Animals of the Future? Allons-y!

This is a short follow-up to the last post, on the project of my French friends & colleagues: 'Demain, les animaux du futur'.

Messieurs Boulay and Steyer wrote that they were quite happy to see that the post had generated numerous pertinent responses, so there.

More to the point, they decided to provide a bit more information on their website in the form of two new videos, on on the 'Demain...' project and one on the terraforming of Mars. It seems that the firm of Cossima Productions is off to a good start. Here is a direct link to the page where you can see both videos. From there, you can also click on the 'YouTube' logos under each video.

Here is the one where Boulay & Steyer explain what the project is all about. Mind you, the quality of the video on this blog is less good than the version you can see on the Cossima site or on YouTube, so if you want a higher quality, use that route or just go here directly.

Yes, it is in French; do not act surprised, it's what people in France speak. Perhaps I can be persuaded to provide a translation, but right away I haven't got the time to do so.

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Additional text (December 2, 2011): With a bit of help by Marc in figuring out what they said I translated the text of the video. Any errors are my fault.

Sébastien Steyer:
"Marc and I both love science fiction. Every time we saw what films and other works in science fiction offered in the way of an exobiological bestiary, we had a thing or two to say about it. So, instead of criticising the work of others, we wished to create our own universe and to imagine speculative biology in Earth's future.
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For example, we designed a future flightless parrot, in which we envisaged a reduction of its wings up to the point where they disappeared altogether, with an accompanying lengthening and strong development of its legs. Bit by bit we came up with an animal we thought likely, ten million years from now.
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This is no longer science fiction, it's more like 'fiction science'. It is a projection, but one taking known evolutionary, tectonic and climatological models into consideration."
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Marc Boulay:
"Making a sculpture, regardless of whether of a past, a present or a future animal, involves an anormous amount of work in getting source material and discussions with scientists. That takes up about 90% of my time. The rest is applying that knowledge. Doing the sculpture takes up about 10% of my time. "

A future book on future evolution from France

Click to enlarge; copyright M Boulay / JS Steyer

Yes, there will be a new book on speculative evolution, a real proper book, that you can actually hold in your hands. It will describe life on Earth 10 million years in the future, or well after man. Future evolution on Earth is a branch of speculative biology I have hardly discussed in this blog, but I thought I would make an exception for this project. Do not run to the bookstore just yet, as the book will probably be published in the second half of 2012. This means you have about a year to brush up on your French, because that is the language it will appear in.

It will be entitled 'Demain: les animaux du futur' ('Tomorrow: animals of the future'), and will be published by 'Éditions Belin'. The authors, Marc Boulay and Sébastien Steyer, told me that they are currently working on the second of what will be five chapters. Marc is a digital sculptor and Z-Brush expert, who has an extensive knowledge of animal sculpture and whose work has featured on this blog before. Does anyone remember me posting on an exposition in Brussels where future animals were shown, posted in February 2009? Well, Marc proved to have had a hand in their design, as I later found out and discussed here, here and here. Sébastien is a palaeontologist from Paris, who does not limit himself to going on fossil-hunting expeditions in Africa and writing scientific papers, but took the time to write a -very readable!- book on 'Earth before the dinosaurs'. If you like that subject, you might wish to take a look the French or Dutch versions; an English version is in the works. Together with Pierre Godlewski they have formed a firm, Cossima productions, to produce not just the book but other projects as well, probably including a television documentary as well as a book. The idea for the project began in 1999 and is completely independent of 'The Future is Wild'.

So what will be in the 'Demain' book? Obviously, we do not know yet, but you can get some glimpses at the site of Marc Boulay and of Cossima Productions. Perhaps the animals that were once shown on their sites will appear in the book. As these sites have been shut down, only some hints remain here and there, including on my own blog.

Click to enlarge; copyright M Boulay / JS Steyer

I really liked Benthogyrinus. The accompanying text says that it about the only surviving amphibian, a descendant of the frog species Xenopus. It has developed glands to expel salt and now lives in the seas. It reproduces in its larval stage and exhibits profound sexual dimorphism, i.e., males are much smaller and are shaped differently than females. For more images on this animal please read the original post.

