Kind: captions
Language: en
[Music]
you're watching a Nova Video
podcast meet the Cuttlefish a cousin of
the squid and octopus it may not look
impressive but cuttlefish have some
extraordinary
talents at the Marine biological lab in
woods home Massachusetts Roger hanin has
been researching just how exceptional
cuttlefish and their close relatives
are my colleagues have accused me of
studying bait for 30 years and in many
ways that's true because everything is
feeding on squid and cuttlefish and
octopus so these animals are a yummy
hunk of protein swimming around in the
ocean and once they're caught they have
no defenses so they have to have a good
primary defense that's camouflage don't
be seen and among the animals on Earth
who have extraordinary skin no other
animal not a chameleon not a fish not a
shrimp can change the path PN appearance
as rapidly and with such diversity as
this animal group these animals are
changing less than an ey
blank their skin is extraordinary
because it has two ways to produce color
and pattern has chromatophores pigmented
chromatophores that create patterns but
it also has below the chromator is these
reflective cells and collectively those
two groups of cells can create optical
illusions and they can create patterns
and color and brightness and contrast
change and it's really quite
extraordinary even at the level of the
cell and the molecule and to make all
that work takes a very sophisticated
brain and it has to have a large Brain
because there are up to 20 million of
these chromator pigment cells in the
skin and to control 20 million of
anything is going to take a lot of
processing power
so here you have this anomaly you have a
short-lived invertebrate animal a very
ancient group that has evolved This
Magnificent brain now a clam doesn't
have much that you would call a brain
but a cuttle fish
does just how smart are these spineless
creatures find out on Nova's Kings of
camouflage airing April 3rd on PBS or
join us online at
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