The Telegraph's first
picture of the day is a terrifying action shot of a huge dolphin's toothy maw, about to chomp down on a sweet little red squid.
Go look at it! Right now! But it's not my fault if you get nightmares.
Dolphins are so scary.
(As this picture was shot in the Bahamas, the squid is most likely a
Caribbean Reef Squid.)
If you want to know basic things about animals, like who eats whom, you might guess that your days would consist of watching real-life nature documentaries. You might expect to go out into the savannah or into the depths of the sea to observe predators hunting and devouring their prey.
Actually, it takes a lot of sitting still and watching to see even a single predation event. It turns out you can get a lot more data a lot more quickly by looking at predator vomit and feces. Oh, the glamour of science!
When it comes to squid, the remmants they leave in their predators' guts or scat are usually beaks. These hard, chitinous structures last a lot longer than the muscle that makes up the rest of the squid.
Baby squid are the cutest, right? I mean, right?
Back in August, an iPhone game called simply "Squids"
charmed me with its adorable, somewhat-anatomically-plausible rendition of my favorite animal. Luckily for my productivity, however, I don't have an iPhone--I have a
Nexus One.
To no one's surprise, environmentalists and industry lobbyists are butting heads in a major legal wrangle over California's "wetfish"--sardines, anchovies, mackerel, and market squid. As you may recall, the pretty little market squid is the state's single biggest fishery:
Opalescent inshore squid by Joshua Sera
Bloomberg calls it "
South Pacific's Cruelest Catch":
Yusril says the officers hit him in the face with fish and the boatswain repeatedly kicked him in the back for using gloves when he was sewing the trawl nets in cold weather. Most unnervingly, the second officer would crawl into the bunk of Yusril’s friend at night and attempt to rape him.
The abuse is horrible and wrong, no matter what kind of fish they're catching or where it's ending up, but the reason this particular story caught my eye is--
An Open Letter To Squid
With This Devoted Squid Mama, I Bid Farewell
ICAD 2012: Top Ten Cephalopod Stories From The Last Year
Scavenging Cephalopods: Mild-Mannered Vampire Squid Just Want To Eat Waste
