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.

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.

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.