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First published online November 17, 2006
Journal of Experimental Biology 209, 4717-4723 (2006)
Published by The Company of Biologists 2006
doi: 10.1242/jeb.02580
Cuttlefish responses to visual orientation of substrates, water flow and a model of motion camouflage
School of Life Sciences, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton, BN1 9QG, UK
* Author for correspondence (e-mail: d.osorio{at}sussex.ac.uk)
Accepted 4 October 2006
| Summary |
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Key words: Sepia, cephalopod, orientation, motion camouflage, vision
| Introduction |
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The eyes and the visual behaviour of cephalopod molluscs have much in
common with those of fish. Thus Octopus uses a broad array of
features to recognize objects (Hanlon and
Messenger, 1996
), whereas the cuttlefish Sepia
officinalis shows size constancy when selecting prey
(Messenger, 1977
). In addition
to tests of object recognition, a natural way to investigate cephalopod vision
is via their visual polymorphism or `polyphenism', which allows a
complete change of body pattern in less than a second
(Hanlon and Messenger, 1988
;
Hanlon et al., 1999
; Chiao and
Hanlon, 2001a
,
b
;
Messenger, 2001
). In
particular one can ask how cuttlefish (Sepia spp.), which often lie
on the sea-bed rather like flatfish, alter their appearance according to the
background substrate. Under these conditions the patterns adopted by juveniles
at rest are probably cryptic, although this is hard to prove
(Kelman et al., 2006
).
In visual psychology a central idea is that neural codes represent images
by a small number of parameters. Best known are the primary visual cortices of
cats and monkeys where neurons encode spatial location, spatial scale, colour,
contrast, stereo, motion and orientation
(Hubel, 1988
). It is,
therefore, natural to ask if cephalopods use similar measures. Many
cephalopods, including Sepia officinalis, lack colour vision
(Marshall and Messenger, 1996
;
Mäthger et al., 2006
),
but, unsurprisingly, they are sensitive to achromatic contrast
(Chiao and Hanlon, 2001a
;
Chiao and Hanlon, 2001b
;
Mäthger et al., 2006
). We
do not know of tests of stereovision, motion or orientation sensitivity in
cuttlefish, but octopus can learn the orientation of a line
(Wells, 1960
).
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| Materials and methods |
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Five cuttlefish were tested twelve times each on three different backgrounds (Fig. 1), which were presented in a random order. When we were filming the water was reduced to a depth of 0.25 m. We placed individual cuttlefish into a circular filming arena (0.6 m diameter, 0.3 m height) of opaque white plastic that lay within the holding tank. To minimise cast shadows three 150 W halogen floodlights were spaced equally around the arena. Backgrounds, randomised for design and orientation, were placed underneath the arena, and the animal left to acclimatise for at least 10 mins. The cuttlefish was allowed to settle on the substrate until it was expressing a consistent camouflage pattern. A still image was then taken with a digital video camera (Canon XL-1) from directly above (Fig. 1). The process was repeated to give a set of images for each animal on each of the three backgrounds. To ensure that we studied each animal once, after filming the cuttlefish was then moved to a separate holding tank.
Experimental backgrounds were made of three substrate types fixed onto 0.5 m2 Perspex sheets by aquarium sealant (Geocel Ltd, UK). Substrates were either 1 mm diameter: `fine'; 3 mm: `medium'; or 9 mm: `coarse'. The particles were coloured either black or beige with pond paint. Each background consisted of alternating black and beige stripes of equal width (Fig. 1). The period of the patterns were 5 mm for sand, 15 mm for gravel and 45 mm for pebble.
Image analysis
The study produced 180 images (one image of each cuttlefish x 12
trials x 3 backgrounds x 5 cuttlefish). The orientation of the
animal with respect to the background was given by the acute angle between the
longitudinal midline of the cuttlefish and the longitudinal direction of the
background stripes.
Warping
The images were, by necessity, taken from multiple points of view, and the
animals vary in size, and can stretch and twist their skin. To deal with these
distortions and hence to allow point-by-point comparisons of the body
patterns, images were warped (by bi-cubic interpolation) to a standardised
reference frame by placing a mesh of 14 reference points on the image of the
cuttlefish (Anderson et al.,
2003
). After warping, each image was converted to a matrix
(385x287) of pixel intensity values and filtered by convolution with a
Gaussian filter (see Appendix). We did not analyse the pattern on the
head.
A number of points are relevant. Firstly, warping is critical: small inaccuracies give substantial artefacts along luminance boundaries, even between identical images. Luckily these registration artefacts are easy to spot. Secondly, any errors are caused mainly by inaccuracies in the location of reference point, rather than the warping algorithm. Thirdly, warping is very good at interpolation, but less good at extrapolation, which means that information about the pattern at the edge of the animal should be treated with caution.