Above is a demo reel of Diatrymimum boiseï, obtained from the links above. It is a large predatory bird, that has not just lost the power of flight but has lost its wings altogether, bones and all. It evolved from a parrot (Psittacus). As you can see the authors did their homework: whereas most people would limit their skeletal studies to some sketches, in this instance the skeleton has been worked out in full 3D detail. From then on the video shows how the body is shaped, and after that there are some colour studies. The background, with iits light to dark gray gradient, is typical for ZBrush. As a whole the demo shows what can be done with ZBrush (if you are a very accomplished 3D artist, that is!). What struck me is that the femur (the thighbone) is not horizontal as in ostriches but is oriented much more vertically, making the limb much more reminescent of that of a predatory dinosaur such as Tyrannosaurus. Such dinosaurs can afford to have their limb in this position because their tails balance the weight of the front part of the body, meaning that their centre of gravity is near the hip joints, and as long as the feet are directly underneath the centre of gravity, the animal won't keel over. Ostriches do not have heavy tails, meaning their centre of gravity is well in front of the hip joints. In order not to fall the feet still have to be underneath the centre of gravity, and the ostrich does that by having its thighs in a more horizontal position than Diatrymimus. I think Diatrymimus gets away with this by having a short and rather small body.

And this demo reel shows more of Marc's ZBrush work. There are ants, Burgess shale animals as well as dinosaurs and other Mesozoic animals, but about 40 seconds after the start there are glimpses of animals that may well be future animals, but whether they are part of the project described above, I do not know. Perhaps the authors will let us know. At any rate I will keep you informed when the book comes out, hopefully a year from now.

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Additional remarks (November 12 2011)

Marc sent me an email that he was happy with the post and added a file of a much better quality video. I agree that the videos I had shown you were not very good. The problem was not the source material, which was excellent, but in getting that quality here on the blog. The Google blogger program alters videos and shrinks them to fit one and the same size. Unfortunately, I cannot therefore replace the videos above with better ones. But what I can do, and should have done, is to point out where you can find better quality ones.

Both videos can be found on Youtube: here is the Diatrymimus one, and here is the 2010 demo reel.

Marc also added some other images for you to look at:

Click to enlarge; copyright M Boulay / JS Steyer

This is D. boiseï again, this time with lots of details of the head. I suppose that readers will have noted the development of teeth-like structures, lost by its bird ancestors a long time ago? The two commenters so far drew attention to the lack of feathers. I can understand how feathers might be lost on the head for predators: many vultures have unfeathered heads. But there is as yet no explanation for the total loss of feathers elsewhere on the body. We will either have to wait for the book, or perhaps Marc or Sébastien will take the bait and write a comment...

Click to enlarge; copyright M Boulay / JS Steyer

And a new species as well! It is called 'Spatamagnalis ruber'. If memory serves me right, a 'spata' is a short or broad sword, and ruber is definitely 'red'. Apparently, there are more flightless birds in this future. And featherless too... is it the climate?

From the IFB archives (1): the 'schaatsbeest'

Every institute has archives. You cannot have a proper Institute with a capital 'I' without them. The 'Institute for the Advancement of Biological Studies on Furaha, Nu Phoenicis IV', also known as the 'Institute of Furahan Biology', or even shorter as the 'IFB', definitely has archives. You might think that the IFB, being a virtual Institute, would have virtual archives, but that is not the case.
I have a stack of old sketchbooks and loose sheets of paper containing sketches that I have amassed over the years. As archives go, this one is a right mess, as the papers are not in any order and the dates of the sketches and studies are not indicated. Some sketches contain the earliest appearances of animals that were later painted, others are just doodles, some contains ideas later incorporated into something else, and some show designs that never made it. I thought it might be interesting to show a few of those sketches, and will start with an example of the latter kind, one that nearly made it into a painting, but became destined for non-existence. So here is the world's first peek at the 'schaatsbeest'.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

