Photo Credit: Permission from photographer Kouta Muramatsu, Hokkaido University
Yup, they’re a thing! Squid species within several families—most significantly in the family Ommastrephidae—fly. And it gets better. Want to know their secret of airborneness? They use jet propulsion. But before you strap on a jetpack to fly like they do, I should clarify how their method of flight works. After doing a specific Google Search (the more classification-style websites didn’t want to give up the information so easily), I found articles from National Geographic and Scientific American that explained the gist of it. Their flight contains four steps: launching, jetting, gliding, and diving. While swimming, the squid open their mantle—a layer soft muscle enveloping their body—to capture water. Then they forcefully expel it, launching themselves into the air quite a bit like a bottle rocket. Some jet water while still airborne, and actively change their posture to maximize their flight time. Finally, they fold their webbed fins and tentacles back in to minimize the impact of diving back into the water.
What else is there to know about these miracle-workers? Most of Ommastrephidae are fished commercially and one species, Todarodes pacificus, gives about half of the world’s yearly cephalopod catch (i.e. among mollusks such as squid, octopus, or nautilus). Some flying squid were recorded to travel nearly 100 feet in about 3 seconds. Understandably, scientific research on this phenomenon was recent and hard to perform as these squids fly so incredibly fast.
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Atlas of Living Australia:
National Geographic:
Scientific American:
For a briefish article on Ommastrephidae in particular and another, rather immense article on cephalopods (also containing a listing for Ommastrephidae), see
FOAA (Food and Agriculture Administration of the United Nations):
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