Sep 17, 2026 · 32 min · 10 segments
Ep 24 🫧🦑 Giant cuttlefish! This episode’s for you if you’re a cephalopod head , if you’re curious how octopus or cuttlefish can change textures or colours, and if you want to know what it’ll take to…
Zoe DoubledayGuest
Jess HamiltonHost
Yeah so okay let's talk about this year so what happened this is it this aggregation occurs as you said sort of starts around May every year there's you know up to hundreds of thousands of animals and then what happened this year?
The animals just didn't really So this population has been surveyed by state government scientists for about 25 years, nearly not every year, but nearly every year.
And they do surveys and then they get a population estimate of the aggregating animals.
And there was actually a flurry of research telling them fears that the cuttlefish would disappear.
But put that into context, they estimated the numbers at the lowest of the low, when everyone was scared the animals were going to disappear for good, were still 13,000 animals.
So when it goes down to 13,000, we're like, wow, what's happening here? Compared to now, this year, that 13,000 is very abundant.
There has been a little bit of decline in the numbers over the last few years, but we're still talking tens of thousands of animals and they've dropped off.
Maybe it'd be part of a natural cycle, the conditions were that great and it's dropping off.
But last year there were 65,000 animals, so still a bit low in the scheme of things.
And now, while the official estimate hasn't been released by the government yet, independent surveys and tour operators, you know, after eight hours of diving and seeing like, I think 44 animals was a
You know, like if we put this on a graph, compared to all the other numbers, you wouldn't even see it.
It would look like it's a missing year because you wouldn't even see it on a graph.
I believe there was a few egg masses, a few hundreds of eggs laid by the remaining animals.
But you see with a lot of these marine animals, the natural mortality rate of those eggs and the juveniles would be naturally very high.
A quick update here, because since I recorded this interview with Zoe, official reports from the South Australian Research and Development Institute have now put that number at 113.
And then the Department of Environment and Water in South Australia increased that to just over 1800.
That was when they included cryptic cuttlefish who were found by searching under rocks with torches.
Yeah so okay let's talk about this year so what happened this is it this aggregation occurs as you said sort of starts around May every year there's you know up to hundreds of thousands of animals and then what happened this year?
The animals just didn't really So this population has been surveyed by state government scientists for about 25 years, nearly not every year, but nearly every year.
And they do surveys and then they get a population estimate of the aggregating animals.
And there was actually a flurry of research telling them fears that the cuttlefish would disappear.
But put that into context, they estimated the numbers at the lowest of the low, when everyone was scared the animals were going to disappear for good, were still 13,000 animals.
So when it goes down to 13,000, we're like, wow, what's happening here? Compared to now, this year, that 13,000 is very abundant.
There has been a little bit of decline in the numbers over the last few years, but we're still talking tens of thousands of animals and they've dropped off.
Maybe it'd be part of a natural cycle, the conditions were that great and it's dropping off.
But last year there were 65,000 animals, so still a bit low in the scheme of things.
And now, while the official estimate hasn't been released by the government yet, independent surveys and tour operators, you know, after eight hours of diving and seeing like, I think 44 animals was a
You know, like if we put this on a graph, compared to all the other numbers, you wouldn't even see it.
It would look like it's a missing year because you wouldn't even see it on a graph.
I believe there was a few egg masses, a few hundreds of eggs laid by the remaining animals.
But you see with a lot of these marine animals, the natural mortality rate of those eggs and the juveniles would be naturally very high.
A quick update here, because since I recorded this interview with Zoe, official reports from the South Australian Research and Development Institute have now put that number at 113.
And then the Department of Environment and Water in South Australia increased that to just over 1800.
That was when they included cryptic cuttlefish who were found by searching under rocks with torches.
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