This is probably its very first appearance. I must have felt the composition was good from the start, as it hardly changed afterwards. In fact, I still like it. I wrote 'schaatsbeest' next to it, which is Dutch for 'skating beast'. For this post I decided to leave its name in Dutch rather than translate it into English. There are animals names in Swahili and French besides English on Furaha, so why not one or two in other languages? On the remote chance that you might wish to pronounce its name correctly, the 'ch' in the beginning is like the 'ch' in 'Bach' as Germans pronounce it, which is NOT 'bahk'. The 'aa' is like the 'a' in 'father' but longer, and the 'ee' in 'beest' is like the 'ay' in layer (if you think this is silly, remember that you English speakers are the ones who messed things up with your great vowel shift). Anyway, the schaatsbeest is ice sailing, also known as 'ice yachting'. If you do not know what ice yachting is, have a quick look at the Wikipedia entry, or here for photographs of present-day ice sailing.

Click to enlarge; source here

Just to be on the safe side, here is an example of a historical type of ship used in ice yachting. As you can see, the process is like sailing, but instead of a hull making its way through water there are skates allowing it to glide over frozen rivers, ponds or lakes.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

And this may well have been the second sketch. Together with the first one it allows the beast's anatomy to be discerned: it has six legs, of which four are used to skate on, and the other two look like the front limbs of a mantis (this may very well be the first time that this particular configuration came up). There are four sails, derived from wings. The animal is sailing into the wind, which means that the wind is coming from in front and a bit to the side. This type of sailing requires the sails to be very taut, and results in large sideways forces on the ship, so ships sailing into the wind typically tilt over to the leeward side. The schaatsbeest undergoes the same forces, and in this case the two skating legs on the windward side are tilted right off the ice, where they help act as a counterweight.
The point of this second sketch was to work out the perspective. If you look carefully, you will see that the animal throws a shadow on the ice, indicated by vertical stripes, and below that you see its body mirrored in the ice (the perspective of a mirror image is easy, once you understand that you should act as if there is a second object behind the mirror). In this case, the mirror image allows the viewer to see the underside of the animal. I thought that this would make for an interesting composition.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

This sheet of paper shows more takes on the same idea. I used to sketch multiple images right through one another at the time. I was playing with the sails and had a first look at colour. The colour sketch at the top shows a completely different kind of sail, reminiscent of a schooner rig. The bottom sketch shows two pairs of sails while the two other sketches show fused sails, with a mainsail at the back and a jib or genoa in front.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

Here is a pencil sketch showing the schaatsbeest from in front. The odd object at the left is a squarish 3D arrow indicating the wind direction. The animal allows its body to be tilted, but uses its front limbs and the windward skates to balance it. Its head is held perfectly horizontally. The sails are also moved towards the vertical. I think that the thick lines where its back meets the mainsail masts were alterations to allow it do that with sufficient force. The small sketch towards the right show it sailing squarely before the wind, where it does not tilt and spreads out its four sails to make the most of the wind.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

Finally, a very large pencil sketch. It looks like it is drawn on parchment, but that is only because I needed to manipulate the image for the pencil lines to show up at all. I had made a cardboard model, put it on a mirror, and based the sketch on that. That explains the thinness of the limbs and the lack of any perspective drawing guides.

I stopped development there. In hindsight, I may have been right to do so. While I still like the composition, almost enough to pick up the design again, an ecological point of view suggests this animal to be in trouble. It is obviously quite well adapted to move around on expanses of flat ice. Are these then around from most of the year? What does it find there to eat? The animal would probably be very clumsy on dry land, and its modified wings will not allow it to fly. Oh well; back into the archives, I guess.

