How is a Nautilus Different from a Squid?

[MUSIC]

[A chambered nautilus swims through an aquarium.]

NEIL LANDMAN (Curator, Division of Paleontology, American Museum of Natural History): So I love nautilus. They’re a unique group of animals.

[Camera pans over nautilus-like fossils. Neil Landman appears on screen.]

LANDMAN: They’ve been around on our planet for the last 5- to 600 million years and have left a remarkable record.

[Screen fades to white. Illustrated nautiluses form a border on the screen and a larger version bobs up and down in the center.]

LANDMAN: We don’t have very much to compare it to because it’s so different from all other modern cephalopods.

[Text appears: How is a nautilus different from a squid? That text is then replaced by: 1. They’re really old.]

LANDMAN: Nautilus is the most primitive of all the cephalopods.

[Camera pans over a few nautilus fossils. Camera pans over a fossil of a squid. Text appears: Squids: 350 million years old.]

LANDMAN: The oldest squid that we have are 350 million years

[A hand holds up a nautilus fossil. Text appears: Nautilids: 500 million years old.]

LANDMAN: but the lineage of nautilids is about 500 million years old.

[A living nautilus sits at the bottom of an aquarium. Text appears: 2. They have shells.]

LANDMAN: So what makes nautilus unique

[Neil Landman appears on screen holding a nautilus shell. At the bottom left text appears: Neil Landman, Curator, Division of Paleontology.]

LANDMAN: among all cephalopods today is this external shell.

[Nautilus shells dance in a tray. Shots of a diorama of reimagined ancient cephalopods, all of which have shells in different sizes and shapes.]

LANDMAN: Back at the dawn of cephalopod evolution, probably all of them had shells.

[Neil Landman appears on screen again, indicating with a nautilus shell.]

LANDMAN: On the outside it seems like it’s a solid shell, but on the inside, you immediately detect that it’s a series of chambers ever-increasing in size, until you come to the body chamber, where the animal is lodged.

[Close-up of the interior of a nautilus shell, which is segmented in a spiral.]

LANDMAN: So each of these chambers is filled with air during life,

[Footage of a living nautilus bobbing along in the ocean.]

LANDMAN: and that permits the animal to maintain a neutral buoyancy as it grows.

[Text appears: 3. They have more than eight arms. A nautilus extends its tentacle-like cirri towards the camera.]

LANDMAN: If you look at the early embryology, you’ll see the same number of arm buds as the other cephalopods,

[Neil Landman speaks on screen.]

LANDMAN: but they develop very differently so that they develop into all of these tiny, little tentacle-like structures,

[Close-up of nautilus cirri. Hand-drawn arrows point to them. A nautilus uses its cirri to pry at the food another nautilus is holding. Text on screen reads: cirri.]

LANDMAN: called cirri, about a hundred little cirri.

[Text appears: 4. They aren’t hunters. Old grainy footage of a squid lunging at a fish in an aquarium.]

LANDMAN: If you look at squids, you think of them as lunging predators. Nautilus doesn’t swim all that well.

[Neil Landman appears on screen.]

LANDMAN: I mean, it swims perfectly well for what it needs to do,

[A nautilus calmly hovers in an aquarium holding a frozen shrimp.]

LANDMAN: but it’s not going to be doing these predatory lunging activities.

[Camera trap footage of a nautilus trying to get at bait in a cage. Another nautilus hovers near the ocean floor with its cirri extended all around it. A group of three nautiluses swim slowly around a baited camera trap.]

LANDMAN: It’s going to scavenge along the bottom, looking for dead animals. So it’s a different mode of life.

[Text appears: 5. They have huge eggs – and hatch in adult form. The camera moves over a big clump of oblong white egg cases on the ocean floor. Text appears with an arrow: Squid egg cases.]

LANDMAN: If you look at the common squid Loligo, it produces thousands of eggs, but each egg is very small.

