longfin Squid (Loligo pealeii); photo by Roger Hanlon,
Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, MA

Mikey said a local fisherman told him that squid will glide like stealth torpedoes beneath a school of small fish and periodically -- and sometimes in formation -- explode upward with lightning speed, grab a fish, and then sink back down to devour it in the murky depths. He carried our damaged creature down to the shore at the launch ramp and tried to revive it, holding his fingertip against the beak and sliding the animal back and forth in the shallows, but it was too far gone. "Dinner for someone else," said Mikey as he pushed it gently toward deeper water.