Types of squids3/23/2023 Many biologists have bemoaned this and tried to set things right in popular works for quite a while ( e.g., Lee, 1883 Salvador & Tomotani, 2014). People just do not seem to know which is which. The foremost of these issues is: there is a long-lived and persistent confusion in popular knowledge, art and fiction, regarding squids and octopuses. But before we can say something about the critters starring in Splatoon, we must first clear some Biology stuff. OK, so we can all see that Splatoon is a cephalopod-themed game. This group is a latecomer in cephalopod history: it appeared only during the Mesozoic, although some late Paleozoic fossils have tentatively been classified as squids (Boyle & Rodhouse, 2005 Nishiguchi & Mapes, 2008). Ammonoids and belemnites were completely extinguished and today we have just a handful of Nautilus species and the group consisting of cuttlefish, squids and octopuses. Most of these forms, however, did not survive to this day. Cephalopods enjoyed a high amount of diversity during the Paleozoic and Mesozoic eras, with hundreds of species of nautiloids and ammonoids (Monks & Palmer, 2002). The class appeared over 450 million years ago during the late Cambrian, the first period of the Paleozoic era (Boyle & Rodhouse, 2005 Nishiguchi & Mapes, 2008). There are over 800 known living species of cephalopods, but the fossil record counts with more than 17,000 species (Boyle & Rodhouse, 2005 Rosenberg, 2014). Today, cephalopods are found everywhere in the sea, from the polar regions to the tropics and from the surface to depths over 5,000 m. Besides squids and octopuses, it counts with cuttlefish, nautiloids and the fossil belemnites and ammonoids. For those who remember their biological classification, we can put it like this: the class Cephalopoda belongs to the phylum Mollusca.Ĭephalopoda is a group that contains a vast array of marine animals. The mollusks are the second largest animal group on Earth (after the arthropods, of course) and includes gastropods (snails and slugs), bivalves (clams, mussels and oysters), cephalopods (we’ll come back to them soon) and the little known scaphopods (tusk shells), monoplacophorans, aplacophorans, polyplacophorans (chitons) and some fossil oddities. These animals are mollusks, and, more specifically, cephalopods. Bottom right: Octopus rubescens, an example of an octopus species (photo by Taollan82, 2007 image modified from Wikimedia Commons). octoling (original artwork from the game). Bottom left: an elite octarian soldier, a.k.a. Top right: Loligo vulgaris, an example of a squid species (photo by Hans Hillewaert, 2005 image modified from Wikimedia Commons). Top left: an inkling girl in human form (original model from the game). 1), two of the most awesome kinds of animals out there.įigure 1. (In multiplayer though, its inkling against inkling.) Inklings and octarians (especially the elite soldiers called “octolings”) are based, respectively, on squids and octopuses (Fig. It features two races, inklings (the playable one) and octarians (the enemies), and revolves around the fierce dispute against each other. The game is a third-person shooter with ink instead of bullets. Splatoon was recently released (second quarter of 2015) for the Wii U, receiving a warm welcome by Nintendo fans (it’s nigh unthinkable for the company to launch a new IP like this) and generating a flood of fan art on the Internet. Email: (at) gmail (dot) comĢ Museu de Zoologia da Universidade de São Paulo São Paulo, Brazil. Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen Tübingen, Germany. 1 Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde Stuttgart Stuttgart, Germany.
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