Wednesday, March 14, 2007

The hunting of the squid

Two scientific teams have joined forces to find out just how the biggest predator in the sea, the sperm whale, finds it fast-moving squid prey. One team, led by William Gilly at Stanford University, was tagging the two-meter jumbo squid (Dosidicus gigas, not to be confused with the much larger giant squid Architeuthis dux), squid, while Randall Davis's team from Texas A&M University was tagging sperm whales. Now the joint team can "watch" as the animals, which normally congregate at different depths, cross paths and become steps in the same food chain.

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