[Featured]: Announcing 'Squidmas' 2023 (July 3-5)

[Tintenfisch]

Heyooooo TONMO, it's been a while (kids/COVID/teaching... life) but ALCES / AUT Squid Squad are still here, and we're heading to Wellington NZ next week for Squidmas! It's our annual(ish) event where we visit NIWA and Te Papa to help them process cephalopod specimens that have accumulated in their freezer from research voyages and scientific observers on commercial vessels. We'll also be taking samples for various deep-sea ceph research PhD projects such as retinal anatomy (Ryan), squid microbiome (Marina) and trophic ecology (Sam), as well tissue snips and samples for our ongoing biodiversity work. We'll be live Tweeting, and hopefully doing some outreach in collaboration with Dr Thom Linley (co-host of the Deep-sea Podcast and new fish curator at Te Papa), and will also try to post some roundups here. Hope you can join us!

 

[Tintenfisch]

Day 1 was quite productive! We sorted and identified about 60 squids, ranging in size from a few centimeters to about 1.5 m. Most of the pics are over on Twitter but here are a few highlights

Giant squid beak:

Large 'jeweled' squid, Histioteuthis miranda:

Chiroteuthis head (left) and 'googly eyed glass squid', Teuthowenia pellucida (right)

 

[tonmo]

that beak! those specimens!