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What a crab sees before it gets eaten by a cuttlefish
- nouryqt 2y agohttps://archive.is/qancZ https://archive.is/qancZ
- chiyc 2y agoI was hoping the article would include a video, but there's a great 12 second clip on Matteo Santon's site: https://matteosanton.com/research/ https://matteosanton.com/research/
- jjmarr 2y agoGift link with video, because a static archive doesn't do the opening video justice: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/03/science/cuttlefish-camouflage-huting-crabs.html?unlocked_article_code=1.1U4.y9tH.Aujw5YLUNl3v&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/03/science/cuttlefish-camouf...
- ge96 2y agoDamn that was quick the attack reminds me of Nope
- chiyc 2y agoThanks! I didn't realize the static archive was missing the video. These are better than what's on Santon's site.
- HenryBemis 2y agoHere the link to the mp4 file (from my InternetDownloadManager) https://vp.nyt.com/video/2025/03/03/135038_1_03tb-cuttlefish-95551_wg_1080p.mp4 https://vp.nyt.com/video/2025/03/03/135038_1_03tb-cuttlefish...
- indrora 2y agoThere are 4 videos in the article, each with different forms of predatory approach. It's very neat.
- codetrotter 2y agoUsing the above gift link as argument to yt-dlp, you can download all four videos in one fell swoop. If you want to just watch the four videos and not read the article. yt-dlp --add-metadata "https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/03/science/cuttlefish-camouflage-huting-crabs.html?unlocked_article_code=1.1U4.y9tH.Aujw5YLUNl3v&smid=url-share"
- justaj 2y ago[NYTimesArticle] Extracting URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/03/science/cuttlefish-camouflage-huting-crabs.html?unlocked_artic...UNl3v&smid=url-share [NYTimesArticle] cuttlefish-camouflage-huting-crabs: Downloading webpage ERROR: [NYTimesArticle] cuttlefish-camouflage-huting-crabs: Unable to download webpage: HTTP Error 403: Forbidden (caused by <HTTPError 403: Forbidden>)
- codetrotter 2y agoMaybe you have to update yt-dlp, or maybe the link has been used by too many people? For me it worked.
- Terr_ 2y agoHmm, for Firefox on Android, the videos animate once and then stop, still-framed forever. Ditto in desktop mode. Weird. Time to go over to a real computer I guess.
- vijaybritto 2y agoWorks fine on Brave
- vekatimest 2y agoThey don't play on Chrome for Android, either.
- quietbritishjim 2y agoWorks for me on Chrome for Android
- x______________ 2y agoThe playback was broken on Firefox android from both the main site and direct url here as well, but was able to watch the video correctly after downloading it locally.
- iammiles 2y agoI appreciate the gift but I suspect sleep tonight will be less than appreciative.
- Apofis 2y agoWhy not post the OP with this link?
- pkilgore 2y agoDefector did it better (and included the videos): https://defector.com/this-is-the-last-thing-you-see-before-you-die-if-you-are-a-crab https://defector.com/this-is-the-last-thing-you-see-before-y...
- roughly 2y agoDefector is fantastic and Sabrina Imbler is an absolute treasure - gift link, to share the wealth: https://defector.com/this-is-the-last-thing-you-see-before-you-die-if-you-are-a-crab?giftLink=9d0ba1f6536af3927b504e1e6d1fc30d https://defector.com/this-is-the-last-thing-you-see-before-y...
- junon 2y agoI find cuttlefish normally very cute but dear god this is nightmare fuel.
- alorimer 2y agoThis article is so much better than the original NYT one. Great writing and no paywall.
- sph 2y agoHow the hell is this news site loading so fast, with no popups, nag screens, in-body ads, call-to-actions and autoplaying videos? Jesus, since when do we have the technology to achieve that?!
- deadbabe 2y agoHorrifying, does the video cut suddenly because what happens next is too fast for the brain to comprehend before being destroyed?
- 7thaccount 2y agoI thought when the cuttlefish starts blinking, it essentially becomes invisible to the crab
- snorrah 2y agoa video has nothing to do with a brain
- Dylan16807 2y agoThe video is representing what a crab sees. An abrupt cut is either implying that the crab stops seeing (for brain damage reasons), or the video is not quite living up to the promise, and they are asking which it is.
