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Fig. 1. Cuttlefish coloration patterns and their components. (A) Examples of four
camouflage patterns from juvenile cuttlefish (mantle length 50 mm). From left
to right the animals illustrate: a pale uniform pattern; a stipple with some
mottle; a mottle with weak disruptive elements; and a high contrast pattern
(but not typically disruptive). The animals also illustrate a range of skin
textures. (B) A juvenile cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis) settled
amongst pebbles, which is displaying components that are characteristic of
both the disruptive and mottle body patterns. Increasing pebble size would
cause the animal to emphasise components associated with the disruptive
pattern, and decreasing pebble size would favour the mottle. The level of
visual contrast within the image (e.g. between pebbles) appears to affect the
overall contrast in the body pattern rather than the relative strengths of
disruptive and mottle patterns (see Fig.
3A for further body patterns)
(Mäthger et al., 2006;
Kelman et al., 2007). (C) Some
of these components numbered according to the scheme proposed by Hanlon and
Messenger (Hanlon and Messenger,
1988) (see Fig. 2).
In our principal components analysis (PCA) of cuttlefish, body pattern
principal components (PCs) often approximate body patterns identified by
Hanlon and his co-workers (Hanlon and
Messenger, 1988; Mäthger
et al., 2006). Here, features labelled on the left are often
positively weighted in PCs that resemble the disruptive body pattern, and
those on the right in PCs that resemble the mottle pattern (Figs
2,
3,
4). Features 5 and 40 are not
clearly associated with either type of pattern.
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