In a corner tank in the Sitka Sound Science Center, there’s a soft creature about the size and shape of a plum. She’s a deep, ruddy purple, and she blasts little puffs of sand when someone gets too close to the tank.
Matt Wilson has worked as the aquarist here for a few years. He manages the care of about 200 species in the aquarium. He says this stubby squid — also known as a dumpling squid, or Rossia pacifica — isn’t really a squid at all.
“With every, you know, group of animals, there’s some weirdos that are out on the fringes,” he said. “They are most closely related to cuttlefish, more than they are squid or octopus. But they are not quite cuttlefish.”
Wilson found the stubby squid by accident. In March, he was walking along the beach next to the Science Center, looking for live crabs to feed to aquarium animals.
“I think she was trying to go after shrimp that were eating the herring eggs right after herring spawn,” he said. “She was only in a couple inches of water when I spotted her.”
Stubby squid usually live in deeper waters and burrow in the sand during the day. Wilson says finding one out in the open like that was a sign she was in bad shape.
“She was a dark purple, which means that all of her color-changing cells had completely relaxed,” he said. “So she probably was almost sort of unconscious at the time, and she could barely move, and she couldn’t burrow in the sand.”
Wilson scooped the stubby squid up in a bucket. Over several days, he adjusted the temperature and salt levels in the tank to better resemble a typical habitat. Wilson said the animal stayed ghost white for two days — a bad sign — but then changed colors and started burrowing again.
“That was our first sign that she probably was going to start to improve, and from there, she has continued to make a full recovery from that, and is now doing all the normal behaviors we’d expect,” he said.
It was a fortuitous outcome – Wilson happens to be one of a handful of aquarium biologists with experience caring for the species. He first worked with them more than a decade ago, learning from guidelines left by the late octopus specialist Roland Anderson. Anderson cared for stubby squid during a three-decade career at the Seattle Aquarium — one of the only public aquariums that displays the species.
“It was about probably four years off and on working with these animals before I really felt like I was getting positive, good interactions with them,” Wilson said.
Kathryn Kegel is a curator at the Seattle Aquarium. She says stubby squid don’t often show up in aquariums because they can be hard to find, don’t live long, and they’re not easy to keep – they’re really picky eaters.
“They hunt small crustaceans, and don’t always like to eat dead food,” she said.
Kegel says reviving an unhealthy stubby squid, like the one Wilson found, can be especially difficult.
For Wilson, keeping the stubby squid alive and happy is a lot of work. He doesn’t often get to watch her hunt, but when he does, it’s quite a show.
“They pop up completely out of the sand, start to basically hover and rise just above the sand and shoot those tentacles out really, really quickly, like just lightning speed, grab that animal, pull them back and bite it with their beak to immobilize and paralyze it,” he said.
Stubby squid typically live for one and a half to two years. Wilson says that this particular pint-sized predator was already full-sized — a whopping three inches — when he found her. He estimates that she has another four to six months left.
“That’s the downside to working with cephalopods, is that they don’t live for very long in most cases,” he said.
After she dies, this stubby squid will be preserved as a learning tool. Wilson sees that as another way to respect the animal.
“Skeletons, preservations, all of those are really important to me as somebody who wants to continue to respect that animal and have them continue to teach even after death,” he said.
He considers his relationship with the animals as a collaborative one – and he says that’s why he avoids giving pet names to animals in his care.
“These are not my pets,” he said. “These are my colleagues.”
Wilson also hopes to expand the existing care manual for the species, sharing what he’s learned, so that other biologists can effectively care for this not-quite-a-squid, not-quite-a-cuttlefish creature.
In the meantime, visitors can meet the stubby squid at the Sitka Sound Science Center.
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