Researchers just spotted cunning cuttlefish waving to one another with their tentacles, a previously unobserved behavior that pushes the boundaries of the creature\u2019s intelligence.<\/p>\n
Cuttlefish\u2014sometimes referred to as the \u201cchameleons of the sea\u201d\u2014are renowned for their camouflage abilities. In other cephalopods, that color-changing capacity is also used for communication<\/a>. And like other cephalopods, namely octopuses, cuttlefish are quite intelligent. The cuttlefish\u2019s apparent waving behavior reveals a new aspect of their sophistication, and opens up a new avenue for researchers to investigate their smarts using machine learning. The team\u2019s research is not yet peer-reviewed, and is hosted<\/a> on the preprint server bioRxiv.<\/p>\n In its research, the team studied four different arm movements in two cuttlefish species,\u00a0S. officinalis\u00a0and\u00a0S. bandensis. The researchers recorded videos of animals signing and played them back to the \u201ccuttlefish participants,\u201d who waved back at the displays. The team also flipped the video in some playbacks, revealing that the cuttlefish were more likely to wave when the video was played upright. The cuttlefish had four different signs, dubbed \u201cup,\u201d \u201cside,\u201d \u201croll,\u201d and \u201ccrown.\u201d<\/p>\n As for the meaning of the arm waves, the jury remains out. The researchers wrote that the signs could be domination signs, as after a cuttlefish waved, other cuttlefish tended to withdraw. But the signals could also be courtship displays\u2014though the signs were also made by juvenile cuttlefish that were not yet sexually mature. Other possibilities remain: The signs could be aversive displays, made in defensive contexts, or exhibit internal states such as mood in the animals. \u201cThe most plausible interpretation is that these signs are symbolic and can encrypt a variety of possible meanings depending on the associated behavioral contexts,\u201d the team wrote.<\/p>\n But the arm waves themselves are not the whole story.<\/p>\n \u201cIn addition to their visually striking display, arm wave signs produce mechanical waves in the water, prompting us to explore the possibility that they may also be perceived via mechanoreception,\u201d the team wrote. In other words, even when the animals could not see one another underwater, they could\u00a0feel the vibrational waves produced by the arm movements of the other participants.<\/p>\n \u201cUsing playback experiments similar to those adopted in vision, we obtained preliminary evidence to support this hypothesis, indicating that arm wave signs may represent multimodal signals involving vision and mechanoreception,\u201d the group added.<\/p>\n Cuttlefish are bright; previous research<\/a> indicated the animals are capable of waiting for a reward when there\u2019s a promise of a bigger payout. The animals are able to plan for the future, which previously was thought to be a behavior only exhibited in mammals and birds.<\/p>\n The researchers, including first author Sophie Cohen-Bod\u00e9n\u00e8s from Perceptual Systems Laboratory at the \u00c9cole Normale Sup\u00e9rieure (ENS) in France, added that machine learning algorithms could be applied to similar data to better understand how the animals dished out different arm signals depending on the stimuli. Similar work has been done with sperm whale click data with stunning success<\/a>\u2014researchers recently managed to identify specific patterns of speech in the animals\u2019 communiques, and roughly assemble their\u00a0 \u201calphabet.\u201d<\/p>\n Cuttlefish\u2019s intelligence, reasoning, and behavior remains enigmatic, but the new research indicates that the animals have plenty more secrets to decipher.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Researchers just spotted cunning cuttlefish waving to one another with their tentacles, a previously unobserved behavior that pushes…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":77664,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3847],"tags":[38091,38092,933,38093,70,16,15,38094,1717],"class_list":{"0":"post-77663","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-animal-behavior","9":"tag-animal-communication","10":"tag-animals","11":"tag-cephalopods","12":"tag-science","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom","15":"tag-wave","16":"tag-wildlife"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114457781371882604","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77663","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77663"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77663\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}