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the fishing boats. Research.
The intent was to get a head start on what would essentially be extreme squid fishing,
    for science.
    It took nearly hour and half of getting far enough away from the shore, for the radar to pick up large quantities of bleeping dots, slowly moving north.
There must have been thousands,
maybe tens of thousands of Humboldt squid,
swarming beneath their feet.
    Allen stopped the motors.
    This job wasn’t mandatory. It wasn’t pushed onto them by their superiors or the board of directives at the university - they all wanted to do it.
For their love of the ocean.
The tags themselves were very expensive to make;
state of the art little gadgets.
Once attached, each one had the ability to record the surrounding temperature and depth of each animal.
    Only for real ocean-geeks.
With squid tagging, there has never been a protocol, it was all about how many squid they can catch and record, and bring back a live sample. The steps sound easy enough; bait a squid, catch a squid, tag a squid, release.
All that mattered is that they attach all sixteen tags.
The purchased bucket of live squirming shrimp was received with no mercy. No shrimp cries could be heard when the helpless creatures got pierced with sharp hooks, nor when they flew through the air toward their inevitable doom. They also used small fish in combination with a shrimp-like squid jig and bits of bread.
Not one of the guys felt sorry for the shrimp, for they had all eaten something that included shrimp in some way just in the last week and surely, they would again eat some more that very evening to celebrate.                                       The cloudy sky quickly turned ominous purples, overcast and rather dark for the time of day.
    Sharp rays of light penetrated the shallow areas of the clouds and shone down on the wavy desert-like plain of the ocean waves., bathing their boat with light. Sunglasses were not optional.
Not 10 minutes after they cast their lines, Steve caught the first squid. It was a Humboldt, and just over 92lbs. Big first catch of the day. Fortunately he’d put on his gloves in time for the tentacled beast not to cut his skin and pointed the sea-beast away into the ocean when he squeezed it squirted ink. The tag was then affixed to the squid’s fin from below, like a piercing.
There was no denying what was clearly a flinch of pain in the creature’s body language when the little hooks sunk into its rubbery body, but it did not matter.
    The squid hardly felt it and it will be dead in a few months anyway. Just a year long lifespan.
“Is that even enough time to form relationships?
I mean they’re like the ultimate swinger.”
    Allen tended to be overly sexual at times, but none of the guys really cared. He’d never dare at home.
Then Steve noticed something odd.  
    “Look at the way it moves its tentacles.”
    When he spoke, his silly accent was suddenly not so silly anymore. The frightened cephalopod was soon on its way to abandonment, hopefully forgetting the trauma it had been caused before turning to alcoholism.
    What none of them were ever able to appreciate was that any of the squid they tagged were quickly rejected by the rest of the crowd, quickly attacked by other squid and outcast to be loners, forced to seek exile in colder waters with as few predators as possible.                           Trying their hardest to survive, against all odds.
The nature didn’t allow for such a drastic force of tampering, and without the slightest sympathy for its victims. Not unlike much of species on earth, the squids perished after the human touch.

    The quota for the day was to get the most they could get in the 30 minutes from the first squid they catch. By catching squid for 30 minutes each tagging, the sample sizes would make for fair tests.
    The vast numbers of the cephalopods have depleted much of the fish in the ocean and went starving, so they were ‘biting’ indeed. By 4 o’clock