2023-12-26 17:42:01
The pigmentation of cuttlefish is made up of brown, yellow and red dots, which correspond to pigment cells. Stephan Junek, Max Planck Institute for Brain Research.
ANALYSIS – Cephalopods are able to camouflage themselves by controlling the millions of pigmented cells in their skin.
Camouflage is an art that is certainly widespread in life, but oh so fascinating. If there are animals that master it more than any other, and actively, it is surely the cephalopods of the coleoid subclass. These marine animals armed with tentacles which include cuttlefish, octopuses and even squid among them, and which are capable of changing their appearance in the blink of an eyelash and blending into their environment. A study published this year in the magazine Nature deciphers the incredibly complex mechanism that allows common cuttlefish to change their color according to their own will.
« Cephalopod camouflage is unique in the living world, explains Gilles Laurent, neurobiologist at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt (Germany), who is leading this work. Certainly, reptiles know how to change color, but it is a slow, low-resolution humoral mechanism for them. In the cephalopod, it is…
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