![]() The outside feels like a quaint waterfront park, complete with benches, a fire pit and a nearly complete view of the crescent-shaped Monterey Bay. Gilly’s lab at the Hopkins Marine Station rests barely out of the shadow of the Monterey Bay Aquarium. So expansive is the ocean that we’d never know the squid were there. “Open ocean is a tough, expensive place to work.” It could be, Gilly said, that the squid were here all along, we just didn’t see them because they maintained a small presence lingering off the continental shelf. It’s hard to say why they invaded back then, because there’s little El Niño information that far back, Gilly said. “As far as I know that was the biggest appearance in the Monterey area,” Gilly said. The fishermen couldn’t catch their salmon and rockfish because the squid were attacking their catches on the line. For a few years in the 1930s, the invasion was so large that fisherman in Monterey Bay wanted the state to declare a bounty on the squid. There have been pulses of Humboldt squid invading California waters since the late 1800s. The squid react in a certain way, but that doesn’t allow you to predict where they’ll end up two years later.” “We learned some lessons from the ‘ El Niños. “El Niño seems to be a wildcard in their ecology and it sort of resets them,” he said. It’s possible, Gilly said, the anomaly helped the squid move north starting in the ‘90s. Humboldt squid appearances seemed to coincide with El Niño and La Niña events. During that time, researchers were wondering out loud if this time the change was permanent. In 2002, the Humboldt squid returned, and stayed for an unprecedented eight years. Then they stopped.įor four years, MBARI saw no Humboldt squid on its monthly ROV dives. The next year, as the El Niño event continued, squid sightings spiked. From San Diego to Monterey, and as far north as Alaska, fishermen were catching Humboldt squid by the ton. Or rather, researchers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute detected the first of what would become a squid invasion in the California Current System. That was an El Niño year, which over the following winter drenched the Pacific coast with rain and importantly, warmed the surface temperature of the ocean. In 1997, California’s ecosystem was different from usual. “They’re like a roaming gang of bad guys.” “I think the squid are always searching for something to take advantage of,” he said. They even take advantage of each other: When one squid is sick or injured, Gilly said, others will eat it. They’re opportunistic predators, capable of taking over any niche or displacing any species that’s compromised. It’s either that or starve.Īs a species, Dosidicus gigas is profoundly adaptable. They follow a path of least resistance, chasing the food and thriving where their predators and competitors can’t survive. Close enough for researchers to spot them.īut new research from the Gilly lab shows that when the conditions shift against them, the Humboldt squid tend to pack up and hit the ocean currents, and ride to new territory. In the fall, they return back south, but this time closer to shore. The squid spawn in the waters of Mexico and Baja California in the winter, then migrate north in the spring and summer, up to Washington and sometimes as far as Alaska. They spend most of their time in the deep ocean, where there’s not much oxygen and about as much light as a moonless night. A pair of Humboldt squid hunt in Monterey Bay. They take their name from the Humboldt Current, which stretches from the southern tip of South America to northern Peru. Jumbo squid ( Dosidicus gigas), also called Humboldt squid, are most common in the warm waters of Baja California and South America. ![]() Each time, as he ran across the shells with the thrashing, slippery cephalopod in his arms, a new chance to wonder: what were they doing here? Each time, he and lab assistants would rush out to gather the wayward squid and bring them back into the lab. Monterey Bay isn’t normally jumbo territory, and these ones were smaller than the 30-pounders Gilly has netted and tagged in the ocean.įor weeks, wave after wave of mini-jumbo squid made land on Gilly’s back porch. It was a moment of divine luck and deep mystery for Gilly, who has studied the squid for 30 years. One day in 2012, hundreds of jumbo squid landed, circling around in the clear water and washing ashore on sand. Stanford biologist William Gilly surveys the beach and recalls the time something weird happened here. Harbor seals laze on the rocks above, and a floating wary duck eyes the weekend visitors to the Hopkins Marine Station. N a pristine day in Monterey Bay, clear waves roll over a beach speckled with shells.
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