Chôco (Sepia officinalis)

A cephalopod mollusc that is not rare in Madeiran coastal waters, especially in summer. It is edible and tastes good; it is caught on hook rigs, but more commonly in trawl nets. Its internal shell, which is called silba (a corruption of siba), often turns up on the beaches, pecked by seabirds. The gull is one of this animal’s enemies, watching for it in flight and swooping swiftly on it when it approaches the surface of the sea. The black liquid which the cuttlefish squirts out, clouding the water and so hiding itself from its enemies, is called ferral by the fishermen, no doubt because of its dark rust colour. This is the same liquid that elsewhere is used to make a brown ink used in painting under the name of sepia. Sometimes, when hauling in the boat’s mooring stone (poita), the fisherman finds it wrapped in a strange object resembling a bunch of grapes, whose black, soft and somewhat pear-shaped berries have the limpness of rubber: these are the cuttlefish’s eggs, called uvas do mar (sea grapes) and stained by the ferral itself. They were laid around the mooring rope while the boat was at anchor – or apoitado, in the characteristic phrase of seafaring men.