Humboldt squid in Los Cabos

How to recognize it

A robust, thick-walled squid with rhomboid fins about 56% as wide as the mantle is long. The arm tips stretch into long, thin filaments packed with 100 to 200 pairs of tiny suckers, and the mantle locks to the head with an inverted-T cartilage typical of its family. Its skin is full of chromatophores that change its color in an instant; in Mexico it’s also called diablo rojo.

Biology

Jumbo squid live in the eastern Pacific from California to southern Chile, and in Mexico they’re found along the whole Pacific coast and inside the Gulf of California, where the main concentrations are off Santa Rosalía and Guaymas. By day they stay deep, below about 250 m in the oxygen minimum zone; at night they rise toward the surface to feed on lanternfish, sardines, mackerels and crabs, mostly at night and in the first hours of daylight.

They grow fast and die young: in the Gulf the oldest squid aged were about 385 days for males and 450 for females, though the species can pass 1.2 m in mantle length and 50 kg. In turn they feed big fish, sharks, sea lions, dolphins and sperm whales. Off California, jumbo squid were among the two most important prey of swordfish, and in one Mexican study they made up 37.5% of the diet of silky sharks.

How it's caught in Los Cabos

In Baja California Sur jumbo squid are fished at night with jigs called poteras, under bright lights, mainly by fleets from Santa Rosalía, Mulegé and Loreto. The jigs glow, so they need no bait, although some fishermen add a piece of squid head or tentacle. Mexican rules let sport anglers keep squid, the only mollusk they may take, up to five a day. Since the Gulf turned warmer, its squid have stayed small, and big-squid nights are no longer a sure thing.

Around Los Cabos the squid matters most as food and bait. Local reports from the Gordo Banks panga fleet call squid a favorite food of pelagic gamefish, especially swordfish, and in April 2011 East Cape charters reported striped marlin plugged with medium-sized squid. Mexico’s squid management plan lists it as bait for sport, artisanal and industrial fishing. Encounters off Cabo itself are irregular; during El Niño years the squid shift toward Baja’s Pacific coast.

On the table

Jumbo squid is eaten fresh and processed. In Mexico the thick mantle sells mostly as frozen fillet or canned, and fins and tentacles are now sold too; when the management plan was published, 89% of Mexico’s catch was exported to Japan, Korea, China, the Philippines and Spain.

Rules, records & conservation

Don't confuse it with

Other oceanic flying squids share the inverted-T locking cartilage, but the jumbo squid’s arm tips stretch into long, thin filaments packed with 100 to 200 pairs of tiny suckers.

Questions

By Max VargasTop Anglers, Cabo San Lucas · international judge at big game fishing world championships · reviewed October 2026

Sources

• Zeidberg & Robison 2007, range expansion (PNAS)
• Seibel et al. 2014, metabolic suppression in hypoxia (J Exp Biol)
• MBARI: deciphering the visual language of Humboldt squid
• Ibarra-García et al. 2014, cannibalism in the Gulf of California (Hidrobiológica)
• Frawley et al. 2019, warm-water regime and the Gulf fishery (ICES J Mar Sci)
• Pacheco-Aldana et al. 2026, striped marlin diet in Cabo San Lucas (J Fish Biol)
• Preti et al. 2023, swordfish diet in the California Current (PLoS One)
• Plan de Manejo Pesquero de Calamar Gigante, 2014 (DOF)
• NOM-017-PESC-1994, 2013 amendment (DOF)

Top illustration: Top Anglers. Photos: iNaturalist contributors, credited on each photo.