Lifting the cloak on Cloakfish

There is an odd difference between drawings and photographs of animals. In a photograph a galloping animal may be caught in time in just such a way that only one of its legs touches the ground. No-one will think twice about whether this is 'correct' or not. But do the same in a painting, and people will start thinking that the painter has it all wrong. Something like that happened to my Furahan Fish IV, shown in this blog earlier.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

Here it is again. I received some questions where it right front fin had gone. Was it amputated or had I forgotten it? No, I replied, I worked out the perspective and the missing fin is simply hidden by the body. I admit that I saw these people's point and have been tempted to tweak the perspective a bit and have the tip of the 'missing' fin emerge from behind the body. Its absence seems to be disturbing in a way. While working on Fish and Cloakfish I experimented a bit with the reasons.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

This image shows two versions of a ray-like species of Fishes IV. The top image shows a layer for the perspective lines as well as a layer containing some rough idea of light and colour. Layers, for those of you not familiar with computer painting programs, are the computer equivalent of a pane of glass on which you paint. The painting as a whole can consist of many such panes, each consisting a different bit of the painting. The trick is that you can make layers invisible, change their transparency or swap their order. I use Painter 11 as I like its tools, that resemble artists' brushes more than the tools of Photoshop CS5. As you can see from the sketch the perspective effect is fairly strong, meaning that parallel lines diverge quite a bit. Still, the drawing seems to work, perhaps because all parts of the animal are visible.



Apart from 'regular' Fishes, I have been working on Cloakfish, completely unrelated to Fishes I to VI. You will find cloakfish on the main Furaha page, but also here on the blog. Apart from a few sketches almost all my earlier work on cloakfishes involved computer graphics, because I wished to see their four 'cloaks' move while swimming. At present it is time to paint them, but I wished to get their cloaks right, and doing that by hand would be very difficult. So I took recourse to computer graphics, a process best described as 'practical' ('cheating' comes to mind, but why not use tools when available?). To help the process, I adapted earlier programmes in Matlab so I could produce a cloak with any shape I wished, as on the left, that is warped to produce waves progressing along it, as on the right. Right; make four of them, export them as 3D files, import them in a suitable 3D program (Vue Infinite in my case, and we are ready to play.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

Here is an example. The left panel shows the four cloaks, striped to help visualise their 3D shape, attached to a central axis (that is called a 'dagger', by the way). The body proper is formed by some basic shapes such as cylinders and rectangles. I thought it might be worthwhile to put lots of parallel rods in the image that could help get a better feel for the perspective. I set the focal distance of the imaginary camera in Vue to 35 mm, and that is the image in the left-hand panel. The perspective looks believable, does it not?

The right-hand side was produced in Painter 11. I imported the image from Vue and painted a rough cloakfish on a semitransparent layer above it. I decided to play around with the front edge of the funnel. In that stage of their evolution, cloakfish were all filter feeders, so the opening in the front doubles as a food and a respiratory intake. Some cloakfish evolved feelers, and those are what you see here. I wasn't happy with the sketch though, and wondered whether the perspective was part of the problem.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

So I went back to Vue, altered the characteristics of the 'camera' to give it a long lens, and repeated the process. Well, well. The result looked more suitable for an illustration that the earlier one, even though that one was realistic. More realistic, because the combination of the lens with the size of the animal resulted in a perspective closer to what you would see if you were a human on Furaha. Obviously, my attempt at 'mathematical correctness' did not work. Perhaps it can be as counterproductive as its political counterpart. Anyway, I was not happy with the funnel opening.

Perhaps it was time for a redesign. Should cloakfish really all be filter feeders? There certainly are small filter feeders on Earth (polyps etc.), but there is curious gap in size in filter feeders: either they are small or they are colossal, such as whales. I cannot think of sardine- or tuna-sized filter feeders. While I haven't thought that problem through, it seems a real one. I wanted cloakfish to occupy lots of niches and needed a good range of sizes. Perhaps the beasts needed a separation of alimentary and breathing tracts after all.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

Here is an all-new cloakfish. The inner body protrudes forward from the funnel, that, as before, contains the gills. I played with it having four jaws, but decided against it. What you see here is the latest thing in cloakfish design: a regular mouth with a horizontal split. It need not stay that way, though. As you can see, their eyes have shifted forwards on the funnel to improve frontal vision while still having excellent all-round vision. And the perspective? Well, a view without strongly convergent lines, such as this one, may help viewers get a good feeling for the animal's shape.

