[HN Gopher] Cuttlefish 'talk' with their arms, study reveals
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Cuttlefish 'talk' with their arms, study reveals
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.04.13.648584v3
Author : geox
Score : 122 points
Date : 2025-05-06 12:46 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (scienceblog.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (scienceblog.com)
| luotuoshangdui wrote:
| Cuttlefish are incredibly intelligent.
| enneff wrote:
| This is so cool to see. When I used to do a lot of SCUBA diving I
| would sometimes have long staring competitions with cuttlefish.
| Of course it's impossible to know for sure, but I always got the
| sense there was a lot going on behind those eyes.
| go_elmo wrote:
| Super cool! Imo kind of makes sense - think these sort of
| problems (communication) are general across actors and science
| seems to confirm some cases (between plants / funghi, cuddlefish,
| mamals..). Were not as unique as we think & thats freeing.
| damnitbuilds wrote:
| So if I drum my fingers on the table, and my colleague gets
| visibly annoyed by it, these researchers think I am "talking" to
| him ?
| anotheryou wrote:
| Of course that's communcation. "Talking" might be a bit
| overpromising, but definitely some comms. Don't nitpick, the
| core is true. :P _eyeroll_
| damnitbuilds wrote:
| This is supposed to be science, terminology matters:
|
| They state that tentacle waving serves "as a communication
| system between cuttlefish."
|
| Merely showing that a thing reacts to another thing doing
| something in a certain way is NOT showing the existence of a
| communication system between them.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Weird. I would say that idle finger drumming is of course
| _not_ communication.
| anotheryou wrote:
| > Communication is the process of exchanging information
| between individuals through various means, such as
| speaking, writing, or using body language. It involves a
| sender conveying a message to a receiver, who then
| interprets and responds to that message.
|
| (some ai said this, but I think AI should be perfect for
| defining common words :)
| anotheryou wrote:
| Well to be fair finger drumming can, but does not have to
| be purpuseful communication.
|
| You can drum your fingers because you are bored, not to
| signal to the outside that you are bored. Strictly speaking
| me picking up on your boredness because you drum your
| fingers makes it communication anyways I think :).
|
| A better example would be waving at someone, communicating
| "hello / look at me / I see you / here / I'm happy to see
| you / goodbye"
| 542354234235 wrote:
| If I flip you off for being annoying, I would definitely be
| communicating something as specific as if I'd used words.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| Yes, you'll communicate your emotional immaturity. With words
| we might be able to solve the problem.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| Don't forget about sign language.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| Sign language is a language for people who have serious
| problems communicating with spoken language. So yes,
| definitely don't forget about words communicated using
| sign language.
| timschmidt wrote:
| The signing community disagrees strongly with this take,
| as sign is an expressive artform in it's own right.
| Hearing folks can as easily appreciate a talented and
| expressive signer as a vocalist. And it's possible to
| express things through sign which are impossible to
| express with speech.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Heather Dale wrote a song about Gawain and the Green
| Knight, and produced a video in which a deaf storyteller
| tells the story while the song plays. (I don't think the
| story is an exact match to the song, but I assume it's
| fairly close.)
|
| The storyteller uses some very impressive body language;
| it's great to see. It made me wonder if this is a
| particular strength of deaf storytelling, given that the
| audience has to be watching closely anyway.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTtlPUNGs3Q
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| 99% of those people would not be interested in the
| artform if they or a loved one did not have a handicap.
|
| Similarly, 99% of people will not appreciate an
| expressive signer as much as a vocalist.
|
| That is just reality. I doesn't mean it is without value.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| "Spanish is a language used by people who have serious
| difficulties communicating in English"
|
| "But look, there are tons of people who speak English but
| still use Spanish to communicate with others who only or
| mostly speak Spanish"
|
| "99% of those people would not be interested in Spanish
| if they or a loved one did not have problems speaking
| English".
| boothby wrote:
| I take it you've never had a conversation on a dance
| floor, across a street busy with traffic, or without any
| risk of waking the baby (or your enemies, I guess), or
| behind somebody's (highly proximate) back.
