Why the Entire Ocean Is Terrified of the Humboldt Squid

In July 2009, thousands of five-foot squid came up into the shallows off San Diego. They grabbed divers' masks and cameras, and one tore the light off a dive-shop manager's gear. Mexican fishermen have a name for this animal: diablo rojo, the red devil. This is why so much of the Pacific has reason to fear the Humboldt squid. It builds a hundred-pound body in about a year. Every sucker on its arms is ringed with teeth. It hunts in glowing packs of up to 1,200 that seem to signal to each other, it often eats its own kind, and it hides by day in water with too little oxygen for tuna and marlin to follow. Since 2002 it has pushed as far north as Alaska. Then comes the twist: the two things the red devil is afraid of, and how it survived by shrinking. Sources: Burford & Robison, PNAS 2020 (bioluminescent backlighting); Zeidberg & Robison, PNAS 2007 (range expansion, Monterey Bay ROV surveys); Gilly, Markaida et al., Stanford/Hopkins Marine Station (tagging, oxygen minimum zone); Alaska Fisheries Science Center 2005 (Sitka records); Jaquet & Gendron et al., Marine Ecology Progress Series 2007 and PeerJ 2024 (sperm whales and jumbo squid, Gulf of California); FAO / Global Fishing Watch (jumbo squid catch); Oceana 2020 (Galápagos fleet); KQED Science 2019 and Bay Nature 2014 (Monterey and Santa Rosalía); AP, ABC and NBC News 2009 (San Diego); LAist 2013 (Orange County). Chapters: 0:00 The squid that grabbed a diver 1:21 Reason 1 · It lives fast 2:30 Reason 2 · The arms 3:53 Reason 3 · It never hunts alone 5:31 Reason 4 · It eats its own 6:36 Reason 5 · It hides where nothing else can breathe 8:03 Reason 6 · It's moving in 10:03 Reason 7 · It isn't afraid of us 11:55 Reason 8 · Almost everything is on the menu 12:57 What the red devil fears 15:25 The red devil shrinks #humboldt #squid #animals