The squid

📖 In short

The squid is a soft-bodied sea animal with no bones, related to the octopus. It has ten arms, two of them longer than the rest, which it hunts with. It lives in every sea and often swims in big groups.

🤩 Did you know?

A giant squid can be 18 meters long with its arms.
Most squid are between 30 centimeters and several meters long.
Inside a squid's body is a thin, hard quill that supports it instead of bones.
Some squid glow in the dark.

🔎 Find out more

🌟 Jet power

A squid swims in an amazing way: it fills its body with water, then squirts it hard out of a little tube and zooms off like a rocket!

🔍 Changing color

A squid's skin has tiny color sacs it opens and closes fast, changing color in an instant to hide or talk to another squid.

💡 Ink to escape

Like the octopus, a squid squirts dark ink into the water when it's scared, vanishing behind the cloud and escaping.

🎯 The giant squid

In the dark ocean depths lives the giant squid, one of the biggest animals without a backbone, with the biggest eyes in the animal world, each the size of a plate!

📸 More pictures

🧩 Test yourself

1 How many arms does a squid have?

2 How does a squid swim fast?

3 A giant squid can be ?? meters long with its arms.

4 Which picture shows “The squid”?

🦁 Discover more

📷 Picture sources: Wikimedia Commons

Nhobgood Nick Hobgood · CC BY-SA 3.0
Betty Wills · CC BY-SA 4.0