Gift link with video, because a static archive doesn't do the opening video justice:<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/03/science/cuttlefish-camouflage-huting-crabs.html?unlocked_article_code=1.1U4.y9tH.Aujw5YLUNl3v&smid=url-share" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/03/science/cuttlefish-camouf...</a>
Defector did it better (and included the videos): <a href="https://defector.com/this-is-the-last-thing-you-see-before-you-die-if-you-are-a-crab" rel="nofollow">https://defector.com/this-is-the-last-thing-you-see-before-y...</a>
In Peter Watts' novel Blindsight, human protagonists enter a completely alien world - not Star Trek "people with rubber ears", but different biology/consciousness-patterns/etc entirely.<p>As one of the plot points, 'aliens' (again, not the Star Trek humanoid kind) eventually 'hack' the human nervous/visual systems through various means (electromagnetic fields, visual patterns, movement types, etc) to hide things in plan sight.<p>My internal vision of scenes from that book is eerily similar to the videos in the article.<p>(On aside, would <i>highly</i> recommend Peter Watts to Hacker News audience :)
The deceptive capabilities of cuttlefish has been known since ancient Greece. The 2C AD author of hunting and fishing books Oppian wrote extensively about the 'cunning devices' of cuttlefish, as well as octopuses, which he considers to be par excellennce foxes of the sea.<p><pre><code> Yea, the crafty Cuttle-fish also has found a cunning manner of
hunting. From her head? grow long slender branches, like locks of
hair, wherewith as with lines she draws and captures fish, prone in
the sand and coiled beneath her shell.
They have seated in their heads a dark muddy fluid blacker than pitch,
a mysterious drug causing a watery cloud, which is their natural
defence against destruction. When fear seizes them, immediately they
discharge the dusky drops thereof and the cloudy fluid stains and
obscures all around the paths of the sea and ruins all the view ; and
they straightway through the turbid waters easily escape man or haply
mightier fish. ... Such are the cunning devices‘ of fishes.</code></pre>
What amazing creatures! One of the coolest experiences I’ve lived scuba diving was an interaction with a cuttlefish. It would come towards me in its alien like swimming style and crazy eyes, while pulsating super cool colors, getting very close to my face and then quickly swimming back and forth and up and down, speeding up and slowing down, like performing some kind of ritual dance.<p>I think it was trying to hypnotize me, like Futurama’s good old Hypnotoad. What was the motivation behind, I will always wonder
Crabs predate cuttlefish in the fossil record by a significant amount of time (~50 million years), but both have had a good 100 million years to battle it out and crabs are still blinded by the camo. Cuttlefish maybe have not exerted enough evolutionary pressure on crabs to make them adapt, or there are crabs that have adapted and we just don't know which species or have not discovered them yet.
I was hoping the article would include a video, but there's a great 12 second clip on Matteo Santon's site: <a href="https://matteosanton.com/research/" rel="nofollow">https://matteosanton.com/research/</a>
I’m trying to understand how/what the cuttlefish attacks the crag with - but I can’t tell if the white thing that comes out from under its… “Cthluthu mouth-tentacles” is a tongue, a beak, a bone, a pincer, a spine, or something else.<p>Wikipedia’s page on cuttlefish anatomy doesn’t help, unfortunately :/
Plenty of this going on in this BBC earth video: <a href="https://youtu.be/rbDzVzBsbGM?feature=shared&t=130" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/rbDzVzBsbGM?feature=shared&t=130</a><p>Clearly this is the inspiration for the design of the mindflayers.
This was an immersive experience. I was trying to make sense of what I was seeing, putting my face closer to the screen to take a good look at the creature... Then WHACK! paywall! It hit me before I could understand what was happening.<p>I can relate to that crab.
I always reserve budget for night diving. Below the waters, night time is like peak hour traffic, with much better chances of spotting a cuttlefish. The colors they exhibit is beautiful. You can only see them at night and with a torch light as red gets filtered out even at shallow depths.
Couldn't help but be reminded of this scene from that movie where Tom Hanks plays Fred Rogers: <a href="https://youtu.be/9AzXX_2BrVk?t=63" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/9AzXX_2BrVk?t=63</a>