Male Cuttlefish Make Their Own Light Shows To Flirt With Potential Mates

Mating is all about marketing. Males throughout the animal kingdom are constantly having to sell themselves to potential mates. Where we humans do it through charm, empathy, humor, and pretending to like hiking, birds do it through beautifully colored plumage.

In the hierarchy of impressive mating displays, male Andrea cuttlefish have us all beat: they literally bend the light to flirt.

A new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that male Andrea cuttlefish, Doratosepion andreanum, use specialized arms to manipulate polarized light during courtship. If you are looking at them dead on while it was happening, you probably wouldn’t tell the difference. To other cuttlefish, they’re putting on a dazzling light show that our eyes can’t perceive.

Cuttlefish eyes are weird. They’ve got W-shaped pupils and the ability to see polarization, the same way your sunglasses let you see through murky water that your regular vision can’t penetrate. Because of this, scientists have suspected that they might also use polarization to communicate, and this study proves it.  

When trying to attract a mate, male Andrea cuttlefish extend two elongated arms and twist them in a specific way. Their translucent, birefringent muscle rotates horizontally polarized light by nearly 90 degrees, turning it vertical. The result is alternating bands of horizontal and vertical polarization, creating maximum contrast for cuttlefish vision while essentially being invisible to predators and researchers without special cameras.

The signal disappears when they aren’t engaged in their mating ritual, suggesting that the behavior evolved specifically for mating. The cylindrical shape of the arms amplifies the effect, making them perfectly suited to turn ambient light into a sexy little light show.

This isn’t only a breakthrough regarding cuttlefish, but it could have wide-reaching implications for the rest of the ocean. Now that we know creatures are bending polarized light to create their own personalized planetarium laser light shows on their bodies, the same thing could be true of other creatures beneath the waves.

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