|
| Sign languages are for humans. Even those of us with
| sharp hearing can learn to take greater advantage of the
| bandwidth available to us.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| There's nothing immature about flipping people off. In
| fact, it's quite healthy. Sometimes words fail, but
| flipping off never does.
| karn97 wrote:
| Most HN posters were bullied in schools for being weird
| werent they
| jajko wrote:
| Who was never bullied during school age, maybe home
| schooled kids?
| fsckboy wrote:
| sorry, but i was never bullied (US public school)
| lucyv wrote:
| The word "talk" doesn't appear anywhere in the article besides
| the title.
| damnitbuilds wrote:
| They grossly overstate what they have shown.
|
| What they have actually shown - that cuttlefish react to
| another cuttlefish waving its tentacles - is clearly not
| showing that tentacle waving "serves as a communication
| system between cuttlefish.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| I think you grossly overstate your expertise in marine
| communication studies.
| sethammons wrote:
| How would you define communication between two entities?
| What threshold of data needs to be conveyed? Can
| communication be unidirectional?
| NonHyloMorph wrote:
| No that is precicsely communication, but nothing indicazes
| that is "talk". Communication is the "lower" phenomenon
| ghen talk/speech. Involuntary body processes communicate
| something in us sapiensapiens and we are sure tjat animals
| communicate. But do they talk... if we say "talk"
| ("sprechen") that entails the whole of what natural
| languages do and is quite different.
| damnitbuilds wrote:
| Again, reacting when an action is detected does not show
| communication.
| asdajksah2123 wrote:
| I think you're confused about what the communication is.
|
| The communication isn't the waving in "reaction" (it's
| not clear it's simply a reaction, but let's assume it is)
| to the original wave, but the original wave itself.
|
| And the fact that it's also triggered by videos indicates
| it's not just a mechanical reaction (like some of the
| research about how plants "communicate" is which are
| essentially mechanical responses to stimuli).
|
| However, this doesn't necessarily mean that the
| communication is meaningful. It just shows that a means
| of communicating exists.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| I'm not going to speak for these researchers, but I will
| suggest you read up on the concept of scare quotes.
| kozlovsky wrote:
| > The exact meaning behind these arm signs remains unclear. The
| researchers observed them in various contexts - during mating,
| hunting, defensive situations, and sometimes spontaneously. This
| suggests the signs might serve multiple purposes depending on the
| situation.
|
| Can these signs be an alphabet of some language?
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| Squid are no big deal, but people should really stop eating
| cuttlefish and large octopi. By all accounts -- and, by now,
| there are very many -- they seem highly intelligent and playful.
| aeonik wrote:
| If I donate my body to octopus stockfeed after I die (after
| organs are harvested for those in need obviously), does that
| give me a pass?
| deepvibrations wrote:
| Can I kill and eat your pets and/or the pets of your
| friends/family?
|
| I will donate my body as stockfeed to those remaining pets
| that your family/friends have after I die. Does that give me
| a pass?
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| But which pets do you mean. Pigs? Cows? Goats? A dog? A
| turtle?
| infecto wrote:
| Lots of places still eat horses, dogs or other animals. I
| may make a decision to not eat those but I don't judge
| folks that do.
| coddingtonbear wrote:
| There's a clear difference between deciding not to eat
| something for cultural reasons than deciding not to eat
| something because it's an intelligent, thinking creature.
| infecto wrote:
| No it's not, hence the conversation around it. I am glad
| you can draw that line clearly but don't impose others to
| do the same.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| If you swapped out "slavery", "rape", or "murder" for a
| few choice words in this thread, you can see how
| ridiculous your statement is. The way we treat and even
| talk about animals is an incredible moral failure.
| infecto wrote:
| You're making my point for me. Swapping out words to
| create new moral equivalencies is exactly what I find
| unproductive. Humans are animals, and we live with
| competing instincts: survival, empathy, culture,
| appetite. In the best of times, we have the luxury to
| weigh those things and make personal choices. But
| pretending there's a clean, universal moral framework
| that everyone must follow, regardless of history,
| biology, or circumstance, feels more like ideology than
| ethics. I respect your choices, just don't expect
| everyone else to inhabit your frame.
