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Last year, a test of cephalopod smarts reinforced how important it is for us humans to not underestimate animal intelligence. Cuttlefish were given a new version of the marshmallow test, and the results appeared to demonstrate that there's more going on in their strange little brains than we knew. Their ability to learn and adapt, the researchers said, could have evolved to give cuttlefish an edge in the cutthroat eat-or-be-eaten marine world they live in. The marshmallow test, or Stanford marshmallow experiment, is pretty straightforward. A child is placed in a room with a marshmallow. They are told if they...

The fossilised remains of the animal were discovered in what is now Montana back in 1988 but it has only been identified as a new species of vampyropod now. This group of soft-bodied cephalopods was previously believed to have eight arms, but the new species actually has 10. 'This is the first and only known vampyropod to possess 10 functional appendages,' said Dr Whalen. During their new analysis of the fossil, the researchers found that the species had 10 arms with suckers, and dated back 328 million years – 82 million years older than the previous earliest record. 'The arm...

A young European cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis) trying to escape predation by expressing dermal papillae in 3-D and a mottled pattern, both of which disrupt the body contour and allow the cuttlefish to fool predators by avoiding recognition. As reported by Gonzalez-Bellido et al., these muscular structures contain a mix of muscle types that allow the animal to express and flatten the papillae quickly, and to maintain papillae expression for extensive periods without the need for neural input. The circuit that controls them appears homologous to the squid skin iridescence circuit. Credit: P Gonzalez-Bellido. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ An international team of scientists has...

Something strange is happening to the oceans. As coral reefs wither and fisheries collapse, octopuses are multiplying like mad... cephalopods—squids, octopuses, cuttlefish—are booming, and scientists don’t know why. An analysis published today in Current Biology indicates that numerous species across the world’s oceans have increased in numbers since the 1950s. “The consistency was the biggest surprise,” said lead study author Zoë Doubleday of the University of Adelaide. “Cephalopods are notoriously variable, and population abundance can fluctuate wildly, both within and among species.”

Red Lobster says it's feeling the "Beyonce Bounce." The seafood chain says sales surged 33 percent Sunday, compared with last year's Super Bowl Sunday. The increase came after the release of "Formation," a song in which Beyonce says she took a man to Red Lobster after sex. The halftime show -- seen by an estimated 112 million people -- is drawing praise from her fans and consternation from critics.

You and I both have the ability to travel back in time… at least in our minds. For example, I can remember that last Monday, I was at my desk, writing a post about stomachless animals. You too have a seemingly endless catalogue of the whats, wheres and whens of your life. This ability to remember the what, where and when of our past experiences is known as “episodic memory”. The term was first coined in the 1970s by Canadian psychologist Endel Tulving, who thought that such memories depended on language and were unique to humans. He was wrong. In...

Dolphins are fantastic sea chefs who have mastered the art of rustling up a soft meal of calamari, say scientists. The intelligent sea mammals have been spotted going through precise and elaborate preparations to rid cuttlefish of ink and bone to produce a soft meal of calamari. Australian researchers observed one wild female Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphin The research team, writing in the science journal PLoS One, said they repeatedly observed a female dolphin herding cuttlefish out of algal weed and onto a clear, sandy patch of seafloor. The dolphin, identified using circular body scars, then pinned the cuttlefish with its...