![]() ![]() The footage confirmed that squid’s pigmentation patterns do seem to relate to specific contexts. They also paid attention to how these behaviors changed depending on the number of other squid in the immediate area – after all, people communicate differently if they are speaking with friends versus a large audience. Using the ROV footage, the researchers analyzed how individual squid behaved when they were feeding versus when they were not. Instead, they found supporting evidence for it in their anatomical studies of captured squid. While the ROVs could record the squid’s skin patterning, the lights the cameras required were too bright to record their subtle glow, so the researchers couldn’t test their backlighting hypothesis directly. For this research, Bruce Robison of MBARI, who is senior author of the paper, captured footage of Humboldt squid off the coast of California using remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), or unmanned, robotic submarines. Humboldt squid behavior is nearly impossible to study in captivity, so researchers must meet them where they live. “Maybe they need this ability to glow and display these pigmentation patterns to facilitate group behaviors in order to survive out there.”Ī Humboldt squid shows its colors in the lights of a remotely operated vehicle 300 meters below the surface of Monterey Bay. (Image credit: © 2010 MBARI) Seeing the deep sea “Many squid live in fairly shallow water and don’t have these light-producing organs, so it’s possible this is a key evolutionary innovation for being able to inhabit the open ocean,” said Benjamin Burford, a graduate student in biology in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford and lead author of the paper. The research is published March 23 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The creatures may be using these changing patterns to signal one another. ![]() Like the illuminated words on an e-book reader, these researchers suggest that the squid’s ability to subtly glow – using light-producing organs in their muscles – can create a backlight for shifting pigmentation patterns on their skin. The answer, according to researchers from Stanford University and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) may be visual communication. How do they establish such order in the near-darkness of the ocean’s twilight zone? Zipping past each other, the predators move with exceptional precision, never colliding or competing for prey. In the frigid waters 1,500 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, hundreds of human-sized Humboldt squid feed on a patch of finger-length lantern fish. ![]()
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