KARACHI: An increased presence of purpleback flying squid (or purple squid) -- a specific species of the oceanic squid -- has been noticed in the country’s offshore waters, the World Wide Fund for Nature-Pakistan (WWF-P) reported on Sunday.

According to the organisation, fishermen have been reporting huge aggregations of oceanic squid (Sthenoteuthis oualaniensis) in the offshore waters since November last.

“This year, they have noticed an unprecedented concentration of this squid in the offshore waters along Sindh and Balochistan coasts especially in the Khori Great Bank (Sindh coast) and off Malan (Balochistan coast),” said technical adviser on marine fisheries at the WWF-P Mohammad Moazzam Khan.

According to him, purpleback flying squid is occasionally caught by fishermen as by-catch but has never been observed in such dense concentration.

“A number of fishermen have reported an unusual increase in their population over the past two months. Interestingly, a fisherman, Hidayatullah, had observed large numbers of squids encircling his gillnetter during the daytime at 65 nautical miles southwest of Cape Monz,” he said, describing the report as unusual as purpleback flying squids were seldom seen in the surface waters.

This squid lived in open waters from the surface down to the depth of around 1,000m of the ocean. It exhibited diurnal vertical migration and moved from deeper layers to surface or shallower waters during the night, he said.

He attributed the abundant occurrence of purpleback flying squid in the Arabian Sea to long-term changes in the oceanic regime and suggested that it presented an opportunity for the fisheries industry to gear up for exporting this high-priced commodity to Far East Asian countries.

Senior director programmes at WWF-P Rab Nawaz underlined the need for studying long-term changes in the oceanographic factors that may have favoured one particular species of squid as well as jellyfish whose unprecedented blooms were earlier observed.

It is interesting to note that in some other areas of the Arabian Sea and Persian Gulf, unusual occurrence of purpleback flying squid has been observed over the past two months.

Fishermen in Fujairah, UAE, caught large number of this oceanic squid in November last year. Similarly, very high catches of this species were recorded from Oman. In both these areas, these squids were processed and exported.

Published in Dawn, January 16th, 2017