- miunau 2y agoThey are hitting the plexiglass in front of the camera and crabs, so I assume it's nothing interesting to look at science wise.
- DaiPlusPlus 2y agoI’m trying to understand how/what the cuttlefish attacks the crag with - but I can’t tell if the white thing that comes out from under its… “Cthluthu mouth-tentacles” is a tongue, a beak, a bone, a pincer, a spine, or something else. Wikipedia’s page on cuttlefish anatomy doesn’t help, unfortunately :/
- adrian_b 2y agoCuttlefish, like squid, have 8 short tentacles around the mouth plus other 2 much longer tentacles, which are thinner except for their ends, which are expanded and which have suckers. The 2 long tentacles are normally kept coiled and covered by the short tentacles, so they are not visible. When the cuttlefish catches prey, the 2 long tentacles are extended together extremely quickly and they attach to the prey (much like a chameleon catches insects with its very long tongue). Then the 2 long tentacles are retracted quickly, bringing the prey to the mouth that is also hidden between the 8 short tentacles. The mouth has a beak, similar to a parrot beak, which is used to kill and consume the prey. See the drawing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuttlefish#/media/File:Seba_molluscas.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuttlefish#/media/File:Seba_mo... The drawing shows the long tentacles as you could see them on a dead cuttlefish. As I have said, in the living cuttlefish you can see them only for a fraction of a second, when catching prey and bringing it to the mouth. Also, the 2 long tentacles are extended together, one besides the other, they never stay limp and separated, like in the drawing or in a dead animal.
- robocat 2y ago> The drawing shows the long tentacles as you could see them on a dead cuttlefish. As I have said, in the living cuttlefish you can see them only for a fraction of a second Yeah: stop drawing dead butterflies https://www.emilydamstra.com/please-enough-dead-butterflies/ https://www.emilydamstra.com/please-enough-dead-butterflies/ Once you've seen the pattern, you see the same issue with other art. I bought a biology style painting because I liked the intentional dead-animal style (both a bird and some insects).
- nsbk 2y agoWhat amazing creatures! One of the coolest experiences I’ve lived scuba diving was an interaction with a cuttlefish. It would come towards me in its alien like swimming style and crazy eyes, while pulsating super cool colors, getting very close to my face and then quickly swimming back and forth and up and down, speeding up and slowing down, like performing some kind of ritual dance. I think it was trying to hypnotize me, like Futurama’s good old Hypnotoad. What was the motivation behind, I will always wonder
- z2 2y agoThe colors understanding is even more remarkable given that they are colorblind in the sense that they do not have different color cones, and likely rely on a very imperfect process of chromatic aberration that they can somehow translate back into color. https://www.science.org/content/article/how-colorblind-cuttlefish-may-see-living-color https://www.science.org/content/article/how-colorblind-cuttl...
- nsbk 2y agoColor me impressed. Remarkable indeed, thanks for the link.
- hermitcrab 2y agoI spent 15 minutes watching a group of about 8 cuttlefish on a reef. There were clearly lots of complex group interactions going on between them. It is also amazing fast they can change colour.
- aidenn0 2y agoPerhaps it was saying "So long, and thanks for all the fish?"
- nsbk 2y agoOr 42 in Cuttlefishish
- asadm 2y agowhy do these videos just cut at the moment???
- IamTC 2y agoI always reserve budget for night diving. Below the waters, night time is like peak hour traffic, with much better chances of spotting a cuttlefish. The colors they exhibit is beautiful. You can only see them at night and with a torch light as red gets filtered out even at shallow depths.
- prxtl 2y agoImmediately got reminded of the creatures in Perdido Street Station -- Terrifying!
- NikolaNovak 2y agoIn Peter Watts' novel Blindsight, human protagonists enter a completely alien world - not Star Trek "people with rubber ears", but different biology/consciousness-patterns/etc entirely. As one of the plot points, 'aliens' (again, not the Star Trek humanoid kind) eventually 'hack' the human nervous/visual systems through various means (electromagnetic fields, visual patterns, movement types, etc) to hide things in plan sight. My internal vision of scenes from that book is eerily similar to the videos in the article. (On aside, would highly recommend Peter Watts to Hacker News audience :)
- Baeocystin 2y agoSeconded. Blindsight remains one of my favorite meditations on the Mind's I (not a typo) that I've read. Echopraxia, the 'sequel' (the events occur at the same time as the events in Blindsight, with a completely different group of characters) has grown on me over time, too. At the very least, it gave me a great appreciation for Portia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portia_(spider) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portia_(spider)
- clarionbell 2y agoIsn't that what Children of Time by Tchaikovsky is for? :)
- Baeocystin 2y agoHa! Good point. No argument there.
