![]() “It’s an indication that looking at the entire Pacific Ocean, things are out of whack,” said Zeidberg. Similarly, some smaller species of tuna, which compete with squid for food, also have been reduced. Instead, they suspect that the squid’s range has expanded because fishing has reduced the populations of predators such as large tuna, marlins and swordfish that eat them in their natural range off South America. But after that, the squid, which live to be only one or two years old, were seen on almost every dive.īecause the squid dive as deep as 3,000 feet and have been filmed hunting krill, lanternfishes, hake and other animals in a wide temperature range from 37 degrees in Monterey Bay to 90 degrees in Mexico’s Sea of Cortez, Robison and Zeidberg say they don’t think global warming or other temperature changes are driving the expansion. There were only one or two a year spotted until 2002, another mild El Niño year. Then, during an El Niño year – when Pacific waters warm and currents change – they noticed some, but the animals disappeared. They didn’t see any Humboldt squid until 1997. The duo reviewed video footage that Robison and other researchers shot around Monterey Bay from more than 3,000 dives with unmanned submersibles back to 1991. They published their findings this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a prominent scientific journal. Zeidberg and Robison concluded that the Humboldt squid have become a permanent presence in Monterey Bay since about 2002. “I’ve seen big heavy construction workers after catching two or three look like they’ve been worked over by a prize fighter.” “They fight so much, they are a real bear to pull in,” he added. “Nobody here has ever caught anything like this. They are very strange looking,” he said with a chuckle. “This is like the creature from the black lagoon. Tom Mattusch, of El Granada, runs recreational fishing trips on his 53-foot charter boat, the Huli Cat, based in Half Moon Bay. “We’ve yet to see how that is going to play out, but it could change things.” ![]() “When it moves into an area, it can potentially have drastic impacts,” said Louis Zeidberg, a post-doctoral researcher at Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove. And it has drawn wary attention from fisheries biologists, who are concerned that the voracious invertebrates could deplete commercial fisheries like hake, known as Pacific whiting, a common ingredient in frozen fish sticks, or rockfish, which are sold in restaurants as “red snapper.” It has piqued the curiosity of some chefs, who say they can be cooked like calamari. The invasion has sparked the interest of recreational fishermen, who fight to land them like marlins. “These are aggressive, pugnacious bullies, said Bruce Robison, senior scientist at MBARI, based in Moss Landing. Now they appear to have taken up residence in Monterey Bay, according to a study released today by researchers from Stanford University and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) compiled with more than 16 years of underwater video. For reasons that still aren’t entirely clear, large numbers of the scrappy cephalopods have been steadily expanding their range north, first off San Diego and Los Angeles, where hundreds have washed up on beaches in recent years.
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