Learn about our discovery of the first Humboldt squid egg mass. Find out how we create our own squid babies. See what we are learning from it all and what questions we still have. Check out Danna Shulman’s page and The Illustrated Guide to Making Squid Babies

Out of electronic tagging studies came the discovery that Humboldt squid can tolerate very low oxygen environments (10% of surface levels) and not only that, they are thriving! With the range expansion of Humboldt squid in that last 10 years up the US and Canadian coasts, we are now looking at what oceanographic changes the squid are exploiting (movie to the left shows regions of sustained low oxygen [purple] at different depths). See Humboldt Squid

During the last two years, Lou Zeidberg has studied the local market squid, Doryteuthis (formerly Loligo) opalescens, discovering that 90% of eggs hatch nocturnally and that infestation of the egg capsules by an annelid worm, Capitella ovincola, actually improves the hatching rate (see video on the left).

In an effort to learn more about Humboldt squid in California waters, Gilly, technician Ashley Booth and second year graduate student Julie Stewart will be carrying out work with new funding from the California Ocean Protection Council administered through California Sea Grant. This involves collaboration with NOAA scientists in Santa Cruz and with the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which is also interested in developing techniques to display adult Humboldt squid.

Postdoc Charles Hanifin was awarded an individual post-doctoral fellowship from the National Institutes of Health in 2007 to work on sodium channels in--not a squid--not a mollusc--not even an invertebrate--but California newts! His research addresses the molecular mechanisms which confer newt sodium channels with essentially complete resistance to tetrodotoxin, a potent neurotoxin that is present at extremely high concentrations in their skin and eggs. These highly toxic newts are preyed on by garter snakes that have also evolved tetrodotoxin- resistant sodium channels, but not exactly in the same manner. The more toxin newts produce, the more resistant the snakes become– an arms race! Charles is developing this system as a model for co-evolution of traits that have specific, and measurable, costs and benefits.

As a visitor to our lab as a UCLA undergraduate, Julie Stewart published a paper in 2005 which showed for the first time that this species could kill fish. This means that Conus californicus (pictured to the left) is the only species known that can kill and consume prey of the three major types eaten by cone snails: worms, other snails and fish. Finally, research associates Carl Elliger and Zora Lebaric have been cloning and sequencing toxin genes from Conus californicus and have discovered an amazing collection of peptide toxins.

Along these lines, Tess Pierce, an undergraduate with an individual research grant from Stanford, worked in the lab this summer and successfully developed procedures for maintaining Conus venom ducts in tissue culture. This is a first and makes the biology of toxin production accessible to many tools of cell and molecular biology. See Venomous Cone Snails

A dead Architeuthis sp. was found off the coast of Santa Cruz June 25 2008 by crew of the Pelagic Shark Research Foundation. Our lab in conjunction with NOAA Fisheries, University of California Santa Cruz, and the California Academy of Sciences have taken samples and will be conducting research on this rare find. See The Gilly Lab in the News