If you could have
one animal’s superpowers, what would it be?
Would you choose a bear's strength?
a cheetah’s lightning speed?
How about the ability to keep your memories forever?
As if the incredible shapeshifting abilities
of the cuttlefish didn't make it cool enough,
this eight legged critter
also remembers stuff better than most humans.
We're about to get inside the mind of a cuttlefish.
Try and keep up.
Over 120 species of cuttlefish can be found
in oceans around
all continents except North and South America.
But a cuttlefish isn't really a fish.
It's a cephalopod,
a type of mollusk like squids and octopuses.
And cuttlefish are often confused with their
more popular cousins,
but once you meet a cuttlefish, you'll
never forget it.
Or maybe you will, because they have
better memories than you.
It has eight short arms,
two longer tentacles and glides around
on a translucent fin skirt surrounding its mantle.
And if you get close enough,
you'll notice that its eyes are “W” shaped.
But there's a lot more to this spectacular creature.
Cuttlefish have better episodic memory than
most other animals, including humans.
Episodic memories are linked
to a specific time, location and feeling,
and most animals
lose them with age, but not the cuttlefish.
In an experiment,
both young and old
cuttlefish learned to eat their favorite meal, shrimp,
at a particular time and place.
After some time,
the cuttlefish continued
to swim to the same
location, even when no shrimp were there.
The cuttlefish even
preferred to wait for their favorite shrimp
meal rather than eat the
readily available prawn.
This behavior continues in the wild. A cuttlefish
remembers the location of a favorite food
throughout its life,
and learning starts early for these clever mollusks.
Embryos incubating in an
area swarming with white
crabs will develop a lifelong preference
for them after the embryos hatch.
And baby cuttles
start hunting live prey immediately after hatching.
Eggs can play dead and become invisible to predators
by lowering their heart rates and their bioelectric outputs.
Rapid learning and retention is critical to the young
cuttle’s survival
because mama cuttle don't
stick around much after depositing her eggs.
But what is helping this cephalopod retain
all its life's learnings well into old age?
There are a few possible explanations.
Mammals are forgetful
because we store
our memories in a part of the brain
called the hippocampus. Like other body parts,
It's susceptible to wear over time.
the cuttlefish brain
is structured differently and doesn't have a hippocampus.
Storage space isn't a problem either.
With the highest brain-to -body ratio
among all invertebrates,
some cephalopod brains
are packed with over 500 million neurons.
That's twice as many as a rat's brain.
And if you consider that
most cephalopods live very short lives,
It figures that having super powerful brains
might be the only way to make the most of their time.
But cuttlefish aren't
always in a rush.
Despite their short, two year lifespan,
cuttlefish don't start
looking for a mate until the
last quarter of their lives.
That's like a human hitting puberty.
well after 60.
And at this very ripe age, each
cuttlefish still needs to ensure it passes
on its genetic information to as many mates as possible.
There are other tricks
cuttlefish evolved to survive their
very competitive mating Olympics.
Their skins have papillae that helped
change their textures,
and 10 million specialized cells called chromatophores
and leucophores all over
their bodies allow them to change colors.
Cuttlefish can deploy these structures within seconds
to look like a piece of
coral or a lump of
sand and confuse predators.
At other times,
they can make the most garish basketlike
structure to impress females.
I know I’m impressed.
When scientists study cuttlefish,
they never fail to surprise.
As far as weird and wonderful creatures go,
they truly are royalty.
Heck, it even has blue blood
and three hearts to pump it around.
Having infallible memories and shape shifting
in the blink of an eye. That's what cuttlefish do.
And that's why they're Crazy Creatures.