Warm-water squids and pelagic octopuses in the Far Eastern seas

• Main Author: Nesis, K.N.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Springer 1994
• Subjects: Bering Sea; Gulf of Alaska; Kamchatka; Sperm whale; Alaska; Aleutian Islands
• Online Access: https://oceanrep.geomar.de/id/eprint/50841/; https://oceanrep.geomar.de/id/eprint/50841/1/2967.pdf

Some species of wide-spread tropical squids and pelgic octopuses (Histioteuthis hoylei, Alloposus mollis and others), based on beak findings in sperm whale stomachs, were common in the 1950s and early 1960s and widely distributed along the Kuril' Islands, eastern Kamchatka, in the Bering Sea, near the Aleutian Islands and the Gulf of Alaska, but later they were never recorded north of northwastern Honshu or southeast of the southern Kuril's. In 1990-1992 the squid Watasenia scintillans extended north to the middle Kuril's and, in smaller quantities, to the northern Kuril's while H. hoylei extended to the western Bering Sea. In the summer of 1992, Ancistrocheirus lesueurii, Mastigoteuthis dentata?, Eledonella pygmaea, and Allopsus mollis were also caught off the Shikotan, Kunashir, and Iturup Islands. A. lesueurii and E. pygmaea were caught in the Russian EEZ for the first time. We discuss why the warm-water species appear in the Russian Far Eastern seas again, after a long period of absence.