You can donate money to help schoolchildren throughout the year, but if you participate in the ocean blogging community's annual Donor's Choose drive (which ends November 9th) then you get your name thrown in the hat to win some pretty special prizes.

I was hoping to find a gift to add to the list while I was at the Squid Symposium in Mexico, and indeed, it was very nearly dropped into my lap:

I guess there is a new anime called Squid Girl? I guess Squid Girl's goal is to "subdue the human race and prevent them from polluting the ocean"? I can't decide whether or not this sounds like something I would make up, and if it does, I can't decide whether I should be proud or embarassed. In any case, I don't think anyone is learning any biology from Squid Girl.

Here are the answers to yesterday's questions:

1. The two contenders for World's Smallest Baby Cephalopod are ommastrephid squid (the family that includes Humboldt squid) and argonaut octopuses. Both groups have paralarvae that hatch at less than one millimeter!

Fun facts from the second day* of the Fifth International Symposium on Pacific Squids:

1. Which cephalopod has the smallest babies?
2. Mucus is often used for protection, like the stuff in our noses, which collects bacteria and dust that would otherwise be hazardous to our health. When we get rid of the mucus, we get rid of the irritants. What completely opposite purpose can mucus serve?
3. How much can you learn about a squid just by looking at its beak?

Answers to come tomorrow!


* Technically the second day was yesterday, but I wasn't able to get online to post these until this morning. Ah, the vagaries of ISPs . . .

"Male of Dosidicus are gentlesquid."

That was today's last hypothesis. In fact, it was the very last sentence of the last slide of the last talk of the first day of the 5th International Symposium on Pacific Squid. It was announced by the venerable Dr. Chingis Nigmatullin, as an explanation for the fact that 90% of all jigged Humboldt squid (Dosidicus gigas) are females.

Nigmatullin suggested that male Humboldt squid are such caballeros that they always allow the females first bite when food appears. In the case of fishing lures, this leads to the unfortunate and disproportionate demise of the females.

It was hard to tell if he was serious or not.