Another day, another species. AUT's squid team have made yet another surprise discovery, this time on camera.
"There we go, lazy T, Thysanoteuthis rhombus, from the New Zealand EEZ, it's a new record," says Dr Kat Bolstad, from the AUT Squid Lab.
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The team had planned to show Newshub how they dissected samples found in the Kermadec Islands pulling one at random from a NIWA freezer.
But accidentally they found yet another new species of squid. It's been a great year for this team - they've already identified 13 species of cephalopod in the Kermadecs.
"Of those 13 have never been found in New Zealand waters at all before and probably five or six are new to science," Dr Bolstad says.
These latest finds have doubled the species of squid found in the area.
It's where the government wanted to set up a 620,000 square kilometre ocean sanctuary, but a legal challenge has put plans on hold.
"This really high diversity of cephalopods up there will give the proposed sanctuary a bit of a boost, because it does seem to be a very unique group of species up there," Dr Bolstad says.
Squid Lab post-doctoral fellow Heather Braid has identified many of these species by analysing their DNA.
She's got a reputation for splitting up families of squid species into even more species and forcing other researchers to update their text books.
"I will be able to tell people they have a new species and they're not often not as excited about that as I thought they would be, because they're often quite cryptic," she says.
"I wreck people's squid families."
The squishy specimens are now going back in the freezer but the secrets they've unveiled have left some very happy squid scientists.
Newshub.
