Camouflage revealed

Roger Hanlon likes to see how far he can push cuttlefish (left) and their relatives octopus and squid, the world’s camouflage champions, according to a story in today's New York Times. He sometimes puts black and white checkerboards in the tubs. The cuttlefish respond by forming astonishingly sharp-edged blocks of white.

“We can give them any hideous background,” he tells the Times, “and they will try to camouflage."

A senior scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Hanlon has spent much of the last three decades studying them in his laboratory and on thousands of ocean dives. He believes that he finally has a theory for how they achieve their magic, according to the Times story. For all the variety in the world of camouflage, there may be a limited number of ways to fool the eye.