MBFE - Day 22 - Baby Squid!

Things continue to go well with the MBFE.  The students have jelled well as a group and as far as I can tell there haven't been any significant conflicts or issues.  Maybe I just got lucky with the mix of participants.  Then again, there is something soothing, healing, and a little like coming home when we visit the sea.  Being able to sit and watch the waves roll in and see the tides rise and fall tends to calm us and our souls.

OK, the big happening today was that someone  took time to look at a mass of squid eggs that we've had in culture in the lab since April 25th, and they saw baby squid swimming around!

Where did the egg masses come from?

During our down time, on Saturday afternoon April 25th I went to Lighthouse Beach just to poke around.  At the south end of that beach is a rock wall and some rock pools.  I noticed something very odd on those rocks.  There were oblong, translucent, gelatinous masses all over the place.

I thought at first that they might be squid egg masses, but there were so many of them that this would have been extremely strange.

I picked up a clump of them that had been attached to some sea grass but somehow washed up on shore.  Yep, they were squid eggs all right!  I didn't have anything with me to put them in so I just slipped them into my jacket pocket and walked on.

I walked on and looked down at a large tide pool and saw that it was FULL of egg masses!  They were not only here but also all over floating in the water and all over the rocks.  This represents MASSIVE reproductive failure by these squid.  I talked to faculty at OIMB where we are based and they'd never seen anything like it either.

The egg mass I collected was soon put into a beaker in the lab and everyone took a look at them. Squid embryos take weeks to hatch, so there was no guarantee that we'd see anything.  After a week or so of checking we all forgot about them...well, I did change the water once in a while and plopped an aeration stone in it.

Two and half weeks later someone took a look and there were baby squid jetting around in the beaker!

Did you know that you can take quite nice photomicrographs with a cell phone camera?  Just line the lens up with an eye piece and snap away.  Here's what those babies look like:

There were, I have to say it, squeals of delight from some students, and everyone anxiously took a good long look.  

It was super-cool!  If you looked at one long enough you could see its chromatophores (the brownish spots) dilating and contracting, you could see the hearts beating inside the mantle, and the mantle muscles contracting as it tried to jet around.

Now that's not something you see every day!  Welcome to MBFE - you never know what you'll see next.