Category: camouflage

Cuttlefish has to search for the best pattern

The cuttlefish has an excellent camouflage ability and rapidly modifies its appearance when the background changes. But its change is indirect, Theodosia Woo and colleagues show: the cuttlefish adjusts a new skin pattern a few times before it is good enough.

To defend itself against predators, the common cuttlefish, Sepia officinalis, like many other squids, can use camouflage to blend in with its surroundings. And if a predator still detects it, it sprays ink to block the view.

The common cuttlefish lives in the North Sea, the Baltic Sea, and the Mediterranean Sea. Depending on the substrate, such as sand, rocks, or sea grass, it can take on a uniform colour, have a mottled pattern, or have large dark and light skin areas that disrupt its contours. There are countless variations, and the cuttlefish produces an appropriate camouflage against almost any background, Theodosia Woo and colleagues write.

Pigment sacs

This is possible, among other things, thanks to two or three million pigment cells in the skin, the so-called chromatophores. They come in three colours: yellow, red, and brown. The cells are closed sacs with an elastic wall, surrounded by radial muscles. When the muscles contract on command of the brain, they pull the sac open, and the colour becomes visible.

Woo showed how cuttlefish change their appearance by doing experiments in which she provided animals with a changing background; she filmed the skin at high resolution and measured the skin patterns with robust computer software. The result is remarkable. The lightning-fast transition makes it seem as if a cuttlefish realises a new matching skin pattern in one go. But it is not like that.

Confronted with a new background, a cuttlefish immediately starts to adapt its skin pattern. But after a first change, it waits shortly and then adjusts the created pattern to improve it. Then it waits again and adjusts the pattern further, until a satisfying pattern is found. So, it goes through a search process in the blink of an eye and apparently receives feedback continuously. Search trajectories are not fixed, because when the researchers offered the same background change several times, the animals followed different search trajectories and the result was also different. The difference in final skin patterns was so subtle that we cannot observe it.

Reflection

In addition to the pigment cells that were studied here, the squid skin has two more types of neurally controlled cells that enable changes in appearance. There are cells that, thanks to their nanostructure, reflect light of one specific colour, for example blue: the iridophores. And there are cells that reflect all incident light and are white in daylight: the leucophores. In addition, the skin can be smooth or rough. The sophistication of a squid skin is beyond our imagination.

All these possibilities are not only used for camouflage, but also for communication. Common cuttlefish spend spring and summer inshore to spawn, and the colours the animals display then is an attraction for divers.

Colour blind

The greatest puzzle about squids is how they are capable to mimic their environment so perfectly while being colourblind themselves. Almost nothing is known about this, but there is evidence that small light sensitive organs occur in the skin.

Willy van Strien

Photo: Young common cuttlefish. Magnef1 (Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0)

Sources:
Woo, T., X. Liang, D.A. Evans, O. Fernandez, F. Kretschmer, S. Reiter & G. Laurent, 2023. The dynamics of pattern matching in camouflaging cuttlefish. Nature, online 28 June. Doi: 10.1038/s41586-023-06259-2
Gilmore, R., R. Crook & J.L. Krans, 2016. Cephalopod camouflage: cells and organs of the skin. Nature Education 9(2): 1
Chiao, C-C., C. Chubb & R.T. Hanlon, 2015. A review of visual perception mechanisms that regulate rapid adaptive camouflage in cuttlefish. Journal of Comparative Physiology A 201: 933-945. Doi: 10.1007/s00359-015-0988-5

Brightly coloured frog is invisible against background

In spite of its bright colouration, predators have difficulty detecting the poison dart frog Dendrobates tinctorius from a distance, according to research by James Barnett and colleagues. The colourful animal turns out to have a cryptic colouration.

The bright colour patterns of poison dart frogs function as a warning signal to predators: don’t eat me, I’m poisonous. Natural enemies learn that they’d better leave these colourful prey alone.

Yet, the striking appearance of these frogs does not offer them complete protection, as James Barnett and colleagues point out. An inexperienced predator that doesn’t yet understand the message may attack and kill such frog. Moreover, some predators are insensitive to the poison, and others are so hungry that they ignore the warning and take the risk. So, a poison dart frog needs additional protection.

It has. Additional protection is provided by the same bright and distinctive colour pattern, which appears to function, surprisingly enough, as a cryptic colour that minimizes detectability. At least, this is the case in the poison dart frog Dendrobates tinctorius.

Camouflage

At close range, the frog clearly stands out against its natural background of leaf litter on the soil of rainforests in French Guiana, the researchers show, thanks to colours that are hardly found in that background: yellow and blue. The salient colouration is a clear signal.

But from a distance, things are different. Predators no longer are able to discern the pattern and the colours blend together to form an average hue that matches the background colour. So, the colouration turns out to function as distance-dependent camouflage; it makes the frog invisible to birds, snakes and mammals that are not at very close range.

Model frogs

That may be hard to believe, but experiments show that it really is like that. The researchers made frogs of plasticine (modelling clay) and gave their models either a natural colour pattern or painted it plain yellow or brown-and-black. They assembled different backgrounds: leaf litter, paper with a leaf litter print, bare soil and paper in a homogeneous colour. In the field, they put model frogs on different backgrounds and assessed how often wild avian predators attacked these models.

As expected, background had no effect on the number of attacks on yellow models, while brown-and-black animals were safer on leaf litter or paper with a leaf litter print than on other backgrounds.

And what about the frog models with a natural colouration?

Just like the brown-and-black animals, they had the best chance to remain undetected on a leaf litter background.

The bright colour pattern of the poison dart frog Dendrobates tinctorius thus has a dual function. At close range, it is a warning signal, while the colours blend to form a cryptic colour when viewed from a distance.

Willy van Strien

Photo: Dendrobates tinctorius. ©James B. Barnett

Source:
Barnett, J.B., C. Michalis, N.E. Scott-Samuel & I.C. Cuthill, 2018. Distance-dependent defensive coloration in the poison frog Dendrobates tinctorius, Dendrobatidae. PNAS, online June 4. Doi: 10.1073/pnas.1800826115