From kudu to bogorbes

There is too much going on at present for me to write any blog entries on arcane biomechanical biomechanics on other planets. For once, I will focus on some personal aspects behind a Furahan animal, an idea suggested by two anniversaries of past events. Twenty years ago I visited sub-Saharan Africa for the first time. I wished to see animals in the wild, reasoning that the slow degradation of the world's biodiversity would render such visits meaningless in time. I wasn't wrong about the degradation, but it is not too late for a visit yet.

I had a great time, camping in the wild, seeing animals as they are supposed to be, and revelling in an over-abundance of beauty. Any readers who have been to Eastern of Southern Africa may recognise African influences in my paintings.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

Here is a sketch proving the point: a group of predators is enjoying their meal on a steppe or savannah, watching some large herbivores and being watched in turn. The scientist in me insists in adding that this is not a typically African scene: similar scenes have been played out on European, Asian, American and probably Australian steppes and savannahs countless times, with different species in the prey and predator roles for each time and place. But it is only in Africa that such biomes have not been wholly replaced by wheat fields, livestock pastures or the human habitat, explaining the strong association of such scenes with Africa. In my case, the associations have a strong personal flavour as well.

That visit changed my life because I met my wife to be during that trip. We got married a few years later, and visited Africa several times afterwards, something I stopped doing after she died, also quite some time ago. At the time she was as enamoured with the wildlife as I was. I returned home earlier than my travel companions, and immediately sent off countless rolls of film to be developed (it was 20 years ago). I sent a few prints to my fellow travellers, and decided to tweak one I would sent to my later wife in Paris, where she then lived.

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

I took out my oil paints and altered a photograph of a greater kudu, an antelope, standing on the shores of Lake Bogoria in Kenya. I added a third pair of legs in the front as well as a new neck and head, and masked out bits of leftover kudu. I varnished the photograph so my handiwork was not too apparent. I sent my 'cooked kudu' to her, and she had a good laugh with it. She mixed the photograph with photographs of her own of that trip. A friend of hers went through her stack of vacation photographs, said "Tiens, il y a six pattes" ("Hey, there's six legs") on encountering the photograph and then simply continued flicking through the pictures, without apparently realising that a large six-legged herbivore was more than just a trifle strange, in Africa or anywhere else...

My wife later dubbed the animal a 'bogorbes' (Venia lauta), and it has been part of the Furahan fauna ever since. You will find it on the cover of Sigismunda Felsacker's travelogue "Paleo Days" (see the New Hades book shop), and the blurb text there was written by my wife; not everyone in the Furaha universe is fictional.

"Maybe if you stick on another leg at the end of the tail?"

Designing a novel way of walking for extraterrestrial animals is complicated. I tried my hand at designing gaits for large hexapodal creatures (see the main Furaha site), radial walking patterns and also explored walking with an odd number of limbs. In all such efforts the trick is to achieve something that looks interesting as well as believable. In the context of speculative biology 'believable' is balanced somewhere between 'Earth normal' and weirdness. One thing is clear though: you cannot get a believable result by assembling an animal of leftover bits and pieces, such as just sticking an extra leg on the end of a long tail.

Or can you? As usual, evolution on Earth manages to come up with designs that, if invented by a mere human, would fall in the category of unacceptable weirdness. The following video shows an insect that looks odd, but oddness by itself is fairly normal for insects. Look how it moves: most of the time insects walk with a double tripod gait: the front and hind legs on one side move in unison with the middle leg on the other side. When these three legs touch the ground they form a stable tripod. The other three legs meanwhile are lifted and swung forwards, and when they touch the ground, they will form a tripod as well. The two tripods are exactly out of phase, so when one hind leg is on the ground the other should be in the air. Now have a look at the hind legs of this interesting beastie, a trilobite beetle from Borneo. The original is here.