Statistics
To visualise the effect of background orientation on the body pattern, we
need: (a) to average all the images where the animal lay parallel (1-30°)
to the background stripes (<Iparallel>;
Fig. 2A); (b) to average all
the images where the animal lay at right-angles (61-90°) to the background
stripes (<Iperpendicular>;
Fig. 2B), and (c) to estimate
the difference between them (<Iparallel> -
<Iperpendicular>;
Fig. 2C). This creates a
difference-image where positive values indicate regions that were brighter
when the animal was lying parallel, and darker regions represent locations
where the skin was darker when the animal was lying parallel to the background
stripes. This analysis identifies possible effects of orientation, but does
not distinguish real structure from random variation. Moreover, the magnitude
of this difference signal is not a good criterion for identifying
statistically significant effects, since it ignores variability. Therefore, as
well as the difference image, a t-statistic image
(It) is created where the value of each pixel is simply
the difference image, divided by the estimated standard deviation at that
location.
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where
(Iparallel) is the standard deviation of
the images where the animal was parallel to the stripes, and
(Iperpendicular) is the standard deviation where
the animal was perpendicular to the stripes, and |.| represents
the absolute function.
To distinguish responses to the stimulus orientation from random variation
we explicitly calculated the magnitude of effects one would expect to
encounter simply due to random effects using a permutation test {also called a
randomization test, re-randomization test, or an exact test [for an example of
its application to spatial data, see Holmes et al.
(Holmes et al., 1996
)]}. This
works by calculating the sampling distribution of the largest difference
between the two conditions, under the null hypothesis that there is no
difference. This is done by randomly splitting the data into two sets and
calculating the maximum difference between the average images in the two sets
(e.g. it estimates the magnitude of the difference expected if the was no
difference in the two conditions). By repeating this process a large number of
times, an estimate of sampling distribution under the Null hypothesis can be
generated, and hence an appropriate threshold for 95% significance. To
calculate an appropriate significance threshold, the data are randomly split
into two equally sized groups. Using this random split, the maximum t
statistic in the resulting t image is calculated. To get an estimate
of the distribution of the maximum values due to chance, this process of
splitting the data into two random groups, and calculating the maximum value
of the t image was repeated 1000 times. Given 1000 maximum values, an
appropriate 0.05 significance threshold can be calculated by ordering these
values in terms of increasing magnitude, and setting the threshold to the 95
percentile (the 950th value). This is a robust non-parametric significance
test that takes account of the actual (potentially non-Gaussian) distribution
of image values. This method also deals with the problems of within-image
correlation and of correction for multiple comparisons.
Measuring orientation in cuttlefish body patterns
To determine whether the S. pharaonis coloration patterns contain
orientation-specific structure that matches the background stripes, images of
the cuttlefish were convolved with vertical and horizontal spatial filters
(see Appendix). These filters were derived by differentiating a Gaussian
distribution, either vertically or horizontally. A range of filter widths
spanning the separation of the background stripes enabled us to detect
structure at several spatial scales.
Orientation to water flow
Tests of orientation preference in water flow were done after the work on
visual behaviour and, because S. pharaonis were no longer available,
used ten juvenile common cuttlefish, Sepia officinalis (mean mantle
length 60 mm). These two species of Sepia are much alike in their
general behaviour and coloration patterns (e.g. Chiao and Hanlon,
2001a
,
b
). Subjects were placed singly
in a 560 mmx120 mm laminar flow chamber. An Eheim aquaball powerhead
1212 (Eheim Ltd, Germany) provided a recirculatory water flow, propelling
water at one end and drawing water from the other at 80 mm s-1.
This flow rate (
0.3 km h-1) is not high for tidal and wave
currents in shallow water. To control for the effects of the visual
environment in the laboratory, water flow was at 0°, 90°, 180° and
270° to an arbitrary main axis in the tank.
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| Results and discussion |
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Had we investigated only body patterns, the conclusion would be that
Sepia pharaonis is insensitive to the orientation in the substrate.
Given a predator sensitive to orientation, then it should be advantageous to
generate body patterns that mimic the orientation structure of the substrate.
Where backgrounds are themselves oriented (as with ripple patterns) it would
seem sensible to use a similar camouflage pattern, but cuttlefish in our
experiments do not do this. Nonetheless it is clear that the animals are
sensitive to visual orientation, because on the medium and the fine stripes
they align themselves across the stripes (Figs
1,
4; fine stripes:
2=15.8, d.f.=2, P<0.001; medium stripes:
2=19.3, d.f.=2, P<0.001). There was no such
preference on the coarse background (Fig.
4;
2=1.7, d.f.=2, P=0.4). Since the null
hypothesis is that all orientations are equally likely, a
2
test for independence of orientation and frequency is an appropriate
statistic.
