Thursday's Thirteen: Squid facts

I’ve been watching shows about squids on Netflix so I decided to do--Thirteen facts about Squids.

 1. Squid have gills just like fish. They are often mistaken for octopus. While they two are similar they are different types of creatures.

2. They also move through the water tail first instead of head first.

3. A squid is able to swim by sucking water into the mantle cavity. Then they remove it through the siphon. This process continues all day long, even when they are sleeping.

4. The Colossal Squid is the largest invertebrate in the world. The smallest is the sepiolid squid. It is less than one inch long and weighs less than a quarter of an ounce.

5. The only predators that giant squid have are sperm whales.

6. More than $100,000 was paid in 2005 by an aquarium in Australia for a block of ice that held the preserved body of a giant squid in it.

7. Squids have the biggest eyes of any creature in the water. About the size of a baseball.

8. The Humboldt squid is very aggressive and will even attack sharks in the water. A few years ago they attacked some fishermen that had fallen out of the boat on the sea of Cortez (Baja California) and killed them.

 9. Most of the time squid are loners in the waters. However, there have been small groups of them identified. This can be due to many young being born in one location. When food sources are scarce or predators are a huge danger though they seem to group together in order to hunt easier and to stay alive. (Like the Humboldt which it the most dangerous of all squids.)

10. Every squid has three hearts and three gills that are positioned under their mantle.

11. Squids have a donut shaped brain.

12. The squids feeding tube goes right through the middle of the donut hole of the brain.

13. If they eat too big of a bite of food, they can suffer from brain damage. I thought this was so funny when I first heard it. “Now don’t eat so big a bite, dear. You don’t want to get brain damage.”