Rare squid found

02 Aug, 2023

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AUT’s resident squid expert Kat Bolstad appeared on RNZ Nights last week to talk about the Squid Squad.

“Squid Squad is a group of researchers working out of Auckland University of Technology who specialise in understanding biodiversity and the ecology, so the interactions with each other and the ecosystem of the deep-sea squids that live around Aotearoa/New Zealand.”

Although New Zealand is small we happen to have a rich cephalopod community, “It turns out this is a really great place to study them because of the really wide range of habitats we have from the far north to the far south of Aotearoa plus from surface waters all the way down to great depths like the Kermadec trench.

“We’ve just come back from an event we call Squid Christmas and I must say I was looking through my photos again and getting giddy all over again because we had a really great Squid Christmas this time. What we do is we go and help NIWA and the museum of Te Papa Tongarewa clear out any accumulated cephalopod boxes in their freezer that have come in from fishery surveys or scientific observers and so we know that there’s gonna be cool stuff in there but we never know in advance exactly what it is and so often we find that some things have been saved are particularly rare or exciting.

^{Various cephalopods being examined}

“We try to do it at least once a year. NIWA goes out and does these regular surveys and they’re the ones who tend to accumulate sort of large quantities of Squidmas presents for us and then every once in a while when we’re down there we also check in with Te Papa and they’ve got things stored up in the freezer from fisheries observers as well so a great Squid Christmas would be working at both of those institutions and just helping them clear out whatever’s accumulated since the last time we were there. We try to do it once a year and on a really good year we might get to go two or three times.

“We photograph everything, and for beautiful specimens that are going to become part of the Te Papa or the NIWA collections we’ll usually take a very small piece of muscle tissue and store that in ethanol or alcohol so that we can do DNA work on it but we’ll save the rest of the specimen pretty much intact so that it becomes a nice voucher that is part of that collection and that we and other scientists can visit and again later and that other scientists can study in good condition. And for things that we might have lots of in collections already but they’re not as rare or they’re not in as good condition then we would take a lot of samples for projects we have going such as ‘what microbes are living on and in association with the squid?’ or ‘what is the anatomy of the eye?’ or we’ll check the stomach contents and see what it’s been eating because that’s one of the ways we can get insight into what their role is within their eco system. Those are all projects that we’re working on right now with various members of the squid squad.”