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The impact of temperature on cephalopod growth has become a productive area of study. Current knowledge of squid growth owes much to earlier laboratory studies on octopuses and cuttlefishes that revealed rapid temperature-sensitive growth. Advances in laboratory culture of squids eventually revealed the dramatic extent to which rising water temperature accelerates growth rates. This led to proposal and testing of a working hypothesis, the Forsythe Hypothesis, that during periods of gradually warming temperature, monthly cohorts of squids experience warmer conditions and grow faster, and perhaps larger, than older, earlier-hatched cohorts. The advent of statolith increment analysis for determining age in field-caught squids has provided a powerful tool in ground-truthing this hypothesis in nature. This hypothesis, now termed here the Forsythe Effect, has been laboratory- and field-tested over the past 10 years and been strongly supported. Food availability and inherent species-specific physiological limits must also be accounted for in predicting growth. Gaps still exist in our precise understanding of the temperature-induced changes in form and duration of squid growth. Acute and chronic ocean-scale seawater-temperature change events will compel us to look to squids as ‘bioindicators’ of environmental condition and to statoliths as the ‘archives’ of this information.
John W. Forsythe (Tue,) studied this question.