(This is a feature I have written for Guru Magazine. You can read the full article below. Hope you enjoy!)

The heroes of this story are two cephalopods – an octopus called Japetella heathi and a cuttlefish called Onychoteuthis banksii – henceforth known as the supersquid. You can see their near-magical talents in the video below:

Why should the supersquid need such an awesome power? Sarah Zylinski from Duke University, North Carolina tested the two squid in conditions replicating their natural habitat, and found a surprising conclusion – they weren’t using their invisibility to sneak into the ladies locker room.

The real reason is a lot less frivolous – avoiding predators. Being invisible seems like the perfect way of avoiding being eaten, but surprisingly this is not always the case. The supersquid live in a rather large number of depths. Nearer the surface, where ambient light is dominant, transparency works brilliantly. The trouble comes further down in the ocean depths.

Lower down in the sea, light from the sun becomes weaker and weaker. Eventually, the dominant form of illumination comes from bioluminescence – light give out by living organisms. The most famous example of this is the anglerfish – who uses a danging biological searchlight to hunt for prey.

This type of light is more directed than the diffuse light that comes from the sun. The transparent tissues of the supersquid would act like a lens for this bioillumination – concentrating and reflecting the light back to the predator. In effect, it makes them glow in the dark.

Image by Wooster Collective

To counter this effect, many animals at depth are heavily pigmented with proteins that colour them black or red. Instead of reflecting the light, the pigmentation absorbs the light, allowing the creature to go about its business uneaten.

Because the supersquid have to deal with both environments they have evolved an ingenious way of turning their pigmentation on and off. They use cells called chromatophores, which change colour through muscular contraction.

“Transparency and pigmentation are so ubiquitous as camouflage strategies in the mesopelagic, but usually animals are confined to one or the other,” says Zylinski. “It’s really neat that these cephalopods can use the capacity for rapid change via chromatophores to utilize both strategies.”

I think it’s time Batman and Spiderman threw in the towel. There’s a new superhero in town, and his name is Squidman. Has a good ring to it, I think.

Zylinski, S., & Johnsen, S. (2011). Mesopelagic Cephalopods Switch between Transparency and Pigmentation to Optimize Camouflage in the Deep Current Biology, 21 (22), 1937-1941 DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2011.10.014

While men mostly grow out of this awkward pubescent way of interacting with women – able to charm and woo and flatter with varying degrees of success – it seems that the anaesthetic effect of women on the brains of men never quite goes away, even when the women in question are not even in the room.

Sanne Nauts and her colleagues from Radboud University, Nijmegen have shown that even the thought of interacting with a woman is enough to impair the cognitive abilities of men.

Nauts gathered together a group of straight men and women under the pretence that they would be involved in a lip reading experiment, monitored by a webcam. Before the experiment, they were first given a test to measure their thinking power. Then, they were told that a researcher would turn the webcam on remotely, and send them an instant message telling them to start. Half the group were told that this observer was called Dan, the other half Danielle.
The whole lip reading experiment was all a diversion. In reality, the researchers were creating in the minds of the participants the expectation that they were going to be interacting with another person – either a man or a woman. What the researches were interested in was how the thought of interacting with another person might affect people’s performance on the thinking power test.
The test they performed was a Stroop colour test. Names of colours were given to the participants. But, each word was also written out in a different colour. The people were challenged to read out the colour of the text, while ignoring the meaning of the word. Sounds easy, but you can see how hard it really is with this online test:

What the researchers found was that male participants performed much worse on the Stroop test when they were told they were going to be interacting with a woman than with a man. The women tested in the experiment – ever level headed – showed no such change.

Why should men be doing this? The old cliché that men think of sex every seven seconds or so is not too far from the truth. Instead of thinking of sex directly, the researchers believe that men are constantly thinking about how well their actions might be coming across to the opposite sex. A lot of thought needs to go in to creating a persona that is attractive. Am I being witty enough? Am I matching her body language? Am I even listening to her? All these subconscious thoughts – sexual media relations – take a lot of brain power. So, when half the men in the experiment were told they might be interacting with a woman (Danielle) soon, their minds wondered. They performed poorly on the Stroop test because they were saving their brain power for the upcoming female interaction. Men told they would be talking to another man were less distracted – they had no one to impress. Similarly, the woman tested in the experiment did not seem to be fazed by the thought of an outside observer.

Considering that men can be struck dumb by even the thought of a future female encounter, it’s surprising that men are able to function in modern society – with actual interactions with women – even slightly.

Nauts, S., Metzmacher, M., Verwijmeren, T., Rommeswinkel, V., & Karremans, J. (2011). The Mere Anticipation of an Interaction with a Woman Can Impair Men’s Cognitive Performance Archives of Sexual Behavior DOI: 10.1007/s10508-011-9860-z