A slender inshore squid of open water over sand, usually met at night in a light.
A slender, torpedo-shaped squid with a long pointed mantle and triangular fins occupying roughly the rear half of it, quite unlike the broad oval fin running the whole length of the bigfin reef squid, which is the animal it is most often confused with. Mantle length is commonly 10 to 20 cm and reaches about 30 cm in the larger species. In a light the body is translucent pink or straw with fine dark chromatophores that flare and fade. Uroteuthis is a genus of about fourteen inshore Indo-West Pacific squids, and the species within it are separated on the shape of the male’s modified arm and on other characters not visible on a living animal in the water. Sharp-tail squid is a diver’s name for the group rather than a fixed one, and pitching a record at the genus is the honest limit for a photograph.
These are squid of the water column over sand and rubble rather than of the reef itself, usually in loose groups a metre or two off the bottom, drifting off backwards when approached and returning once a diver has stopped moving. They take small fish and crustaceans, and they are drawn both to divers’ lights and to the small animals that collect in them, which is why they are seen on night dives far more often than on day ones. Egg masses are laid on the bottom as clusters of white finger-shaped capsules anchored to rubble, and are often the only sign that squid have been present.
The genus is unusual within the loliginids in having photophores, a pair of light organs on the underside of the ink sac. They are internal and not visible on a swimming animal, so this is a point of interest rather than an identification character.
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.
