Cuttlefish at Lionfish Rock

The first and last giant stride you make, off the Palau Aggressor, is at the first dive site called Lionfish Rock.  All other dives are conveniently made from a skiff that is lowered into the water with you in it.

If you were to ask me what irritates me most about diving, I would say it is the obligatory T.A.D.  TAD is an acronym I made up for "Throw Away Dive".  Each dive shop has you do a TAD to check you out and usually it is a monumental waste of underwater experience.  So most TAD's really are throw away dives, but, not on the Aggressor.  This first dive was one of our favorite and the reason was the Cuttlefish at Lionfish Rock.

At 50 feet we were greeted by an inquisitive cuttlefish.  He swam up to us, his undulating fins resembling a skirt draped around his body.  He moved fearlessly, seemingly without effort, forward and backward, to get a good look at each one of us.  I could not believe our good fortune when a second cuttlefish appeared, as if from nowhere, and gracefully glided past us, peering at each one of us with that "w" shaped pupil.

As you can see from, the dive board above, there was a lot of stuff to see on this dive but we spent most of the dive with the cuttlefish.

These Cephalopods are one of my favorite sea creatures for many reasons but the ability to change color and texture to emulate almost anything in seconds is amazing.  Imagine that the cuttlefish skin is made of pixels, like a digital photograph, then what you see when you look at the cuttlefish is ten million little pixels, or color, cells, each one of them controlled by a neuron.  So you are watching a critter in high definition.  How does this happen? The cuttlefish has pigmented organs called chromatophores, to display red, yellow, brown and black.  Bands of muscle radiate from each chromatophore so the cuttlefish can change it appearance by simply contracting or relaxing its muscles.  The cuttlefish has 200 chromatophores per .001 square inch (square millimeter), imagine the brain power necessary to activate that!

As we slowed our movements the cuttlefish became braver, coming up to us and reaching out with its tentacles.  Get too close and it would raise several tentacles up high as if to say back off.

You can see in the picture below how the cuttlefish swims.  Notice the undulating fins draping his body.  But if he needs to move fast he can turn himself into a jet engine by using the water jet, see the funnel under his head.  By contracting his mantle muscle he can force a jet of water through the funnel and propel himself quickly through the water.

After a while the cuttlefish lost interest in us and began interacting with one another.  Not certain what this behavioral interaction was but it certainly was interesting to watch.

Mary watching the cuttlefish.  This photograph was taken by one of the dive crew.

Cool Cuttlefish Facts:

•  The same jet funnel, that helps propel the cuttlefish, can also eject a cloud of ink to help it escape attack. That ink was once used in fountain pens and was called “India Ink”.
• Cuttlefish have eight arms and two suckered tentacles that jet out quickly to capture prey. It uses its "parrot like" beak to eat the prey.
• The cuttlefish has one of the largest brain-to-body size rations of any invertebrate. It is as intelligent as the octopus or the pigeon.
• Male cuttlefish can mimic the opposite sex in order to swim past larger males and gain access to females. Tell me they aren’t smart!
• The cuttlefish has three hearts, with two pumping blood to its gills and one heart circulating oxygenated blood to the rest of its body. By the way, its blood is blue-green in color.