Blending Right In

codeswitching&chromatophores by mariah-rose marie

Blending Right In: Camouflaging and Code-Switching

By Angelique Allen

Volume 27, no. 1, Rethinking Science Communication

Almost five years ago I stood in a room that was more like a hallway, waiting for my turn to put on a lab coat, constrain my curls in a hair net, and put on a pair of gloves. After putting on my coat and bunching up my hair, I had to take a break to let out a screech of excitement and shake out the nervous energy. I was already excited to be welcomed in this lab space, but standing in that hallway room I became overcome with emotion. It finally hit me that I would get to interact with an animal that I had (only sort of) seen behind thick aquarium glass.

Once I finished putting on the various coverings that would protect the octopuses from the residue on my hands and hair, I opened a door that led to a real hallway. I encountered a couple more doors, twists, and turns before arriving in the room with a series of tanks containing tens of octopuses. They swam to the top of their housing units with flashing colors and varying textures. Even as a novice I could tell that they knew it was feeding time: it was as if they were dogs waiting near the pantry door that keeps them from their food. The room was filled with sounds of bubbling salt water and water filtration, smells of thawing shrimp, and clipboards with notes scribbled. Some may have considered these things to be overwhelming, but I was too focused on taking in the experience of interacting with octopuses the size of my pinky nail to notice. This was the first day that I got a glimpse into how an octopus interacts with its environment. Suddenly the studies I had spent so much time trying to imagine made sense. In just one close-up interaction, the mind-boggling studies about how cephalopods can distinguish between humans and exert self-control came to life.1 I was seeing their amazing capabilities in real time, and I’ve been aiming to understand them better ever since.

~

Many cephalopods spend their waking hours camouflaging or shapeshifting to avoid predators, cautiously investigating crevices and novelties, and hunting prey.2 Their camouflage and shapeshifting are not always perfect, but it is good enough to deceive the eyes of those that want to find them most—like sharks, sea lions, and sometimes humans. It is not very surprising that they can do this with ease in their natural environment, but it may be a shock to learn that these animals can also match human-made patterns in the lab.3 Trust me, there are no checkerboards on the ocean floor or amongst the coral reefs, but some cephalopods can color match a black and white checkerboard pretty well!

While octopuses do not actually know what they look like from the perspective of a shark or sea lion, you can’t help but think, “They must know what they are doing,” when you watch a mimic octopus transform into the shape of a flounder, or the chromatophores of the giant pacific octopus paint a textured piece of coral over its skin.

If you have ever seen a video of an octopus camouflaging or been lucky enough to see it in real life, then you can appreciate how incredible this feat is. They can match color and texture almost perfectly, which becomes even more impressive when you think about the fact that they are likely color-blind. I say likely because it is very hard for a scientist to prove that something isn’t happening, but it has been shown that behaviorally cephalopods do not differentiate between different colors.4  So, they cannot see color, but they change color.

~

I spend many of my waking hours studying visual processing in the octopus. This is a fancy way of saying I look at brain activity in the octopus to determine how they think about what they see. I ask how they create a vision of their environment, with the goal of understanding how that influences their behavior. In scientific spaces, it can feel as if my world is defined by my skin color. Everyone around me sees and tends to respond to my color in one way or another, but I cannot change color, so I spend a lot of time trying to not draw attention to it. To vocally and physically camouflage I may pronounce words differently and braid my curls back. This is known as code switching, and unlike camouflaging, it is the work of parental or peer guidance and cultural pressures.

~

Octopuses come out of their eggs ready to hunt prey much larger than them, ink to confuse and escape a threat, and camouflage to their environment. While octopuses and other cephalopods go through different developmental stages, they do come out of their eggs equipped with everything they need to hunt prey, change colors, and survive without a parent to look out for them.5 Female and male octopuses come together near the end of their lifespan, which can be one to three years depending on the species, to mate. The male either escapes once the act is done or gets eaten by the female. The female will then lay her eggs, which marks the beginning of the end of her life. She will pass away right before the eggs hatch.6 There can be hundreds or thousands of eggs depending on the species, and every one of these hatchlings must be ready to take on their dynamic and ever-changing world.7 And they do. In fact, they have to do this almost immediately, since they are cannibalistic.8 All of these hatchlings could be both predator and prey to their siblings, who are ready to take them out of the world seconds after they entered it.

~

I remember asking my dad, a Black man raised in the middle of Missouri who built a booming mortgage business on the east coast, why he talked differently when he used his work phone. He said it was to build trust with clients, but for the years following I would hear stories about how surprised people would seem when they met my dad in person for the first time. He had to adapt to build a company he was proud of in a dynamic and ever-changing field that wasn’t made for people who looked like him. And he did.

Growing up I was the only one who looked like me in my school. From my memory, I was the only black person in any classroom I went into until one day in 4th grade when a new student hopped off a bus that came from outside of town. In order to form a surrounding community, I code-switched to build trust and fit in. I straightened my hair for picture days, school dances, or events where I wanted to look like everyone else. This came with the added bonus that people stopped asking to pull the curls that sprung up and down as I walked, which was an annoying and frequent occurrence. But I put up with that and many other microaggressions in order to find my place in a school system and society that felt like it wanted to put me in a box. A system that was ready to push me out of the pipeline of becoming a scientist as soon as I entered.

~

Lots of animals in the animal kingdom can camouflage, with or without changing color, but none of them can change color as fast as cephalopods can. This is because their skin is covered in little ink sacs full of color called chromatophores. These chromatophores are organized by color using a layered system, and every chromatophore has at least one direct connection to the chromatophore lobe in the central brain.9 This allows them to change color with incredible speed and precision. They can change from white to black to red as fast as you can blink. This incredible ability allows them to communicate without creating sound and to vanish in front of a predator’s eyes.