[Screen fades to white. A dot appears in the middle. Text reads: 1mm squid egg]

LANDMAN: It’s probably going to be a millimeter in size.

[An insert appears next to the dot showing a photograph of a squid larvae. Text reads: Paralarvae (plankton-sized).]

LANDMAN: And the newly-hatched animals are going to spend time as paralarvae. Nautilus is a very different strategy.

[A large oblong jagged object appears on screen. Text reads: Nautilus egg. 5 cm]

LANDMAN: A nautilus will lay only about a dozen eggs, the largest in the invertebrate kingdom.

[Neil Landman appears on screen.]

LANDMAN: And embryonic development takes an extraordinarily long time, a year.

[A small nautilus shell dances on screen with an arrow pointing to it and text reading: Juvenile. A ruler inches its way on screen below the nautilus shell. It appears to be an inch to two inches in size.]

LANDMAN: A nautilus a little more than an inch in size hatches,

[Camera trap footage with a large nautilus near the cage, and from bottom right a small nautilus starts swimming upwards. An arrow appears near the smaller nautilus and text reads: Baby nautilus!]

LANDMAN: and it begins to assume all of the behavior of an adult scavenging along the bottom.

[Text appears: 6. They live long lives. Neil Landman appears on screen.]

LANDMAN: Nautilus is clearly one of the most exceptional of the cephalopods in that it grows very slowly. Most squid, octopus, cuttlefish-

[Minimalist drawings of a squid, octopus, and cuttlefish appear on screen with the text: ~6 months to 2 years.]

LANDMAN: grow very rapidly and reach maturity in a few years and die.

[X’s appear over the eyes of the hand drawn animals. They move offscreen and are replaced by the drawing of a nautilus, under which text appears: 20 years.]

LANDMAN: But nautilus reaches maturity in about 20 years.

[The drawing of the nautilus dissolves into live footage of a nautilus swimming in the ocean. Text appears: 7. They’re endangered.]

LANDMAN: So nautilus today are broadly distributed in the Indo-Pacific,

[Footage from camera traps of nautilus feeding on the ocean floor. Neil Landman reappears on screen.]

LANDMAN: and we don’t really know exactly all the places they live but at some sites, we know for sure that they have been overharvested,

[A pearly nautilus shell is moved to catch the light. Another nautilus shell is covered in complex carvings and decoration. A third nautilus shell is worn as a necklace.]

LANDMAN: not for the food value, but for the ornamental value. The fact that they have very few eggs, and they’re slow-growing animals,

[Neil Landman reappears on screen.]

LANDMAN: really, really, is not good news for a population.

[Live footage of nautiluses swimming in the ocean.]

LANDMAN: So if you are fishing them, you risk exterminating them. Current research is revealing new sites,

[Neil Landman appears on screen again.]

LANDMAN: so there may be hope that it’s a more robust population than we think but

[Camera pans over a nautilus in an aquarium.]

LANDMAN: conservationists around the world have begun to worry about the fate of nautilus.

[Credits roll. As credits roll, video of someone holding a nautilus shell like a puppet with their fingers as cirri plays on the bottom right.

Video

AMNH / L. Stevens

AMNH / K. Corben

David Gruber

Dr. Gregory Barord and Dr. Peter Ward, funded in part by United States Fish and Wildlife Service

John Sparks

Patrick Anders Webster

Vincent Pieribone

Images / Archive

NOAA Photo Library

Thomas Quine

Music

“Nude Strut” by Adam Mark Gubman (ASCAP) / Warner/Chappell Production Music

“Whistling on the Beach” by Cesar Manrique (GEMA) / Warner/Chappell Production Music

“Last Waltz in Buenos Aires” by Lars-Luis Linek (GEMA), Johannes Matthias Hoffmann (Arr) (GEMA) / Warner/Chappell Production Music

Special Thanks

Bushra Hussaini

Gregory Barord

Jennifer Basil & the Basil Laboratory at Brooklyn College, CUNY

Royal Mapes

© American Museum of Natural History]

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