![]() ![]() "It has given us a real peek into the deep dark world of these squids." But, in some of these observations, they saw the squid flattening its fins and moving along horizontal to the bottom, with the filaments trailing behind horizontally instead of dangling downward," Vecchione says. "Usually when we see them, they’re floating vertically in the water column and there’s long filaments - the spaghetti-like pieces are dangling downward. The researchers observed some fascinating behaviors of the bigfin squid, specifically, the coiling of the cephalopod's thin filament-like tendrils, and the outward spreading of its tentacles (referred to in the paper as the 'elbow pose').Īlthough researchers have seen this behavior in other studies of the Bigfin Squid, the squids in Australia exhibited some unusual variations on the poses. The distribution of Bigfin Squid in the Great Australian Bight. "Hopefully future sightings will help us solve this mystery - we can see, for instance, whether they are found in similar habitat." "We are not sure why they are clustered so, but this is often associated with specific environmental needs and/or increased reproductive opportunities," Osterhage says. But it's possible that they gathered off the Australian coast for feeding or mating purposes. The answer to that question will need to wait - this is the first such sighting, and more work will need to be done to get a handle on what, exactly, the squid are doing together. So that raises a bunch of interesting questions of why are there so many of them there?" He tells Inverse. "I’m not aware of any of them where people encountered multiple individuals of this kind of squid fairly close together. Vecchione and his colleagues have described a handful of fleeting encounters with this type of squid over the last three decades. ![]() Michael Vecchione, a senior scientist at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and curator of cephalopods at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, agrees. ![]()
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