Its pairs of legs are in phase, a bit unexpected, but slow-moving insects can do that. But that is not all: it uses the tip of its abdomen as an additional unpaired leg. It curves its abdomen forwards, plants its 'leg' on the ground, and pushes backwards with it. Anatomically this may not be a proper leg, but functionally this animal certainly uses seven legs: it's a heptapod!

Here's another video. The beginning shows that this species can also walk with the front legs out of phase, but you do not get to see all legs that well. It is clear though that it uses the end of its abdomen as a seventh functional leg.

Why do these animals walk in this weird fashion? The gait does not look quick or agile. In fact, the animals appear to be rather slow and clumsy. A bit of research points to an answer. These 'trilobite beetles' are said to belong to the genus Duliticola, and using Google with that name results in a paper starting with the brilliantly surrealistic sentence 'There are two trilobite larva species in Singapore.' Apparently, the male and female of these species differ greatly in shape: the males look like typical beetles while the females are neotenous. Now neoteny is a condition in which sexual maturity occurs while the body is still in a larval stage. The axolotl is a famous example, and humans are sometimes thought to display neoteny as well.

But what does that mean for the strange gait of this apparently female insect? Well, it looks a bit like a regular adult insect, with a hard exoskeleton and all, but its general body shape is in fact that of a caterpillar. Caterpillars display complex gaits, not too surprising if you think about their body plan: six regular legs that will become the legs of the adult insect, a number of 'prolegs' (the knobby stumps further along a caterpillar's body), as well as final 'anal prolegs'. All of these are attached to a boneless body, providing endless opportunities of combining walking with stretching of the body. So that explains the trilobite beetle's walk: its' a caterpillar in disguise. Never underestimate insects' capability of oddness.

There is of course more to be told about caterpillar movement. In fact, at least in some species their gut moves inside their body before the outside follows up. The following video show that very nicely as well as the combination of body stretching with using legs. Perhaps there is a risk that you will learn more about caterpillar movement that you bargained for, but personally, I love details.

It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a... flying squid!?

A year ago images of flying squid were in the news, including two short papers in Scientific American (here and here). Somehow I missed them at the time. Perhaps they are old news to readers of this blog, but I thought they were still very interesting. After all, cephalopods (octopus, squid and the like) attract attention from just about everyone with an interest in speculative evolution. I think Dougal Dixon was the first to have them venture out on land, a concept followed so often that it has become a cliché (but which does not mean that it was not a great idea at the time). I criticised the concept of 'walking with tentacles' in a series of blog entries later, reasoning that tentacles are so poorly designed to withstand compressive forces that evolution would turn them into limbs (here are the first, second, third and fourth posts on the subject). By the way, cephalopods with jointed legs would, for me, be much more interesting than ones painfully plodding about on tentacles. Unfortunately, their renal system is probably a much larger hindrance from them leaving the water than having tentacles; but I digress.

Cephalopods have jet propulsion, also a rather interesting feature to have aboard, and one that also crops up regularly in discussions on alien animal design. Some went so far as to equip animals with fuel-burning jets, something belonging in the needs-a-lot-of-faith category.

So now it turns out that some squids can leave the water, much as flying fish do, and probably for the same reason: to escape predators. And they use jet propulsion to do so. I wonder how people would react if squid did not exist and I would invent an animal with a double set of propulsion organs, fins as well as a jet: "What, two means of propulsion? That is improbable and inefficient!" Have that followed by the remark that they can also use their fins as wings and fold up their grasping organs to have a second pair of wings: "He's lost it this time!". Facts are often stranger than fiction, and flying squid are a prime example.

Internet searches revealed more pages and photographs of flying squid,including the following two ones. I checked two books on cephalopods I already had, and one book mentioned that the family Ommastrephidae is in fact known as 'flying squids'. The other book specifically mentioned that the fins are 'not especially well modified for gliding'. It seemed I had missed all of that.