- NikolaNovak 2y agoSame! Echopraxia did not really resonate on the first read, and I think it was misaligned expectations. As Peter himself said in one of his Reddit AMAs, it starts with action and continues with a lot of action. But it's fundamentally not about action; in fact, it's hard to see the protagonists having much agency, and certainly no clear goals. It's almost existential in that sense; but based on that beginning, my mind was searching for a story and hero and conclusion. On the second read, having the framework of the events in my mind, I could focus on the ideas, and it resonated much better. Now I re-read both books semi-regularly (just like Dune and Neuromancer:)
- elihu 2y agoCouldn't help but be reminded of this scene from that movie where Tom Hanks plays Fred Rogers: https://youtu.be/9AzXX_2BrVk?t=63 https://youtu.be/9AzXX_2BrVk?t=63
- ProAm 2y agoI would totally fall for that too....
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoPlenty of this going on in this BBC earth video: https://youtu.be/rbDzVzBsbGM?feature=shared&t=130 https://youtu.be/rbDzVzBsbGM?feature=shared&t=130 Clearly this is the inspiration for the design of the mindflayers.
- teruakohatu 2y agoCrabs predate cuttlefish in the fossil record by a significant amount of time (~50 million years), but both have had a good 100 million years to battle it out and crabs are still blinded by the camo. Cuttlefish maybe have not exerted enough evolutionary pressure on crabs to make them adapt, or there are crabs that have adapted and we just don't know which species or have not discovered them yet.
- lukas099 2y agoThey could be at an evolutionary equilibrium already.
- mmooss 2y agoSomehow, predators succeed in many scenarios that have plenty of time for evolution to solve the problem for prey. But of course it's also solving the problem for hungry predators. It raises an interesting question about the limits of evolutionary adaptation, and how the evolutionary competition reaches a stable equilibrium.
- kuhewa 2y agoI'm not sure it's that unique of a situation though, most prey organisms have some antipredator adaptations but rarely are they foolproof, just like rarely are predatory adaptations like mimicry/camouflage/crypsis absolutely foolproof.
- willvarfar 2y agoIts an 'arms race'. As crabs adapt to the current crop of cuttlefish ruses, the cuttlefish also adapt to overcome again. An aside, but the recent book by Dawkins "The Genetic Book of the Dead: A Darwinian Reverie" is fascinating and explains how you can look at an animal and understand the environment of its ancestors. You can read it as a kind of massive autobiography of the species and detect waypoints on its evolutionary journey.
- cm2012 2y agoMy local aquarium has cuttlefish, I love those little guys
- tptacek 2y agoBig Jordan Peele Nope energy.
- jongjong 2y agoThis was an immersive experience. I was trying to make sense of what I was seeing, putting my face closer to the screen to take a good look at the creature... Then WHACK! paywall! It hit me before I could understand what was happening. I can relate to that crab.
- nanna 2y agoThe deceptive capabilities of cuttlefish has been known since ancient Greece. The 2C AD author of hunting and fishing books Oppian wrote extensively about the 'cunning devices' of cuttlefish, as well as octopuses, which he considers to be par excellennce foxes of the sea. Yea, the crafty Cuttle-fish also has found a cunning manner of hunting. From her head? grow long slender branches, like locks of hair, wherewith as with lines she draws and captures fish, prone in the sand and coiled beneath her shell. They have seated in their heads a dark muddy fluid blacker than pitch, a mysterious drug causing a watery cloud, which is their natural defence against destruction. When fear seizes them, immediately they discharge the dusky drops thereof and the cloudy fluid stains and obscures all around the paths of the sea and ruins all the view ; and they straightway through the turbid waters easily escape man or haply mightier fish. ... Such are the cunning devices‘ of fishes.
- surfingdino 2y agoCookie and subscription pop-ups?
- jbs789 2y agoI did a quick search to understand how the crabs eyes work. If they see less detail then this must be even more convincing.
- pmdulaney 2y agoIt would be nice to see some high speed video, like the kind they use to show a bullet going through an apple.