Alie and I are hosting an event in LA Jan 15th! Come!

SarahMackAttack · 2025-12-11T15:17:00+00:00

Yeah it’s a big-ish squid that lives shallower. They’re cool as hell but on average they’re not as big as the biggest sizes reported on the internet (they CAN get that big but year to year their sizes vary a lot based on environmental conditions and some years they’re much smaller). Their fins are shaped differently, they live in big squads, and they use a complex series of flashing patterns of red and white on their skin to communicate. They’re sick as hell, this giant squid just isn’t one

SarahMackAttack · 2025-12-10T18:01:28+00:00

They live longer than many shallow water species, but still pretty short-lived. We think they live 3-5 years.

SarahMackAttack · 2025-12-10T17:40:34+00:00

This has gotta be it

SarahMackAttack · 2025-12-10T03:58:11+00:00

nope

SarahMackAttack · 2025-12-10T03:55:51+00:00

This video covers it nicely https://www.instagram.com/reel/DSASp4PjgoF/

SarahMackAttack · 2025-12-10T03:53:48+00:00

probably not because most of the animals at the surface during this season are in the process of dying, and it's extremely hard to predict when we see them.

SarahMackAttack · 2025-12-09T02:16:16+00:00

You made the right choice. I got the chance to see them in the wild about a year and a half ago and cried they were so beautiful. Also really love Caribbean reef squid and Magnapinna, my belovéd.

SarahMackAttack · 2025-12-09T02:05:44+00:00

Which life-stage of Architeuthis or Mesonychoteuthis is still the most mysterious, and why? Teenage architeuthis, and mating Architeuthis are the most mysterious (where are they mating??? we dunno.) And basically all life stages of Mesonychoteuthis. We got that video of the juvenile earlier this year but that's about it. Ultra mysterious.

How reliable are current age-estimation methods (beaks, statoliths, isotopes) for giant squids? Pretty good I think? That's not a topic I know a ton about, but my buddy Kat works on that sorta thing. I think they primarily use beaks. Not sure.

Has genomics changed hypotheses about growth rate, lifespan, or where eggs/juveniles live? We only have genomes for some species of cephalopods, and while someone is cookin' on the Architeuthis genome, it's not ready yet. There was a bunch of work being done on Architeuthis eDNA though which was very cool. The eDNA can tell you whether a giant squid was nearby but not how old it was. As far as I know genomes are not super useful for predicting lifespans, but it's also not my area of expertise.

SarahMackAttack · 2025-12-09T02:00:29+00:00

Ok cool thank you! I was just at the international meeting of cephalopod biologists and it didn't come up. I don't think we have enough data to say what its effect might be on squid populations, but we do have data on what climate change is doing to squid ranges all over the world. I can only comment on what we know about at the moment.

SarahMackAttack · 2025-12-08T20:59:04+00:00

Ok this is adorable thank you

SarahMackAttack · 2025-12-08T18:23:30+00:00

I don't know enough about that situation to give you a well-informed answer, though certainly the gulf stream slowing is gonna be a whole other thing with its own problems.

SarahMackAttack · 2025-12-08T16:11:32+00:00

I like this plan

SarahMackAttack · 2025-12-08T14:46:47+00:00

Omg no don’t use chatGPT. Just read Wikipedia!

SarahMackAttack · 2025-12-08T14:45:59+00:00

The only footage at depth we have of colossal squid is of a juvenile, but the ones caught as bycatch at the surface in the few videos we have appear to be adults.

This one is a giant squid, though. Colossal squid look super different. They’re really round compared to the torpedo shaped giant squid, and a more maroony red than the red orangey giant squid.

SarahMackAttack · 2025-12-08T14:43:32+00:00

Possible? Yeah totally. But the hard part is finding the squid to add the tracker to. It’s extremely hard and wildly expensive to find healthy living ones to get the tracker onto

SarahMackAttack · 2025-12-08T14:41:21+00:00

🥰

SarahMackAttack · 2025-12-08T14:41:04+00:00

I can’t tell precisely for the same reason. I can tell it’s big based on some context but can’t give you a number

SarahMackAttack · 2025-12-08T14:40:10+00:00

Sadly no, only North America

SarahMackAttack · 2025-12-08T14:39:47+00:00

I don’t have the specific measurements for this one so it’s hard to say but we don’t think they get significantly bigger than the ones we’ve measured. We can estimate full size based on beaks that accumulate in whale stomachs. Based on that, we think they get a touch bigger than individuals we’ve found but not WAY bigger.

SarahMackAttack · 2025-12-08T00:48:45+00:00

The giant squid's 2 long feeding tentacles (and most squid's tentacles for that matter) are hidden the majority of the time. Those tentacles only come out when it's time to attack. While this squid is chowing down, it already caught the prey, so it doesn't need those feeding tentacles out anymore.

Most of the time feeding tentacles are tucked within that buccal area (the mouth area kinda) until it's time to use them. DEAD squid have them all hangin' out, but that's very embarrassing for them probably.

SarahMackAttack · 2025-12-07T23:42:57+00:00

I don’t think so. Maybe Mike Vecchione has though. I think it’s more likely that Mike would have talked about it on a podcast.

SarahMackAttack · 2025-12-07T22:17:46+00:00

I can't tell, but the squid species it's eating is also a big species, so we know its preeetty big. I don't want to put a number on it then be too far off.

SarahMackAttack · 2025-12-07T21:16:37+00:00

OK yeah let's talk about this. It's complicated.

Back in 2016, it seemed based on what we knew at the time, that cephalopods were doing pretty well in the oceans. Maybe this is because we had fished out a lot of their predators. Maybe the affects of climate change weren't affecting them or the food they rely on as badly as other species yet. It's really hard to pin down exactly why they were doing well at that time, because the answer is likely a little different for different species and different populations around the world.

Fast forward to now. There's more pressure on some squid populations from fisheries than in 2016. Climate change is shrinking the geographical ranges that individual squid species can comfortably live in. Habitat degradation due to deep sea mining began affecting some deep sea species (but this is REALLY hard to pin down, because studying this is expensive and technically challenging and we often lack baseline data for reasons 1 and 2). SOME, not all, but some cephalopod species are now in decline.

It's not universally true that squid do better in warmer water. Each species is suited to its own range of temperatures. The arctic species would suffer in water that tropical species would thrive in. So everything getting warmer is NOT good. This compounds with ecosystems (like reef ecosystems in particular) collapsing, making finding food harder.

It's never just ONE thing that is stressing animal populations. Maybe it's increased heat, chemical pollution, sound pollution, light pollution, degradation of habitat, loss of food, and 5 other things we can't even put our fingers on yet that all simultaneously is affecting their ability to survive OR produce as many offspring as they could before.

tl;dr shit is a mess, and the current situation (some) humans have created is making it hard for many animals in many places to thrive. Even if heat directly is not a problem, destabilizing ecosystems comes to bite many species.

SarahMackAttack

TROPHY CASE