Jumbo Squid Scare Californians But Aren't Man-Eaters

www.livescience.com...


This phenomenon has been happening during the month of July, there is no real explaination, some are offered such as global warming, lack of food due to global warming, also lack of humboldt predators.

Scuba diving at night in the surface waters of the Gulf of California in 2007, Seibel scanned the depths with his flashlight and saw the shadows of Humboldt squid far in the distance.

Freaky! Whatever is sending them to the shores of Cali, they apparently don't want to go back out! The article is pointing out that they are not nam eaters, but they don't exactly say they are perfectly safe either.

Seibel was surprised by the large number of squid he encountered, which made it easy to imagine how they could be potentially dangerous to anything swimming with them. Their large numbers also made Seibel somewhat pleased that they appeared frightened of his dive light. Yet he said the animals were also curious about other lights, like reflections off his metal equipment or a glow-in-the-dark tool that one squid briefly attacked.

If they are in great numbers, one would think they could easily overtake a man or other animal. I am interested now in knowing how they protect themselves against predators.

Humboldt squid feed in surface waters at night, then retreat to great depths during daylight hours. "They spend the day 300 meters [nearly 1,000 feet] deep where oxygen levels are very low," Seibel said. "We wanted to know how they deal with so little oxygen."

This statement makes me wonder, what if they are not running from something, but rather running TO SOMETHING. What if the more shallow water now has less oxygen? Inticing them to areas that previously had abundant oxygen
And what could cause the water to have less oxygen?

The fact they are still washing up, and are apparently living there by the hundreds, IMO warrants some big time, real quick, research!

[edit on 27-7-2009 by space cadet]

Well I be. I just did a little more searching and found this article:

Jumbo Squid Following Low-Oxygen Zone

Link: www-csgc.ucsd.edu...

You can think of jumbo squid as one of the early winners of ocean climate change, Gilly said.

So I was right, they are flocking to get into the lower oxygen areas, and I was right that those areas are in new places. So far, the only thing I see that is being considered to be causing it, it global warming. This article is from jan 2008. Why aren't they just going ahead and calling it what it is if they already knew this was happening?

I also note that in the article dated jan 2008, they say that they were positive they had found eggs from a female humboldt off shore Cali, and were sure that a female had mated. The first sign was in Jan 2008, and now hundreds are there! A lot of people attributed them to the recent earthquakes offshore Cali. Looks like the plot is thicker than that.

Less oxygen could be the warming of the oceans, the seaweeds and plankton releases co2 when it dies.
(not the cars, not the cars.)

This isnt the first squid on land either, there was one about 2-3 weeks ago.

Whales, squids, dolphines all go on land, and some ats'rs say there is nothing going on !? Makes me wonder bigtime.. Some one is telling wrong stories what should be normal, quakes increasing, record low cold temps, and new type of clouds... Come on . drop the 'this nothing new' preaching already..

W and W, dont reply , you only talk untruth ...

reply to post by ChemBreather

Yeah the second article I posted here states that they were starting to breed in 2008, but they hadn't actually be seeing them, they only recently moved up closer to shore, and unfortunately are washing up onto the beaches.

Wonder what food chain this will interupt, what eats the Humboldt?

Squids are very intelligent creatures.

Dolphins and whales beach due to active sonar.