Squid: The Predator You Never Strike
For thirty-nine articles this series has been about a predator that bites: the zander on the edge, the bass in cover, the turbot shooting up out of the sand. Every time the bait went into a mouth, and a hook held it there. Squid break that. They do not bite — they grab. Two long tentacles fire out, the clubs at their tips attach to the prey, and the stalks then haul it back to the eight short arms, which hold it and feed it to the beak. On the rod this has one consequence that governs everything else: it is never hooked, it is held. The crowns of an egi carry no barbs; they sit among the arms and hold only while you are pulling. From that follows the most practical sentence in this article, and it contradicts what almost every angler does by reflex: every second without tension is an exit. ⚠️ Loligo vulgaris (GBIF 2290374, family Loliginidae, order Myopsida, class Cephalopoda) is not *Loligo forbesii*. And you tell them apart not by the mantle but by the tentacle club: MarLIN writes “very similar to *Loligo forbesii* but distinguished immediately by the tentacle club, the median suckers of which are especially large, up to four times diameter of marginal suckers” — on the European squid the median suckers of the club are up to four times the diameter of the marginal ones.
Where it sits — and why the bottom will not tell you
For every other predator in this series the structure was the point: the edge, the rock, the weed bed, the gully. With squid exactly that falls away. MarLIN puts it plainly: “Has no preference for a particular bottom type, the only requirement seems to be the presence of substrata for the attachment of egg strings during the spawning period.” No preference for a bottom type at all; the only requirement is some substrate the egg strings can be fixed to when it spawns. The depth range runs from 0 to 500 metres, the distribution in the eastern Atlantic from roughly 20° S to 55° N, plus the British Isles, the North Sea and the whole Mediterranean. So if the ground will not lead you to it — what will? The clock. The species moves toward the surface after sunset; by day it stays within a small area, and from sunset to sunrise it covers a far larger one. The inshore recreational fishery in southern Mallorca accordingly concentrates in a narrow, well-delineated area and in a very specific part of the day — sunset. That is not folklore; that is the description of a fishery which has attached itself to a time window because the time window *is* the place.
Why it only gets one year
The second break with the series is bigger still, and few anglers follow it all the way through. The life cycle of this species is completed in about one year, with maximum lifespans of roughly 15 months recorded. It is semelparous: a terminal spawner that spawns once and then dies. Mean age at maturity is about nine months, mean spawning age about ten; fecundity is estimated at 10,000 to 42,000 eggs, embryonic development lasts around 30 days, and the paralarvae then live planktonically for about two months. Add that up and one sentence is left that belongs written on the rod: the squid you meet in October is not the one you met in April — it is a different generation. A zander grows for years into the same edge. With squid there is no “the same one”. Size classes here are not age steps of a stock you know, they are year-classes that pass through and disappear. That is why the calendar decides harder here than for any fish in this series — and the calendar hangs on water temperature, not on the date. For scale: the species reaches 54 cm.
Why the take is not a bite
What arrives at the blank only makes sense once you know what happens at the other end. The study of the tentacular strike (“The Tentacular Strike Behavior in Squid”, Frontiers in Physiology 2019) describes it like this: the two tentacles are specialised for prey capture and capable of extremely rapid extension; the stalks elongate so that the clubs make first contact and attach — the strike reaches the prey in 20 to 40 milliseconds, at peak velocities of over 2 m/s and accelerations of nearly 250 m/s². The stalks are then immediately contracted to bring the prey within reach of the eight arms, which subdue it and manipulate it into the mouth. ⚠️ That is precisely why no knock arrives at the rod. The egi is not struck by a mouth, it is attached to and drawn in — and what you feel is that it suddenly gets heavier, or that it stops sinking. Waiting for a tap means waiting for a signal this predator cannot send. And because squid inspect before they commit — they hold the egi, examine it and let it go again — every gap in the pull is not merely a risk but an invitation.
What that means for the line
- No strike — pressure: The crowns on an egi are barbless. They sit among the arms and hold only under load. A hard strike rips them out instead of setting them. The right move is a smooth, steady lift into an even pull — and then that pull, unbroken, until the net is underneath.
