A cute, luminescent, goulish squid
A few years ago my dad was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences and took me as his date for the ceremony. It was a slightly awkward time for me to be surrounded by a bunch of successful scientists, who tend to be concrete thinkers with an appreciation for professional achievements—I had recently left my job in St. Louis, of my own accord, I kept reminding myself, to move back to the East Coast but I had yet to find another job, or even a place to live. “So what do you do?” the scientists would ask me during the numerous meet-and-greet cocktail hours. “Well, I’ve been working as a journalist but right now I’m in the middle of…”
“So you’re unemployed,” they would say, cutting me off. “But where are you living?”
“I’ve actually been going between Boston and New York,” I would start, only to realize that they were already giving my father a commiserating look and starting in on a conversation about the sociological underpinnings of generational change. He didn’t seem to mind my in-between state, though, and I was so proud of him I didn’t really mind either.
There was the awards ceremony to attend, and a black tie dinner, for which I bought a very pretty dress I have not had an occasion to wear since, but beyond that the days were filled with scientific talks, some of which I attended, and some of which I avoided to take naps.
Many of the talks went over my head, but my favorite one, which I could at least somewhat follow, was about the symbiotic relationship between the Hawaiian bobtail squid and a type of bioluminescent bacteria. The gist of things is that during the day the squid contains the bacteria between flaps on its underside, and the bacteria shines down on the sea floor and keeps the squid from having a shadow, which helps it avoid predators. The bacteria only becomes bioluminescent when it reaches a critical mass, though (which is also cool, because it means the cells must have some way to communicate with each other), so around dusk the squid opens its flaps, releases most of the bacteria, and the remaining bacteria cells go dark. The bacteria then spend the night reproducing like mad, as bacteria do, and by the morning, just as the squid is ready to start swimming around again, eating whatever squid eat and trying to avoid more predators, the bacteria reaches its critical mass, lights up again and erases the squid’s shadow.
This is crazy, right? I believe in evolution, obviously, but it is a hard to understand how something so complex could develop without at least a little bit of outside guidance.
Also, here are some pictures of the squid. Here it is looking cute:
Here it is being luminescent:
And here it is being ghoulish:
