What a crab sees before it gets eaten by a cuttlefish
29 comments
·March 4, 2025jjmarr
chiyc
Thanks! I didn't realize the static archive was missing the video. These are better than what's on Santon's site.
HenryBemis
Here the link to the mp4 file (from my InternetDownloadManager)
https://vp.nyt.com/video/2025/03/03/135038_1_03tb-cuttlefish...
ge96
Damn that was quick the attack
reminds me of Nope
pkilgore
Defector did it better (and included the videos): https://defector.com/this-is-the-last-thing-you-see-before-y...
junon
I find cuttlefish normally very cute but dear god this is nightmare fuel.
roughly
Defector is fantastic and Sabrina Imbler is an absolute treasure - gift link, to share the wealth: https://defector.com/this-is-the-last-thing-you-see-before-y...
alorimer
This article is so much better than the original NYT one. Great writing and no paywall.
NikolaNovak
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.
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.
My internal vision of scenes from that book is eerily similar to the videos in the article.
(On aside, would highly recommend Peter Watts to Hacker News audience :)
Baeocystin
Seconded. Blindsight remains one of my favorite meditations on the Mind's I (not a typo) that I've read.
Echopraxia, the 'sequel' (the events occur at the same time as the events in Blindsight, with a completely different group of characters) has grown on me over time, too. At the very least, it gave me a great appreciation for Portia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portia_(spider)
chiyc
I was hoping the article would include a video, but there's a great 12 second clip on Matteo Santon's site: https://matteosanton.com/research/
nsbk
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.
I think it was trying to hypnotize me, like Futurama’s good old Hypnotoad. What was the motivation behind, I will always wonder
z2
The colors understanding is even more remarkable given that they are colorblind in the sense that they do not have different color cones, and likely rely on a very imperfect process of chromatic aberration that they can somehow translate back into color.
https://www.science.org/content/article/how-colorblind-cuttl...
nsbk
Color me impressed. Remarkable indeed, thanks for the link.
hermitcrab
I spent 15 minutes watching a group of about 8 cuttlefish on a reef. There were clearly lots of complex group interactions going on between them. It is also amazing fast they can change colour.
DaiPlusPlus
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.
Wikipedia’s page on cuttlefish anatomy doesn’t help, unfortunately :/
adrian_b
Cuttlefish, like squid, have 8 short tentacles around the mouth plus other 2 much longer tentacles, which are thinner except for their ends, which are expanded and which have suckers.
The 2 long tentacles are normally kept coiled and covered by the short tentacles, so they are not visible.
When the cuttlefish catches prey, the 2 long tentacles are extended together extremely quickly and they attach to the prey (much like a chameleon catches insects with its very long tongue).
Then the 2 long tentacles are retracted quickly, bringing the prey to the mouth that is also hidden between the 8 short tentacles. The mouth has a beak, similar to a parrot beak, which is used to kill and consume the prey.
See the drawing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuttlefish#/media/File:Seba_mo...
The drawing shows the long tentacles as you could see them on a dead cuttlefish. As I have said, in the living cuttlefish you can see them only for a fraction of a second, when catching prey and bringing it to the mouth.
Also, the 2 long tentacles are extended together, one besides the other, they never stay limp and separated, like in the drawing or in a dead animal.
robocat
> The drawing shows the long tentacles as you could see them on a dead cuttlefish. As I have said, in the living cuttlefish you can see them only for a fraction of a second
Yeah: stop drawing dead butterflies https://www.emilydamstra.com/please-enough-dead-butterflies/
Once you've seen the pattern, you see the same issue with other art. I bought a biology style painting because I liked the intentional dead-animal style (both a bird and some insects).
elihu
Couldn't help but be reminded of this scene from that movie where Tom Hanks plays Fred Rogers: https://youtu.be/9AzXX_2BrVk?t=63
IamTC
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.
prxtl
Immediately got reminded of the creatures in Perdido Street Station -- Terrifying!
asadm
why do these videos just cut at the moment???
ProAm
I would totally fall for that too....
Gift link with video, because a static archive doesn't do the opening video justice:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/03/science/cuttlefish-camouf...