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The first possibility, that the cuttlefish cannot generate orientated patterns is implausible. Body pattern components such as the head bar are orientated, and are commonly used in (what we assume to be) cryptic coloration. So it is not that the animals cannot display orientated displays to match the background, but that they do not.
The second potential reason for the lack of orientation dependence is that normal camouflage displays have strongly orientated structure. Rather than generating a specific orientated pattern, animals could orientate so that their default pattern matches the background orientation. This is not the case. Fig. 3 shows that there are similar amounts of vertical and horizontal structure in the body patterns at the scale of the background substrate.
The third possibility is that generating orientated structure is not desirable for camouflage (Fig. 5). Camouflage is excellent if the body pattern perfectly matches the background (Fig. 5A), but because small alignment errors generate highly visible corners and edges around the mantle, a less perfect match can be worse than having no pattern at all (Fig. 5B). If in addition to alignment errors, the spatial frequency and orientation are also poorly matched, the conspicuousness of the pattern is higher still (Fig. 5C). Matching the environment therefore may be risky: a small error can cause high visibility. Natural backgrounds are not as clearly striped as those in our experiments, but similar principles will apply to other types of cryptic camouflage.
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A model of motion camouflage
The previous three hypotheses refer to static crypsis. This neglects the
highly deleterious effects of motion on crypsis. Almost regardless of the
coloration pattern, small movements will render animals highly visible. Visual
motion reveals the form of an object, at least to human observers, and
minimising its salience is essential to concealment, especially where water
currents cause involuntary displacements.
In humans, detection of relative motion against a background greatly
exceeds sensitivity to absolute motion [simply detecting that a feature has
moved (Leibowitz, 1955
)], and
given the nature of the underlying task, the same almost certainly applies for
the cuttlefish's predators. Consider two situations: for the detection of
absolute motion one has to compensate for both self-motion, and the movement
of one's eyes. All these processes are inherently noisy; a single bright light
in a dark room appears to move because of this noise. Relative motion signals
are not confounded by this noise. Also relevant to how motion affects
camouflage is that the revealing and occlusion of the substrate gives a very
large motion signal. Minimising movement occlusion will minimise the
degradation of camouflage caused by movement.
Both these characteristics are relevant to camouflage on an oriented background. Even if the direction of motion is random, then as shown in Fig. 6, for an animal placed on a striped background, the main source of relative motion is along the edge of the animal aligned with the stripes. If the animal is longer than it is wide, then the relative motion signal is minimized when the body axis is orthogonal to the stripes, as we observed (Fig. 4). Minimising a relative motion signal may explain why the animals do not use stripes for camouflage. Stripes may give good camouflage when the animal is static, but relative motion of body pattern stripes against background stripes is likely to be conspicuous.
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To conclude, whereas a terrestrial predator can minimise motion by moving
slowly, and perhaps minimise motion by actively choosing a trajectory
(Srinivasan and Davey, 1995
;
Mitzutani et al., 2005), cuttlefish, in coastal waters are likely to be
subject to involuntary displacements by waves and currents. The animals appear
to use both visual patterns and information about water flow to align
themselves at 90° to background stripes, and with the flow. There is no
compelling evidence that the demands of camouflage are an overriding
consideration, but given the quality of crypsis by juvenile cuttlefish
(Hanlon and Messenger, 1988
) it
would not be surprising if they were important.
Finally we note that this work makes predictions about the occurrence of oriented textures in natural substrates. First that they do occur where cuttlefish live, and second that they are normally caused by water flow (e.g. ripples) and give information about this flow. Static, oriented patterns, such as those associated with tree bark or rock strata, may be rare, and hence of little relevance to camouflage.
| Appendix |
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This leaves the choice of the spatial scale (standard deviation of the filter) used for blurring. We used a cross validation-based technique that allows the data to determine an optimal estimate for removing noise but preserving any informative variation. This technique exploits the fact that where data are corrupted by independent additive noise, the best estimate of the underlying signals is simply the mean signal. Therefore, one can measure the performance of a particular filter scale by measuring how closely (mean squared error) an individual blurred image is to the average of all other measurements made in that condition. After averaging this error over all three conditions, this cross validation statistic measures how well a particular width of filter removes noise. The filter that minimises this cross validation statistic is used for subsequent analysis.
Lastly, to minimise any small effects of inhomogeneous illumination within the tank, image intensity values were divided by their median. This then resulted in 180 images, warped to the same reference frame, filtered to remove noise, and scaled to remove the effects of variable illumination. These intensity matrixes represented the animal's response to that particular stimulus.
| Acknowledgments |
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| Footnotes |
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2 Present address: Department of Experimental Psychology, Social Sciences
Complex, 8 Woodland Road, Clifton, Bristol, BS8 1TN, UK ![]()
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