Photograph by Peter Parks

Off Lizard Island, on the Great Barrier Reef, in 1981 we encountered a gelatinous cylinder, two metres long and fully 150 mm in diameter. Within it lay a spiral string of black dots. We guessed it was some type of egg mass. We knew not what! We bucketed part of the mass, transported it back to the lab and kept watch. Within two hours it began to hatch and out popped these diminutive squidlings.

(In their 1961 black and white book "Expedition into the Unknown", Hans and Lotte Hass describe coming upon an identical mass of even larger proportions in 1939 (see page 72). At first they too had no idea what it was. Nineteen years after their first encounter they saw one again and did exactly what we did with a bucket and camera!)

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