Calamari is squid. The two words refer to the same animal, with “squid” typically used for the creature in the ocean and “calamari” for what arrives on your plate. There’s no separate species called calamari, no biological distinction. It’s simply the culinary name, borrowed from Italian.
Which Squid Species Become Calamari
The global squid catch comes primarily from two large families of squid. The first, Ommastrephidae, includes the heavy hitters in terms of sheer volume. Five species in this family dominate commercial fishing: the Japanese flying squid, the New Zealand arrow squid, two species of shortfin squid from the Atlantic, and the jumbo flying squid found in the eastern Pacific. The second family, Loliginidae, includes several species often marketed as “longfin squid,” prized for their tender texture and commonly sold in restaurants and grocery stores across North America and Europe.
If you’ve ordered fried calamari at a restaurant in the United States, it was most likely longfin squid caught off the Atlantic coast or shortfin squid from deeper offshore waters. In other parts of the world, the species varies by region, but the preparation and taste are broadly similar.
Where Squid Is Caught
Squid is harvested on every major ocean, but a few regions account for the bulk of the global supply. The Southeast Pacific, off the coasts of Peru, Chile, and Ecuador, is one of the most important fishing grounds in the world for jumbo flying squid. This species is the most abundant squid in that ocean and one of the largest cephalopod fisheries globally.
China operates the largest distant-water squid fleet by a wide margin. In the Southeast Pacific alone, Chinese-flagged vessels made up nearly 99% of the squid fishing fleet in recent analyses, with over 500 vessels logging a combined 98,000+ fishing days in a single year. These fleets concentrate along the edges of Peru’s and Ecuador’s exclusive economic zones. Other significant fleets come from Chinese Taipei (Taiwan) and South Korea.
Beyond the Pacific, squid is commercially fished in the North Atlantic (particularly off New England and eastern Canada), the Mediterranean, the waters around New Zealand, and the southwest Atlantic near Argentina and the Falkland Islands. The species changes by region, but the global trade means squid caught in one ocean often ends up processed and sold on an entirely different continent.
How Squid Is Caught
The most distinctive method is jigging, which exploits one of squid’s strongest instincts: attraction to light. Industrial jigger vessels, often around 60 meters long, are fitted with as many as 150 high-powered bulbs on deck, plus underwater lights rated between 5 and 10 kilowatts. At night, crews switch on the lights to draw squid to the surface, then use mechanized lines fitted with rows of barbless hooks (jigs) to haul them aboard. The underwater lights are also used during the day and early evening to concentrate squid at depth before nightfall.
The other major method is midwater trawling, where large nets are dragged through the water column to scoop up schools of squid. Trawling is especially common in the Atlantic longfin and shortfin squid fisheries off the U.S. East Coast.
What Part of the Squid You’re Eating
A squid’s body has a few key parts, and most of them are edible. The mantle is the tube-shaped body that makes up the bulk of the animal. When sliced crosswise, it produces the classic calamari rings. The tentacles are also commonly served, either fried alongside the rings or prepared separately. The small triangular fins (sometimes called wings or ears) attached to the top of the mantle are edible too, though they’re less commonly featured on menus.
The parts that get removed during cleaning include the head, eyes, beak (a hard structure at the center of the tentacles), the internal organs, and a thin, transparent strip of cartilage called the quill that runs the length of the mantle. The skin, a thin purplish membrane, is also peeled off for most preparations since it can become chewy when cooked. Underneath, the flesh is smooth and white.
Most calamari sold in stores and restaurants arrives already cleaned and frozen, with the mantle either left as whole tubes or pre-cut into rings. If you’re cleaning a whole squid at home, the process involves pulling the tentacles and innards away from the body, removing the quill, peeling the skin, and cutting out the beak and eyes from the tentacle cluster.
Nutritional Profile
Squid is a lean, high-protein seafood. A 4-ounce serving of raw squid contains about 104 calories, 18 grams of protein, and just 2 grams of fat. It also provides iron, calcium, and vitamin C. One notable advantage over many other types of seafood is its extremely low mercury content. Squid averages just 0.024 parts per million of mercury, placing it near the bottom of the FDA’s mercury scale for commercial fish and shellfish. For comparison, the highest-mercury fish on that list (tilefish from the Gulf of Mexico) comes in at 1.123 ppm, nearly 50 times higher. This makes calamari one of the safer seafood choices for people who eat fish regularly.
The main nutritional caveat is preparation. Raw or grilled squid is genuinely lean, but the classic restaurant version, battered and deep-fried, adds significant calories and fat from the oil and breading. The squid itself isn’t the issue; it’s what’s done to it.
Sustainability Concerns
Squid populations are naturally volatile. Most squid species live only one to two years, reproduce once, and die. That short life cycle means populations can boom or crash rapidly based on ocean conditions, making them harder to manage than longer-lived fish. For both longfin and shortfin squid in U.S. waters, NOAA Fisheries sets catch limits but lists the overfishing threshold as “unknown,” reflecting the difficulty of assessing these fast-turnover populations with precision.
The bigger sustainability questions surround the massive distant-water fleets operating on the high seas. Reported catches of squid from the high seas of the Southeast Pacific surged from about 5,000 tons in 1990 to roughly 278,000 tons by 2018. That kind of escalation, concentrated heavily among fleets from China, Taiwan, and South Korea, has raised concerns among regional fisheries management organizations about long-term stock health and the impact on countries like Peru and Ecuador, where squid is also important to local fishing communities.