| deepvibrations wrote:
| That's great for you. However, animals do not have a
| voice, despite being intelligent and feeling the same
| emotions as us. I am sure if you saw somebody harming a
| mentally disabled person who could not communicate, you
| would try to stop them. In the same way, I don't see any
| harm in being a voice for the animals.
|
| For all we know, in the future we may look back on modern
| animal agriculture/ factory farming in the same way as we
| look back on slavery now.
|
| If I can reduce harm in the world to sentient beings at
| the cost of something tasting slightly different then I
| will do my best to go down that path personally.
| infecto wrote:
| I respect your intentions, but the leap you're making,
| comparing animal farming to slavery or abuse of disabled
| people, relies on swapping out real-world complexity for
| clean moral hypotheticals. Humans have always lived in
| tension between empathy and necessity. Culture,
| environment, and biology shape our choices more than
| abstract equivalence does. If you choose to avoid harm,
| great. But turning that into a universal moral indictment
| flattens history, species difference, and the human
| condition. We're animals too, and sometimes we forget how
| messy that is.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| The biggest impact when killing a pet is on the family, so
| that breaks the analogy really badly.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| Just embrace cannibalism.
|
| Now you can eat what you want without having to resort to
| hypocritical cladistics that don't match reality.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| Watch out for prions. Stay safe.
| afactcheck wrote:
| Good advice. Fortunately for the aspiring cannibal,
| however, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is very rare with an
| estimated prevalence of 1 case per million people per
| year [1], and it's exposure to prions through the eating
| of infected meat that allows transmission this way rather
| than cannibalism specifically.
|
| There's a popular belief that cannibalism can cause prion
| disease. However, this seems not to be the case with
| famous outbreaks such as Kuru being the result of many
| members of the community eating or being exposed to the
| brain tissue of already infected individuals [2]. Concern
| of transmission via eating meat of animals with a prion
| disease was the reason for European bans on British Beef
| in the 90s and 2000s [3].
|
| If you're concerned about exposure to prion disease then
| good news! They are rare diseases and research suggests
| that most (87%) of the few cases that do occur are due to
| protein misfolding in the individual (spontaneous CJD)
| rather than genetics (familial CJD) or prion exposure
| (iatrogenic and variant CJD) [4].
|
| [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20170704234755/https://ww
| w.ninds... [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_(disease)#Transmission
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encep
| halopat... [4] https://doi.org/10.1002%2Fana.410430611
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| On behalf of all of us cannibals, I'd like to express my
| sincere gratitude for this valuable contribution to our
| way of life.
| jajko wrote:
| Of course, but only if we talk about you dying now, via some
| pretty horrible death in well oiled industrial process, to
| make things at least a bit comparable.
| pimlottc wrote:
| Yes. You get to eat one.
| magospietato wrote:
| I had a beautifully presented octopus tentacle tapas on Menorca
| about a decade ago. I can't describe how exquisite the meat is
| when cooked well.
|
| But boy, all those short YouTube docs about smart octos just
| came flooding back at the first bite.
|
| Felt a lot like eating someone's dog, and I've steered clear
| since.
| dinfinity wrote:
| To be fair, though: pretty much all animals normally die of
| starvation (if they're lucky) or are eaten alive. Depending on
| how they end up on your plate their life and end of it might be
| far less harrowing than what they face naturally.
| djtango wrote:
| It's not clear to me whether dying by starvation is always
| worse than being eaten alive. Some modes of being alive are
| definitely horrifying but others would result in a fairly
| quick death...
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > pretty much all animals normally die of starvation (if
| they're lucky) or are eaten alive
|
| You don't have to be eaten alive. There are predators who
| will kill their prey before eating it. Cats are known for
| that.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| That's also why cats "play" with their prey. They're not
| being sadistic; they're tiring it out so they can safely
| make a killing bite, so they can safely eat it. When your
| food can bite back, it behooves you to kill it first, so it
| can't hurt you. Which matters when your ancestors (and
| potentially you if you're feral) were both predator and
| prey.
| fsckboy wrote:
| when you are being bitten to death, it is difficult to
| discern if you are being eaten by biting or just bitten by
| biting. this point goes to GP
| lukan wrote:
| Pigs and birds are highly intelligent, too.
