Did a Cuttlefish Write This?

Might be off base here, but I think the title of this article discussing the sophistication of cuttlefish is a reference to this classic tweet [1], and while I kind of have the urge to write a comment exploring the shift in our culture that causes or permits The Newspaper of Record to make a joke a like that, I mostly just find it really funny.

[1] https://twitter.com/ilikemints/status/643552504723148800

Cuttlefish are amazing. They don't just look like tiny Cthulhus, their behavior is also quite Lovecraftian. What does Cthulhu do? He drives you mad, then he eats you. When a cuttlefish comes up on prey, it flashes its chromatophores in trippy, rippling patterns that daze or even hypnotize the poor creature, giving the cuttlefish the opportunity to devour it.

“they have three hearts, green blood and one of the largest brains among invertebrates,” she said. “And they can regenerate their limbs, they can camouflage”

Never heard of cuttlefish before this article, but they sound awesome.

Furthermore the pigment sepia, a beautiful brown color used historically in inks and paint, is derived by removing the ink sac from the cuttlefish (it shoots ink like a squid).

Although it has largely been replaced by synthetic alternatives, you can still obtain traditional sepia from places like Kremer's Pigments - which is a supplier of historic pigments, mediums, and recipes (used by conservationists and artists who like to make their own paint).

I find the brown color of the traditional sepia to be extremely beautiful, the dried pigment has an extremely pungent odor, quite similar to the dried squid you might find at your local Asian fish market.

> the key to unlocking evolutionary secrets about intelligence

Cuttlefish teach us that the "secret" about intelligence is that it is all around us. What blinds us to seeing it is that we only recognise it easily in things that look like us and act like us and appear to share our values.

Once you have spent enough time in cuttlefishes world to appreciate their intelligence, and beauty, you are a cross cultural explorer who can travel to all kinds of other worlds and see them for what they are - intelligent kingdoms as complex as ours, only different.

There's this nice full episode about cephalopods on the doc Animal by netflix. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15964252/?ref_=ttep_ep4

TL;DR No.