Camouflaged cuttlefish employ electrical stealth
Wednesday, December 2, 2015 - 10:24
in Physics & Chemistry
In addition to its visual camouflage, the Common cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis) has a stealth technology to protect itself from predators that might detect it in the electrical spectrum. The 'bioelectric fields' it masks aren't anything like the 500 volts an electric eel produces, they're just a tiny electrical artifact of the ion exchanges caused by the animal's metabolic processes, 75,000 times weaker than the voltage of an AAA battery.