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Cephalopods

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The cephalopods are: the squid, the cuttlefish, and the Octopus.

Do they have intelligence? We normally think of our companions in intelligence as other mammals. This is a very different branch of the tree of life. Still, as a start, we might ask ourselves: do they have a language?

Nothing so auditory as the human voice, or the wonderful whale songs either. The best candidate for a cephalopod language is the constant change of the color of their skin. As Peter Godfrey-Smith writes, these colors change "second by second," Blues and greens, for example, can seep back and forth, unveiling "gray and silver veins."

There are at least three evolutionary purposes for the display of colors. They are used for camouflage. If camouflage fails and it is necessary to flee a predator, the colors can also be used for "deimatic displays," i.e. for patterns that may surprise or confuse the predator giving chase. A predator that pauses or loses its own bearings can quickly become an unsuccessful predator. Furthermore, the colors are useful for signalling others of the same species, as in male-female courtship.

Multi-faceted color changes seem like a language adapted to the deep sea. The colors with which one confuses a predator giving chase are something like saying, "hey look! your laces are untied."

But the most intriguing fact here is that the shifting of colors seems to go beyond what any of these adaptive explanations would encompass. "Some cuttlefishes, and a few octopuses, go through an almost continual, kaleidoscopic process of color change that [seems to be] an inadvertent expression of the electrochemical tumult within them. Once the color-making machinery on the skin is wired to the electrical network of the brain, all sorts of colors and patterns might be produced that are simply side effects of what is going on within."

They talk to themselves.


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