Fantastic Metropolis

The second phase begins when the male’s colors fluctuate wildly, from green to silver to purple. This is the female squid’s signal to allow herself to be chased by the male, sometimes for as long as 12 hours. During this period, she will perform a series of maneuvers intended to emphasize her agility, speed, and endurance. At irregular intervals, she will turn on the male squid and chase him instead, before once again allowing him to chase her. Whether this intricate “fatigue dance,” with its stops and starts, its sudden changes of direction, and its bursts of speed, ever leads to death for either party prior to mating is unknown. Regardless, in some respects the dance signifies a last celebration of strengths that both will soon lose, the male before the female.

On the third day, entwined in each other’s arms and tentacles, the mating pair ascends to the surface of the lake or river, there to mate and produce the fertilized eggs that the female will care for until they hatch, some six weeks later. The resulting cloud of young will grow at an exponential rate and reach maturity in one month. Nine months later, they will repeat the mating rituals of their parents.(27)

Human Interaction with the Mayfly Squid

Florida’s Squid Mills

A Risky Scheme

In 1948, the brothers Jeremy and Henry Davids stole a page from the already booming Florida fish farms^[19] and built the first squid mills on the banks of Lake Okeechobee. Like many Florida entrepreneurs before and since (see: Ralph Parker and his ostrich farms), the Davids believed that an exotic animal could be turned into a profitable replacement for more traditional meats. The enterprise was funded with money from their inheritance; their father Bill Davids, recently deceased, had been a real estate developer and politician.^[20]

The Davids’ risky scheme called for construction of squid mills and a cannery without first testing a squid mill prototype or acquiring a nationwide distributor.^[21] For the squid mill design, they secured the services of the inventor Arthur T. Lynch. Lynch had previously obtained patents for an automated dog kennel, a self-cleaning cat carrier, and several other animal-confinement devices. Wealthy retirees in West Palm Beach had bought his more domestic inventions by the score. As he wrote in a May 1948 letter to the Davids brothers, “it is time to work my magic on a more commercial scale.” (28)

Lynch eventually delivered a contraption on pontoons that combined elements of a lobster trap with his earlier inventions. Made of wire mesh, the squid mill’s several compartments could be lowered by a winch until they touched bottom and closed off a portion of the lake. Lures popular in squid jigging (along with live bait) would be placed on the inner “gate” of the squid mill, with access controlled through a series of latches. The latches would pose no problem for “wild” mayfly squid to open, but would be alligator-, fish-, and turtle-proof . Once inside, the wild squid would eventually find their way to the central pen that housed the domesticated squid, adding to the potential meat harvest. Several squid mills could be set side by side, or they could be placed at a distance from each other. The center pens could be subdivided or enlarged as necessary. In anticipation of the mating season, Lynch designed a series of grooves on the sides, top, and bottom of the pens. Wooden slates that slid into the grooves would imprison the juvenile squid, which would otherwise have swum to freedom through the holes in the mesh. Further innovations allowed the Davids to separate the female and male squid immediately after mating-the males for slaughter, the females to a “nursery” area.^[22]

Success and Failure

The Davids approved of Lynch’s invention and ordered 30 units. They then hired men with fish farm experience and set up operations on the south shore of Lake Okeechobee. By the summer of 1949, the first canned squid were rolling off the assembly line and into grocery stores across Florida. A distribution contract with the Publix Supermarkets chain^[23] helped fund an advertising campaign in a few Florida newspapers. One ad in the St. Petersburg Times showed a classic clip-art 50s dad sharing a can of squid with his son over the tag line “Davids Bros. Canned Freshwater Squid: As Pure As the Best Things in Life. Buy Some at Your Local Grocer’s Today!” Third-quarter sales of canned squid netted the Davids brothers $10,000 in profits. (29)