| justonceokay wrote:
| I take it you've never played hide and seek with a chicken
| DangitBobby wrote:
| I have recently added unintelligent people to my "can eat" list
| since an arbitrary intelligence level is the indicator of
| whether it's ok to eat something.
| CommenterPerson wrote:
| This is why I turned vegetarian. Fish, Chickens, Cows, Goats and
| other creatures are sentient.
| deepvibrations wrote:
| Logically, it may make more sense to keep eating beef/some meat
| and instead give up dairy. Not only is it probably healthier,
| but the pain inflicted in the dairy industry is arguably worse
| per calorie than that of milk.
|
| - Forced (artificial) insemination - Calf separation (within
| 24hrs of birth, causes distress to mother too) - Male calf fate
| (typically sold into veal or beef production, often under low-
| welfare conditions) - Repeated pregnancy and high milking
| demands (3-4 pregnancies over ~4 years and are milked 2-3 times
| daily) - Health problems (mastitis, lameness, metabolic
| disorders etc) - Physical mutilations (dehorning/disbudding,
| tail docking and branding are routine) - Early culling
| (Productive lifespan is ~5 years, yet natural lifespan ~20
| years) - Confinement and barren housing - Transportation and
| slaughter
| dghughes wrote:
| And what do you think will happen if today all dairy cows
| were released to open fields? (I know)
| theoreticalmal wrote:
| I'm cursious as to what would happen, other than more
| expensive milk and cheese
| deepvibrations wrote:
| I don't consider it, as the reduction in dairy consumption
| will likely happen over many years and as demand dies out,
| farmers simply reduce their dairy herd appropriately and
| repurpose the land.
| shakna wrote:
| To drum a hollow drum, you probably meant sapient.
|
| Sentience is a lower bar, and even most trees pass it. [0]
| Sentience, when boiled down, "just about" means capable of
| responding to pain. Nothing more. Sapience comes with the less
| easy to define intelligence of an individual.
|
| [0] One of many, many papers in this debated topic:
| https://doi.org/10.1002/wcs.1578
| smolder wrote:
| Hollow drums are usually the best drums. If you fill them
| with stuff they don't resonate as well.
| CoopaTroopa wrote:
| Cuttlefish confirmed Italians
| dfedbeef wrote:
| best comment
| hartjer wrote:
| This is disappointing, I thought there would be a lot more
| cuddling involved
| fudged71 wrote:
| It took me a while to find, but here is a BestOf Reddit comment
| from 16 years ago where a user Saydrah discusses communicating
| with Cuttlefish for an hour with her fingers
| https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/s/TBfh8u9MGX
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| I'm impressed you remembered and found a reddit comment from 16
| years ago. +1 internet points
| fudged71 wrote:
| This would make my wife laugh so hard. If only I could
| remember more important things!
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| Uncannily similar
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxOTbnHzGrI
| autoexec wrote:
| The linked photo of the cuttlefish "greeting" gesture no longer
| exists where it was, but you can still see it here:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20071027131254/http://www.thepas...
| tejtm wrote:
| javascript free clickers, can replace "www" with
| "old" post is unarchived
| NonHyloMorph wrote:
| I see, so they share that with there main predator... Italians
| DyslexicAtheist wrote:
| not when they're deep-fried they don't
| asimpleusecase wrote:
| "Well that," said Polynesia, brushing some crumbs off the corner
| of the table with her left foot--"that is what you call powers of
| observation--noticing the small things about birds and animals:
| the way they walk and move their heads and flip their wings; the
| way they sniff the air and twitch their whiskers and wiggle their
| tails. You have to notice all those little things if you want to
| learn animal language. For you see, lots of the animals hardly
| talk at all with their tongues; they use their breath or their
| tails or their feet instead.
|
| Dr Dolittle's Parrot explaining how to learn "animal language".
| Voyages of Dr. Dolittle , chapter 8
| nfgrep wrote:
| Interesting, The Mountain in The Sea is becoming a reality.
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59808603-the-mountain-in...
| asmodeuslucifer wrote:
| I watched one checking me over when I was skin diving in about 3
| feet of water. It was hard to see, because it had a rippling
| pattern of light and dark lines on its back that matched the
| sunlight through the waves.
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