News: Cuttlefish Camouflage and Colorblindedness

[tonmo]

Found on our News page, here's an interesting new article on ScienceDaily about cuttlefish camouflage and colorblindedness:

Cuttlefish Masters Of Disguise Despite Colorblindness



Also note the actual Press Release from MBL.

 

[monty]

Found on our News page, here's an interesting new article on ScienceDaily about cuttlefish camouflage and colorblindedness:

Cuttlefish Masters Of Disguise Despite Colorblindness



Also note the actual Press Release from MBL.

Way cool! Researchers who put a link to the pdf of the article and the movies rock!

(I have the minor gripe that the article has a logical fallacy, in that it assumes "the absence of the positive proves the negative"-- i.e. it's possible, though unlikely, that the cuttle can see the colors, but doesn't use them as criteria for choosing its pattern)

It also has a lot of refs I didn't have for color vision experiments, including one where someone did electrophysiology on an octopus retina directly and looked at what the receptor responses actually were to different wavelengths of light!

 

[bathypol]

ok, so am I blind? I don't see the movies anywhere.....

 

[monty]

ok, so am I blind? I don't see the movies anywhere.....

I only saw 1 movie; click on the press release link, and scroll down to "resources: view the video (quicktime)"

I just used plural to say all researchers who put their stuff on the web rock...

I also just slammed my finger in the door, which makes it annoyingly hard to type. ow.

 

[sorseress]

Loved watching the cuttle change color in the blink of an eye.

 

[Stavros]

One of my favorite questions regarding underlying behavioral mechanisms of body patterning... It's hard to believe these guys are color blind- I don't think the evidence is necessarily conclusive and recent findings with possible extra-ocular photoreceptive function show there's more to learn.

 

[DWhatley]

An interesting test would be to see if a severed arm can still match its environment (we know it can move and change colors).