Hawaiian flying squid Nototodarus hawaiiensis (Cephalopoda: Ommastrephidae) in the Arabian Sea: range extension, age, and growth

Mated Shiny bird squid, Ornithoteuthis volatilis Sasaki, 1915 (Cephalopoda: Ommastrephidae), in the southeastern Arabian Sea

“…The present findings of O. volatilis in Indian waters (eastern Arabian Sea) for the first time and the second record of the species from the Arabian Sea. The adult species of O. volatilis live in the lower epipelagic and mesopelagic zones (Nesis, 1987). The female mature at a size of 220 DML and 250 mm DML (Nesis and Nigmattulin, 1979;Dunning and Brandt, 1985).…”

“…The mechanism and locations of spermatangium attachments in squids are species-specific (Nesis, 1995;Hoving et al, 2008a). Earlier, up to 10-15, spermatangia attachment over the buccal region of the mature females of congener O. antillarum (Arkhipkin et al, 1998) has been reported.…”

“…The genus Ornithoteuthis Okada, 1927 presently consists of two closely related species: Ornithoteuthis volatilis (Sasaki, 1915) and Ornithoteuthis antillarum Adam, 1957. The Shiny bird squid O. volatilis is a tropical and sub-tropical species which is widely distributed in the Indo-Pacific Oceans (Wormuth, 1976) including, off western and eastern Australia (Lu and Dunning, 1982;Dunning and Brandt, 1985), South China Sea (Khromov, 1990), Indian Ocean (Okutani and Tsukada, 1988), Arabian Sea (Nesis, 1987) and the southeast Atlantic (Villanueva and Sanchez, 1993). They are mesopelagic species and rarely occur above 100 m (Wormuth, 1976;Nesis and Nigmattulin, 1979).…”

“…Male cephalopods pack their sperm into complex spermatophores that are transferred to the females during mating (Fernandez-Alvarez et al, 2018). The position of the seminal receptacles and implanted spermatangia varies among species (Nesis, 1995;Norman and Lu, 1997;Hoving et al, 2004;Jackson and Jackson, 2004;O'Shea et al, 2007). Implanted spermatangia have never been reported for O. volatilis.…”