What is the difference between squid and cuttlefish? Teach you a quick way to tell them apart

The cuttlefish is properly named wu zei, also known as huazhi, modouyu or moyu, and is an animal of the phylum Mollusca, class Cephalopoda, order Sepiida. Squid generally refers to the loligo squid, a shallow-sea species that mainly lives within the continental shelf, mostly active in the middle and lower layers during the day and often rising to the middle and upper layers at night, with a vertical migration range from the surface to more than a hundred meters. Now let us take a look at what differences there are between squid and cuttlefish!

The taxonomic difference between squid and cuttlefish

1. Squid: Squid is a mollusk of the animal kingdom, phylum Mollusca, class Cephalopoda, subclass Coleoidea, order Teuthida, family Loliginidae, genus Loligo.

2. Cuttlefish: Cuttlefish is a mollusk of the animal kingdom, phylum Mollusca, class Cephalopoda, subclass Neocoleoidea, order Sepiida, suborder Sepiina, family Sepiidae, genus Sepia.

The arm and tentacle difference between squid and cuttlefish

1. Squid: The squid has a slender body in a long cone shape, with more than a dozen tentacles, two of which are longer. The front ends of the tentacles have suckers, and inside the suckers are horny toothed rings. When preying on food, it uses its tentacles to entangle and swallow it. It likes to gather in groups, especially during the mating and spawning season in spring and summer.

2. Cuttlefish: The cuttlefish's foot has specialized into arms and a funnel. It has 10 arms arranged symmetrically on the left and right. At the very center of the back is the first pair, and toward the ventral side are pairs 2 to 5 in order. The fourth pair of arms is especially long, with the end enlarged into a tongue shape, located at the front of the body, spherical, with the mouth at its tip. There are 10 arms in total, with 8 short arms and also two long tentacles for catching food, surrounded by a buccal membrane, called tentacles, which can catch prey and can be retracted into tentacular pouches.

The dietary difference between squid and cuttlefish

1. Squid: The squid is a fierce carnivorous animal. Its food is mostly small pelagic and midwater species such as anchovies, sardines, jack mackerel and krill, and it also preys heavily on its own kind. It is itself an important prey for tuna, chub mackerel, hairtail and seabirds.

2. Cuttlefish: The cuttlefish mainly eats crustaceans, small fish or other mollusks. Its main enemies are large aquatic animals. The ink in its body is usually stored in the ink sac in its belly. When attacked by an enemy, it sprays a stream of ink from the ink sac, dyeing the surrounding seawater pitch black, and then takes the opportunity to flee.

The distribution difference between squid and cuttlefish

1. Squid: Squid is distributed in tropical and temperate waters between 40° north and south latitude. The world's main loligo squid fishing grounds are in the northern South China Sea, the Gulf of Siam, Kyushu in Japan, the central Philippine Islands, western Western Europe, and the eastern and western waters of the United States. The fishing grounds are mostly located around islands and reefs, where the water is clear and the current slow, the salinity relatively high, the bottom material coarse and hard, the seabed has depressions, and coastal water systems meet warm current systems.

2. Cuttlefish: Cuttlefish is distributed in all the world's oceans, mainly living in tropical and temperate coastal shallow waters, and often migrating to deeper waters in winter. Common cuttlefish breed in spring and summer, laying about 100 to 300 eggs. There are many species of cuttlefish in China. The East China Sea is rich in Sepiella maindroni, and the Taiwan loligo squid is distributed in the sea area south of the Taiwan Strait, with the open sea off Shantou and the Beibu Gulf as spawning grounds.