Friday, November 20, 2009

Cuttlefish Looks

What I love about cuttlefish is that no two shots of them are ever the same--they're so mercurial. They're considered to be among the most intelligent of invertebrates, and the Romans used their ink as a pigment, calling it sepia (guess what color the ink is).

Perhaps you've heard of cuttlebones, especially if you give them to your birds as a calcium source. Those cuttlebones provide the internal structure for the cuttlefish. They're made of porous argonite, and the mollusks manipulate the gas-to-liquid ratio within the bone's chambers to control their buoyancy.






















Ever wonder how they change their appearance so well? They've got 200 specialized pigment cells per square millimeter. Those cells are a marvel of biological engineering, as are their eyes, which are among the most advanced on the planet. And their blood isn't red, it's blue-green. So much to say about the cuttlefish, and yet they only live for about two years.

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