A squid paralarva whose two tentacles are fused into a single trunk carried in front of the head.
A very small squid with a rounded mantle, large eyes and, in front of the head, a single short trunk formed by the two tentacles fused along their whole length. The eight arms are short and sit behind it, so the animal reads as a squid with an elephant’s proboscis. The trunk carries a pair of terminal suckers and is used to catch food; as the animal grows it splits from the tip backwards until two ordinary tentacles are left.
The stage is called a rhynchoteuthion and belongs to the flying squids, the Ommastrephidae, an open-ocean family whose adults are strong swimmers of the upper few hundred metres. The glass squid paralarvae met on the same dives have a clear bottle-shaped mantle with the arms in a short bunch and no trunk of any kind, and no other squid paralarva in this water carries the fused tentacles, so the stage is unmistakable even when the species is not.
Genus cannot be taken from a photograph and records are kept at the family. The animals are small, fast and inclined to jet out of a beam, and most usable frames come from a light held wide and slightly off the subject rather than focused hard on it.
Ratings are per location: 1 means found on most dives that look for it, 5 means a handful of records. Where enough dives have been logged the figure is calculated from them; otherwise it is an editorial estimate, and says so. We publish habitat and destination, not the dive site.
