Shape-Shifting Across The Globe

Many animals have evolved camouflage, but nobody quite pulls it off as beautifully as the octopus and its tentacled cousin the cuttlefish. These invertebrates, which belong to a group called cephalopods, are covered in microscopic pigment organs that they can squeeze and stretch to take on the patterns around them. They can curl their tentacles to assume different shapes, and they can even change the texture of their skin to bumpy or smooth, as necessity demands. Nobody knows the tricks of cephalopods better than Roger Hanlon, a biologist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. As I wrote in this New York Times profile of Hanlon