GREEDY CUTTLEFISH

Evening Star, Issue 21904, 15 December 1934, Page 5

GREEDY CUTTLEFISH

Sepia, as the cuttle-fish is called, is a beautiful creature when seen swimming, the oval body streaked or spotted with brownj the side fins gently waving as the animal slowly glides along. If anything disturbs it a sudden wave of colour passes over its body, changing the pattern ‘ in an instant, the' body,

specially in times of excitement, being now light, now dark, sometimes striped, sometimes spotted, ever changing. Besides slow swimming the cuttlefish has another way of progression by sending jets of water out of the body so that it may swim backward by powerful strokes in quick jerks. The mechanism of this movement is very wonderful, a wide opening behind the head leading to a‘ spacious cavity containing the gills which, when full of water, can bo closed by a special fastening; the outer wall of the cavity is then contracted and the water forced out through a narrow funnel. There are ten arms, eight of which are short, each bearing four rows of suckers, the other two long and usually retracted in pockets one on each side of the body. These long tentacles have the expanded tips covered with suckers on short stalks. . . When capturing its food—usually crabs—the cuttle-fish thrusts out a long tentacle very quickly and the crab is -seized and brought to the mouth, the suckers helping m the capture and the parrot-like jaws chewing it up at once. The body of Sepia is strengthened by a large limy structure lying under the skin, the cuttle-bone, the white hard flat oval body one often finds thrown up on the beach, veiy _ light from the air cavities contained in it. This is the remnant of an ancestral shell of much greater complexity. The cuttle-bone has various uses; it is given to birds for polishing their beaks, is/used for polishing wood, and long ago was made into pounce and scattered on paper for drying ink before blotting-paper was invented. The common cuttle-fish, like its relatives, has a bag of jmk which it squirts out when frightened, thus forming a “ smoke screen ” behind which it may escape from its enemies. This is the sepia of the old artists, the hardened ink which formed the paint whose name we know so well in our paintboxes. This ink bag is even present in the newly-hatched babies. Sepia lays its eggs in bunches attached by stalks to some object, the eggs, known' as sea-grapes, being large and black, with very tough ana thick skins. Out of these come tiny cuttlefishes rather less than an inch long and closely resembling their parents. Eggs kept in a glass aquarium hatched out and the babies were the most entertaining little creatures._ It was interesting to watch them feeding, at first catching the very tiny shrimplike animals known as copepqds. As these are active, and quick in their movements the baby cuttle-fishes had to be very quick, too; but they were extraordinarily agile, and in , a few weeks they could take real shrimps. ■ Cuttle-fishes are- greedy creatures, and show this greed at an early age.