This is a large image found here; The blogger program would not let me import all of it, so I had to cut off portions not showing squid. Even so, you may have to zoom in to see them properly. Some squid trail a stream of water behind them, that appears to be breaking up into drops in some cases. The text mentions that these images were taken as a series of rapidly taken images, and that this time series allows calculation of how fast the squid moved. That is obviously true, but unfortunately the results of those calculations were not stated, which is frustrating.

Click to enlarge; from: Bartol et al, Integr. Comp. Biol. (2008) 48 (6): 720-733

Squid squeeze a jet of water out of a tube, the 'siphon'. The image above nicely shows that the siphon can be turned around allowing the squid to move in either direction. The fins at the end of the body are a normal part of squid anatomy. Squid use both their fins and their jets to move around. The principle of jet propulsion has to do with actions and opposite reactions: pushing away a mass with a certain force results in you undergoing an equal force in the opposite reaction. The force gets bigger the more mass is pushed away and the faster it is propelled. In jet engines air streams in to the engine and out of it continuously, but in squid the propulsion is 'pulsatile'. The water is held in the mantle cavity, surrounded by muscles; when these contract water is forced out. Afterwards the muscles relax, the cavity expands and sucks in water for the next cycle. On the whole squid jet propulsion is nowhere near as efficient as swimming with a tail is, as fish do. Recent calculations suggest it is not as inefficient as formerly thought, but squid still do well do use their fins as well as their jet propulsion system. In fact, they may be better off for having two propulsion systems. I found some interesting material on that subject in a free scientific paper on the subject (from which I took the diagram above as well).

Click to enlarge

This image, found here, shows one flying squid in close up. The animal is flying towards the left. The image suggests that the fins are held in a V-shape, with the tips directed upwards. Holding wings like that is a design trick to prevent rolling about the body axis: when the animal rolls to one side, the wing on that side becomes more horizontal, so it will generates more lift. The other wing becomes more vertical and generates less left. The two effects counteracts the roll and help stabilise the body. At the other end of the animal the tentacles are held in a symmetrical way in a horizontal plane, and there appears to be a membrane between at least some tentacles. This position can only mean that the tentacles act as another wing. I cannot see on the large image whether the tentacle-wings are held in a V-position as well. The close-up seems to suggest they are not. So the 'flight plan' of the flying squid consist of two pairs of wings positioned far apart, with a long body between them. Now where have I seen that before?

Click to enlarge; copyright Gert van Dijk

Actually, only here, as far as I know. The Furahan Seasoar can be found on my website. I developed it consciously in an effort to see what could be done with a four-winged body plan. I reasoned that placing the wings far apart would place relatively much mass at the ends of the animal, making it more difficult to rotate to the left and right. The design would be stable, though, good for long and energy-efficient flights. In fact, I made a paper version once that flew quite well (which gives me an interesting idea for a future post...). The front pair of wings are held in a V-shape, but the hind pair are not. In truth, I did that only because it looked good, and I never stopped to think why one pair should be held in a V-shape and the other not. That arrangement looks a lot like that of the flying squid. Perhaps it does serve a purpose besides looking good.

The large image shows trails of water behind the squid. Does that mean that the squid are actually using jet propulsion to power their flight? Yes and no. Maybe. On the one hand it is certain that the jet allowed them to accelerate enough to leave the water, where resistance against movement is very large. That same force should have a stronger propulsive effect in air, which offers much less resistance to movement than water. On the other hand, weight is not a big problem in water, but it is in the air. Any water carried into the air to serve as 'ejection mass' for jet propulsion increases the mass of the animal and will therefore impair the squid's flying ability considerably. The good part of that is that the water is squeezed out, so the mass of the squid plus its store of water decreases quickly. As the store of water is depleted the squid gets an extra boost, which helps to propel it. There must be a complex optimum in there somewhere, in which the mass of stored water, the force of propulsion and the moment the squid leaves the water are all factors that, when balanced subtly, result in the best soaring ability. But such thoughts count in the long run of evolution. For an individual squid with a predator on its heels (so to speak), getting out of the water NOW regardless of any optimisation might be the wiser choice.