I recently learned that cuttlefish will blur parts of their vision to see specific colors, since they only have one type of photoreceptor (we have 3, btw). This allows them to better be able to change into magnificent colors!@eng304cripps @ds106dc #tdc2716 pic.twitter.com/opuVPVItlQ

— Katherine Smith (@Katheri85988147) June 20, 2019

The daily create asked us to reflect on something we’ve recently learned or wondered about. A while ago, I learned that cuttlefish were effectively colorblind since they only have 1 photoreceptor, which isn’t enough to see color. What has confused scientists for the longest is how cuttlefish and other cephalopods are able to change colors despite this disadvantage. A few weeks ago, I came across a video that talks about a recent (at the time) study that says that the w-shaped eyes of cuttlefish can bend light into separate wavelengths and that precise focusing of the eye can filter out some wavelengths and act as another way to detect some colors. Here’s the video, btw.

I decided after coming up with my fact that I would accompany the tweet with a gif of a cuttlefish changing color, just to show how cool it looked. I went through a long process of looking through some videos that had what I wanted since most of the videos I found didn’t have drastic color changes or showcase how they look when camouflaged. After a while, I found the video below that shows a cuttlefish changing into very interesting colors, which I thought would look nice in a GIF.

I put the video into GIPHY, trimmed the GIF to the length I wanted, and added a rainbow onto the GIF. Even though a cuttlefish wouldn’t be able to see a rainbow all at once, I thought it looked nice with the GIF and would emphasize my point on how colorful cuttlefish can be.

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