Old Cuttlefish Still Have Great Memories | The Atlantic

Cuttlefish, with their blimp-shaped bodies and eight squiggly arms, don’t age like people do. Sexual maturity tends to come late for them—about three-quarters of the way through their two-year lives, the rough equivalent of a human hitting puberty in their 60s. The geriatric cephalopods will then spend several weeks on an absolute bender, coupling up with as many partners as they can. Only after the close of these frenetic sexual bonanzas does true decrepitude come to claim them: Their feeding tentacles go limp; their appetite deserts them; their color-changing skin flickers like a television on the fritz. The animals pivot almost instantaneously from their sexual prime into the throes of infirmity, and within days, they are dead. “They really go out with a bang,” Alex Schnell, a cuttlefish biologist at the University of Cambridge and the Marine Biological Laboratory, in Massachusetts, told me.

Before this rapid denouement, though, the animals stay relatively sound of body—and also of mind. Schnell and her colleagues have found that common cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis) can still form and retain crystal-clear memories of personal experiences just a month before their death. Read more of the article here...

Source: Old Cuttlefish Still Have Great Memories – The Atlantic