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Kiwi squid legend Steve O’Shea recently posted this message on tonmo.com. He is still looking for a research student to look at identifying and documenting the NORFANZ collection of squids.

If you are interested in undertaking this ambitious project as either a Masters or PhD course of study then you should contact Steve directly at steve.oshea@aut.ac.nz.

For those who don’t know about Steve an interesting article on him is here.

The NORFANZ collection sounds fascinating …

Mollusca (Cephalopoda)
The NORFANZ collection of squids is one of the most important scientific collections of cephalopods taken from the northern Tasman Sea in the past 50 years. In general, the external and anatomical condition of all specimens is excellent. Not only has the excellent condition of specimens in the collection resolved a number of systematics problems, it has also increased the recognised diversity of species from New Zealand waters to 94, and considerably increased the recognised bathymetric and geographic distribution of several taxa.

Preliminary work on these collections reveals them to comprise 16 families, 31 genera and 33 nominal species - a figure that will increase following more detailed study. New records for New Zealand waters, based on in situ-captured specimens (rather than beaks in stomach contents), are made for the family Sepiidae (genus Sepia), for the genus Grimalditeuthis and species G. cf. bondplani and Chiroteuthis cf. capensis (both Chiroteuthidae), ‘Echinoteuthis’ sp. (Mastigoteuthidae) and Octopoteuthis megaptera (Octopoteuthidae). Two immature specimens of a species either belonging to a genus new to science (Mastigoteuthidae) or the first known non-larval specimens of the enigmatic Magnapinna (Magnapinnidae) are also represented in these collections. The collections also include a number of presently unidentified cranchiid squid (Cranchiidae) apparently new to the New Zealand EEZ, and several fully mature and mated male and female Histioteuthis (Histioteuthidae) species, with bizarre sexually dimorphic characters being discerned for the first time.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 18th, 2004 at 1:54 pm and is filed under Squid Facts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.