15 August 2009

Living colour

As I was kneeling next to this squid and watching the colours pulse across it coming in waves off any little motion the animal made (which felt a lot like watching an I Tunes visualizer of its thoughts or something like that!), the squid was doing at least a couple of really unbelievable things at once. Not only was it opening and closing its chromatophores -- the cells that are filled with an already made pigment and simply get turned on and off -- but it was also actively fabricating entirely new colours from scratch, and it was synchornizing the two things with each other.

-- from CreatureCast Episode 1 from Casey Dunn on Vimeo.

Hat tip Deep Sea News and Pharyngula

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