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Science|What a Crab Sees Before It Gets Eaten by a Cuttlefish
  
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/03/science/
cuttlefish-camouflage-huting-crabs.html

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Trilobites

What a Crab Sees Before It Gets Eaten by a Cuttlefish

Cuttlefish use visual tricks to avoid being eaten. New research shows
how they deploy similar camouflage to bamboozle their prey.

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Video
[03tb-cuttl]
A crab's eye view of a cuttlefish masking its presence with a
technique researchers call stripe.CreditCredit...Matteo Santon

By Richard Kemeny

March 3, 2025

In May 2023, Matteo Santon was filming cuttlefish in the
shallow-water reefs around Indonesia. A marine visual ecologist at
Bristol University in England, he planned to document the predators'
approach to hunting from the perspective of the prey -- essentially,
to see what it's like to be the crab.

He was hoping to see a particular hypnotic camouflage display
cuttlefish use while attacking. But the cephalopods had their own
innovations to show.

"The first time I saw these hunting displays, it was probably one of
the coolest things I've ever seen," Dr. Santon said.

In a series of dives over the next year, he and his team filmed more
than 200 cuttlefish hunts, from crab-eye view. In a study published
last month in the journal Ecology, the scientists documented four
elaborate body patterns the cuttlefish used, including what appeared
to be imitations of drifting leaves or corals. The cuttlefish
displays may somehow hack the visual system of their prey, which may
mask their movement or convince the crabs they are harmless flora and
fauna, rather than wily predators soon to end their lives.

Video
[03tb-cuttl]
The pulse technique, which may mimic something nonthreatening, the
researchers suggest, such as a small fish.CreditCredit...Matteo
Santon

Cuttlefish are masters of deception. Much like their octopus cousins,
the animals have skin filled with pigment-loaded cells and
piston-like muscular pumps, which they use to alter their color and
texture. They can camouflage almost instantaneously to hide from
predators, blending into the seafloor, for example, or disguising
themselves as rocks or algae. In laboratories, scientists have also
observed some of these sophisticated behaviors as cuttlefish hunt.
But this hunting ability has seldom been studied in the wild.

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