Squid with lasers

Squid resting near the laser setup (photo by K Katija).

We have collected data for three squid projects in order to maximize our efficiency here. They include the squid hearing tests, squid-tag development, and measuring squid swimming abilities and efficiency. This third project is led by Kakani Katija, a Postdoctoral Investigator at WHOI. Kakani is gathering high-speed video and infrared light images to record squid swimming and jetting for kinematic and swimming behavior studies. She's also using a laser and high speed camera (a technique called digital particle image velocimetry) to describe the precise wakes and vortices that a swimming squid creates. This allows us to determine how efficient or proficient a large swimming squid may be. Such data informs technical designs of underwater vehicles. This data also provides clues about how the squid may find food or avoid predators because the wake they create while swimming can be detected by their predators or prey.

Tag

Hearing test on a BIG squid.

Another busy day. We caught four animals yesterday, despite rough water. By we, I mean fisherman Norberto and Isauro. We had a second boat relay the squid to shore. One was a big animal (about 1 m length, probably a male) and 3 smaller females.  We're guessing at the sex right now; we don't really know that until we dissect the animals.

Back in the lab, another two hearing tests, some excellent video of swimming behavior and two test tag deployments. These beta-squid tags gather temperature, pressure and acceleration of the animal. But for now, we're only deploying them in the lab to make sure our attachment mechanisms and procedures work well, that we're not very invasive with the tags, and the animal behaves healthy and normally afterward.

Same squid tagged later that day. Note the tag on the tip of the animal.