Biol. Bull. 207: 153. (October 2004)
© 2004 Marine Biological Laboratory
Disruptive Body Patterning of Cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis) Requires Visual Information on Edges and Brightness of Objects on Natural Substrate Backgrounds
Chuan-Chin Chiao1,2,
Emma J. Kelman1,3 and
Roger T. Hanlon1
1 Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Massachusetts
2 National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan
3 University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom
Cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis) show disruptive body patterns for camouflage on mixed light and dark gravel of appropriate size (equivalent to the area of the animal’s own white square component on the dorsal mantle). However, the exact visual features that cuttlefish extract from natural substrates are largely unknown. We placed young cuttlefish (5–8 cm in mantle length) in a circular experimental arena (25 cm in diameter) and presented them with natural gravel and a picture of natural gravel. We established that the animals respond similarly to the three-dimensional natural gravel and to the two-dimensional pictures of natural gravel. We then applied a low-pass filter to remove the edges of the gravel and a high-pass filter to remove the overall brightness of the gravel on the pictures (i.e., to enhance the edges of the gravel), and video-recorded the animals’ resulting body patterns in response to these altered visual stimuli. Our results showed that disruptive body patterning of cuttlefish requires visual information on both the edges and the brightness of objects on natural substrate backgrounds. This indicates that the cuttlefish visual system must sample and process wide ranges of spatial frequency information from substrates to produce the appropriate body coloration for camouflage.
