Thawing Jumbo Squid for Research

So far I have found that they had Pacific herring, Pacific sardines, white bate smelt, and dungeness crabs in their bellies. I don't know any more about parasites than what it says in my invert textbook, but we have a PhD student who's working on parasites who's going to come and visit for a couple of weeks to check them out. I sent him some picutres and he said there are some trematodes. The most interesting thing found in the stomach was kelp (I found this in maybe half the stomachs), one had a feather, and many of them have nurdles (small plastic beads, I find this particularily upsetting). I still haven't barcoded the stomach contents from the second stranding, but I will do that early next week and hopefully have additional results in a couple of weeks. I will be doing stable isotope analysis, and I'll let you all know if I find anything interstind with that.

I am so excited about my project! Squids are the best (especially when specimens decide to wash up on the beach exactly when you need something to work on)!
 
Ethanol Please Heather! I'll PM my addy, can you pm yours? I'll send you a sloanii beak and maybe a gouldi one if I can find on in ETOH but my Moroteuthis ones are all dried, I'll pop one in anyway! What sort of paras?????

Cheers

J
 
Heather Braid;149012 said:
..... many of them have nurdles (small plastic beads....). Squids are the best (especially when specimens decide to wash up on the beach exactly when you need something to work on)!

Nurdles? Plastic beads?? Bizarre! We did find a thread of plastic in the stomach of one giant squid, but squid eating plastic beads? I wonder whether this is some form of secondary ingestion - as in the prey have eaten them - because I cannot imagine a squid attacking a plastic bead (wrong shape, size). The algae could be because of the beach-cast nature of these specimens also (also recorded from the stomach's of stranded Architeuthis, but not in situ captured specimens). You want to check out our paper on gut contents of Architeuthis, as we talk about this therein.

Indeed, convenient timing for you, but I am sure there would have been many other projects you could have worked on with cephalopods as an alternative. Really, we do know so very little.
Congrats!
 
Heather introduced me to this forum (thanks, H) and I couldn't resist commenting. I'm the Humboldt squid collecting biologist in Tofino.

Ob: There were parasites in the stomachs - white flatworms (I'll see if I can find a photo). Every single stomach I looked at (probably 75 over the course of the season) had them. I sent one squid to the parasitology lab at DFO's Pacific Biological Station (Jon Richards, who could put you in touch with the parasitologist who looked at them - not sure of that person's name).

Steve O'Shea: Agreed that it's likely the squid ate something that already had eaten the nurdles (and fishing line perhaps - although there were multiple reports of squid attacking and mangling salmon trawl and jig gear). One squid stomach contain so many pieces of a bull klpe (Nereocystis) bulb which could have been either preyed on while the kelp was intact and attached ot the sealoor (with bulb at surface) or, given where I collected the squid, it could have been eating/attacking a detached plant as it sloshed around in the intertidal along with the squid. Heather also found a feather in a stomach - which is also consistent with how I found that squid, sloshing around with a mixture of wood, kelp, and probably styrofoam if I looked closely.

I am very curious as to whether they will come back this summer!
 
:welcome: to TONMO, I hope you'll continue to not resist commenting!
 

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