- The line must never go dead: On the drop the egi needs enough loose line to fall and glide naturally — but never so much that the connection breaks. Japanese anglers call the right state “controlled semi-slack”: enough slack for the fall, enough contact to see an abnormal movement instantly. A fully slack line costs you both — the detection and the hold.
- The take is weight, not a knock: It grabs and hauls the egi toward its arms. At the rod tip that reads as: it gets heavier, or the descent stops. Both of those *are* the take. A knock is the exception, not the yardstick.
- It inspects — and lets go: Squid hold the egi, examine it and release it again. Every pump of the rod, every yielding, every sag creates exactly the pause in which it can do that. Winding steadily beats pumping here every time.
- Sunset beats midday: It rises after sunset and covers a far larger area between sunset and sunrise than during the day. For a predator whose ground tells you nothing, the hour is the most useful piece of location information you have.
And because a great many numbers circulate about squid, here are the papers in their own words rather than from memory. ⚠️ EU: Annex IX Part A of Regulation (EU) 2019/1241 — the list of minimum conservation reference sizes for the Mediterranean — contains not a single cephalopod. The only molluscs listed there are the scallop *Pecten jacobeus* (10 cm), *Venerupis* spp. (25 mm) and *Venus* spp. (25 mm). The 12 cm circulating in Italian tables for the calamaro is therefore not an EU minimum conservation reference size, and we do not claim it as one here. National or regional rules may exist and may be stricter, and the permit always wins. Croatia (*Pravilnik o sportskom i rekreacijskom ribolovu na moru*, NN 48/2026 of 8 May 2026, in force since 1 June 2026) requires something hardly anyone knows — Article 11(2): “Glavonošci ulovljeni u sportskom i rekreacijskom ribolovu koji se zadržavaju moraju biti označeni dubokim zarezivanjem glave u predjelu između očiju, osim liganja (*Loligo vulgaris*) i sipa (*Sepia officinalis*) namijenjenih za žive mamce.” Retained cephalopods must be marked by a deep notch in the head between the eyes — the only exception being squid and cuttlefish intended as live bait. The per-piece list in Article 11(4) covers *Octopus vulgaris* (2), groupers (1), *Eunice roussaei* (2) and Elasmobranchii (0) — not the lignja; no piece limit is claimed for it here. Article 8(1) makes clear that the maximum per angler is set in the Act and that fishing must stop once it is reached. Turkey (6/2 amateur communiqué No. 2024/21, Official Gazette 11 Aug 2024, No. 32629, valid 1 Sep 2024 – 31 Aug 2028): ⚠️ the Çizelge tables are published only as a scanned annex with no text layer — a kalamar row could not be verified from it, so no number is claimed for it here. What *is* verified verbatim from the communiqué text itself is the collective rule: “Kg cinsinden limit verilen türlerde, avlanılan tür tek veya karışık olsun 5 kg’ı geçemez” — for species limited by weight, the catch, single or mixed, may not exceed five kilograms — along with the 5 % tolerance on the lengths listed in Çizelge 5.
Not the strike — the tension
With this predator what decides is not whether you rip at the right moment but whether your pull ever breaks. Lift softly, hold evenly, never pump — and on the drop run the line controlled semi-slack, so the egi falls and you still see it when it falls differently than it did a second ago. Whether a bay produces at all today additionally depends on light, wind, current, water temperature and season — on all the things that change while the chart stays the same, and that count double for an animal with one year to live. That is exactly what the StrikeAhead app is built for: it reads your water with bite windows, weather and marine data, chart and depth contours, and it learns from your catches, so you fish the moment instead of guessing it. And when you stand for the first time in a strange bay where no ground tells you where the squid are running tonight, the second half is the shortcut. The app tells you when. StrikeAhead Pathfinder tells you with whom: our curated directory of fishing guides and skippers — every expert personally vetted, licence and insurance checked before listing, profiles built from real, verified catches out of the StrikeAhead logbook rather than from advertising photos, no paid ranking, and no booking fee for you as an angler.