Their skin is also covered in papillae, which are hydrostatic bumps that allow them to change texture almost instantly.10 The closest that we can get to understanding what having papillae feels like is to wiggle our tongue, which is also hydrostatic. This means that it has a fixed volume, so if you make one part skinnier the other part gets fatter and vice versa. But our hydrostatic muscle doesn’t allow us to instantly shapeshift.

Octopuses can shapeshift to mimic almost anything that they may encounter in the ocean, from a smooth rock to a bumpy piece of coral. We cannot say for sure that these are things they noticed and adapted to, but we can say these are things that were selected for. The ones who did not get eaten and lived to attract a mate, which for some cephalopod species involves a colorful mating display, were better adapted for the environment and gave life to more offspring. This allowed them and their species to survive.

Scientists have recently quantified how much energy it takes an octopus to camouflage. It was no surprise that the answer was a lot, but it turns out to be the most energetically costly activity they do! Every day, an octopus spends the same amount of energy changing color as it does on nearly all of their other metabolic actions (digestion, respiration, etc.) combined.11 Every chromatophore is controlled by radial muscles, and while they don’t have to constantly flex their muscles, thanks to mechanisms that allow them to “lock” the skin in place, they do have to spend energy changing these muscles.12

~

I never thought much about the small changes I would constantly make so that people would not identify my race over the phone, or touch my hair, or stare when we would talk about Black history in school. I am glad that I learned them, because they enabled me to mimic those around me. Consequently, I fit in better with the crowd, which is a lifeline as a middle and high schooler. This allowed me to survive.

While I, a scientist, have never calculated how much energy it took for me to make these changes, I know it was not zero. Every time I had to think about who was on the other side of the phone call or store counter, and every time I worried that my hair wouldn’t look professional or “look right” next to everyone else’s, I used up energy that was taken from the task at hand. It is incredibly energetically expensive, and ultimately takes energy away from learning, from my science, and from experiencing the moment. While I am not constantly thinking about these small distractions, thanks to safe spaces and warm communities that allow me to let my guard down, I do have to spend energy finding where I belong in every new space or group I enter.

We will never understand what it feels like to be many of the incredible forms that we see on earth. That goes for cephalopods, people with a different identity or from a different background, and every form of life in between. While this can be frustrating at times, I think it is a beautiful part of life. It encourages us to all be scientists in our own way, because the only way to connect with another organism, especially one that moves through the world and experiences life in a different way than you do, is to ask questions. In order to build connections, you have to be curious and open-minded, which is the first step to being a scientist and gaining a deeper understanding of life around you. And once you find that connection, you can start to see the similarities between things that once seemed so different, like you and an octopus.

—

Angelique Allen: I am a PhD candidate studying octopus vision at the University of Oregon, and the author of a children’s book called Dreams of a Scientist: Lessons from the Sea! I am passionate about weaving science into society through art, and I hope that highlighting incredible discoveries about animals gets people more excited about the fascinating world we live in. IG:@angeliques.outthere.

 

Notes

  1. Alexandra K. Schnell et al., “Cuttlefish Exert Self-Control in a Delay of Gratification Task,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 288, no. 1946 (2021): https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2020.3161; R.C. Anderson et al., “Octopuses (Enteroctopus dofleini) Recognize Individual Humans,” Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science 13, no. 3 (2010): 261–72,https://doi.org/10.1080/10888705.2010.483892.
  2. RT Hanlon and JB Messenger, Cephalopod Behaviour, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
  3. Theodosia Woo et al., “The Dynamics of Pattern Matching in Camouflaging Cuttlefish,” Nature 619 (2023): 122–28,https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06259-2.
  4. Mäthger, L. M., et al. (2006). Color Blindness and Contrast Perception in Cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis) Determined by a Visual Sensorimotor Assay. Vision Research, 46(11), 1746–1753. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.visres.2005.09.035
  5. Roger Villanueva et al., “Cephalopods as Predators: A Short Journey Among Behavioral Flexibilities, Adaptations, and Feeding Habits,” Frontiers in Physiology 8 (2017): https://doi.org/10.3389/fphys.2017.00598; Caitlin E. O’Brien et al., “Behavioral Development in Embryonic and Early Juvenile Cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis),” Developmental Psychobiology 59, no. 1: 89–99,https://doi.org/10.1002/dev.21476.
  6. Z Yan Wang, “Octopus Death and Dying,” Integrative and Comparative Biology 63, no. 6 (2023): 1209–13,https://doi.org/10.1093/icb/icad098.
  7. Hanlon and Messenger, Cephalopod Behaviour.
  8. Ibáñez, C. M., & Keyl, F. (2010). Cannibalism in cephalopods. Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries, 20(2), 123–136.https://doi.org/10.1007/s11160-009-9129-y.
  9. JB Messenger, “Cephalopod Chromatophores: Neurobiology and Natural History,” Biological Reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society 76, no. 4 (2001): 473–528, https://doi.org/10.1017/s1464793101005772.
  10. J.J. Allen et al., “Cuttlefish Skin Papilla Morphology Suggests a Muscular Hydrostatic Function for Rapid Changeability,” Journal of Morphology 274, no. 6 (2013): 645–56, https://doi.org/10.1002/jmor.20121.
  11. S.C. Sonner and K.L. Onthank, “High Energetic Cost of Color Change in Octopuses,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 121, no. 48 (2024): e2408386121, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2408386121.
  12. P. T. Gonzalez-Bellido et al., “Neural Control of Dynamic 3-Dimensional Skin Papillae for Cuttlefish Camouflage,” iScience 8 (2018): 37–48, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2018.03.021.