Sep 23, 2024 · By Erik Olsen

Squid Pro Quo: The California Market Squid Feeds the Ocean and the State’s Biggest Fishery

The California market squid lives fast, dies young and supports the state’s largest fishery by volume. Here’s how they live, how they’re caught and why climate change is pushing them toward Alaska.

Updated Oct 12, 2026

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If you’ve ever ordered fried calamari in California, there’s a good chance you ate one of these. The California market squid, Doryteuthis opalescens, is small, fast and kind of a big deal. It doesn’t get the attention of the giant squid or our own two-spot octopus, but it’s a key part of the ocean food web, and it’s the backbone of California’s biggest fishery.

Market squid are small, usually less than a foot long, with a long tube of a body, eight short arms and two longer tentacles, all lined with suckers for grabbing prey. Their skin is packed with chromatophores, tiny pigment sacs they can open and close to change color in an instant. They use it to hide from predators and probably to signal each other. Their eyes are impressive too. Like ours, they have a lens that focuses, which gives them sharp vision for hunting and spotting danger.

The squid’s eyes contain a lens that can focus, similar to the optical system in the human eye, allowing the squid to have keen vision. (Wikipedia)

They live fast and die young. Spawning usually runs from April to November. The male hands the female a packet of sperm, and she lays her eggs in clusters of capsules, each holding a couple hundred eggs, anchored to the sandy bottom. Then both parents usually die. Neither one sticks around to see the eggs hatch, and most market squid live only six to nine months.

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They’ll eat almost anything they can catch, mostly plankton and small fish, and almost everything bigger eats them, which makes them a crucial link between the bottom and the top of the food chain. They usually stay shallower than about 1,000 feet and rise toward the surface at night to feed.

Squid vessels at night, lights ablaze, looking for market squid in Monterey Bay. (Photo: CDFW)

That nighttime habit is how they’re caught. Squid boats switch on blazing lights to draw them up to the surface. By volume, it’s the biggest fishery in California. In 2022, fishermen landed 147 million pounds of market squid worth $88 million, according to NOAA’s landings database, nearly a quarter of everything caught commercially in the state by weight. A lot of it is shipped to Europe and Asia. It’s a boom-and-bust business, though. Squid numbers swing with ocean conditions, and in bad years, especially during El Niño, they can almost vanish, and the fleet suffers.

The fishery is run by the California Fish and Game Commission and the Department of Fish and Wildlife under the state’s Market Squid Fishery Management Plan.

California Market Squid (NOAA)

Climate change is starting to move them around. A Stanford study published in The American Naturalist found that warming oceans have likely helped market squid spread north, all the way into the Gulf of Alaska. Up there, they could shake up local food webs by competing with, or eating, young salmon.

“As climate change progresses, there are bound to be other species like the California market squid that move to more suitable seas,” Mark Denny, a marine scientist at Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station and senior author of the paper, told Stanford’s Earth Matters magazine. “Investigating what happens to this squid and the ecosystems around them right now will help researchers predict what could happen to other marine life later.”

To keep the fishery sustainable, regulators use seasonal closures during spawning, weekend closures and limits on gear, and NOAA lists market squid as a smart seafood choice. But there’s a big gap in what we know. As the agency notes: “Short- and long-term changes in the market squid population are poorly understood. The stock has not been assessed so there are no reliable estimates of the population size and the overfished and overfishing status are unknown.”

So enjoy your calamari. Just know that the little squid on your plate lived a short, intense life, and that nobody’s entirely sure how many of them are out there.