Lovely work and lovely images and videos. But two things stand out:
1. The transgenesis was successful but initially at least induced behavioral changes. Over multiple generations these hopefully attenuated, but that’s the price of a model system: you poke the fundamentals and sometimes it can change what matters to what you’re studying.
2. I wonder how much being in the wild affects the quality and variety of camouflage, that will be sanded down in lab grown cuttlefish. They have fewer textures they experience, and rarely do their camo in the lab when under true predatory threat. For a question like: does the camouflage adjust when the cuttlefish is tracking the movement of a nearby predator, and what’s the neurological basis of that, are going to necessarily remain hard to answer in a lab.
Still, fascinating work that I hope teaches us a lot about these amazing creatures and ourselves.
And if you deem creating an account using a fake email is too high a price to pay for quality human journalism:
https://archive.is/VlFlc
(also you will miss the videos, which in this case are worth the price of admission, IMHO)
I must say I am still amazed and mystified at how cephalopods to camouflage so well, especially because they must mimic a perspective much different from the one they have access to from their eyes (or skin).
Yeah giving the NYT my email address so they can sell it on to a thousand "partner organizations" is not going to happen, nor am I going to spend time setting up a throwaway.
Lovely work and lovely images and videos. But two things stand out:
1. The transgenesis was successful but initially at least induced behavioral changes. Over multiple generations these hopefully attenuated, but that’s the price of a model system: you poke the fundamentals and sometimes it can change what matters to what you’re studying.
2. I wonder how much being in the wild affects the quality and variety of camouflage, that will be sanded down in lab grown cuttlefish. They have fewer textures they experience, and rarely do their camo in the lab when under true predatory threat. For a question like: does the camouflage adjust when the cuttlefish is tracking the movement of a nearby predator, and what’s the neurological basis of that, are going to necessarily remain hard to answer in a lab.
Still, fascinating work that I hope teaches us a lot about these amazing creatures and ourselves.
gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/12/science/cuttlefish-brain-...
And if you deem creating an account using a fake email is too high a price to pay for quality human journalism: https://archive.is/VlFlc (also you will miss the videos, which in this case are worth the price of admission, IMHO)
paper: >Generation of a transgenic cephalopod https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.23.753964v1
I must say I am still amazed and mystified at how cephalopods to camouflage so well, especially because they must mimic a perspective much different from the one they have access to from their eyes (or skin).
Yeah giving the NYT my email address so they can sell it on to a thousand "partner organizations" is not going to happen, nor am I going to spend time setting up a throwaway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuttlefish
There you go.