There was one scuttle over a female that a pair of cuttlefish males indulged in 2011. The entire drama was witnessed in the Aegean Sea coast of a fishing village called Çeşmealtı in Turkey. One pair of graduate students saw the phenomenal fight between male cuttlefish fighting over a female.
It was like a movie sequence, filmed by the team to record the information for a study on camouflage. The video of the warring cuttlefish was published in the American Naturalist. One male first came up and rested next to expert Justine Allen, according to Phys.org. Allen completes her Ph.D. in neuroscience at Brown. Currently, she is functioning as an adjunct instructor in the University's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.
She records that the cuttlefish male just swam up to a female a few meters away, grabbed her and mated in the head-to-head position. The whole sequence was filmed with co-author Derya Akkaynak, now at the University of Haifa in Israel.
The cuttlefish couple finished mating and began to swim together. It was a common male European cuttlefish, Sepia Officinalis. He was "guarding" his girlfriend to ensure that she was using his sperm to fertilize her eggs when she laid them. But soon, another male intruded. He put out his fourth arm towards the male and dilated the pupil of the eye when he faced the first male.
Allen, who is also the training grant manager in Brown's Office of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies, said that it was a vicious "war of colors" between the cuttlefish. The newcomer's "pupil dilation and arm extension" started three brief tussles over four minutes. The aggression just kept increasing. The consort male extended his own arm, darkened his face and then both flashed "brightly contrasting zebra-like bands on their skin."
"The biting and rolling are the most aggressive behavior ever observed," Allen said, according to Newsweek. "That's about as intense as it gets." The first round was won by the cuttlefish intruder. The consort darkened his body, squirted ink into the intruder's face and swam away.
The cuttlefish intruder then tried to woo the female but the consort male returned with a new, dark face and zebra banding. He was again defeated by the intruder, who fought him off with aggressive gestures, including hitting him with a fourth arm. The intruder tried to position the female's body to start off a head-to-head mating, but she rejected him.
This brought back the consort cuttlefish. He came back with greater aggression, grabbed the intruder and twisted him into a barrel roll three times. He also bit the intruder, while the female cuttlefish scuttled away. The victorious consort then swam away with the female cuttlefish.
Hence, the male cuttlefish rivalry seemed to be a "mutual assessment" model of the game theory. How the opponents could prevail over each other's ability seemed to signal the results of the fight. Each tried to gain a hand over the other and ended in three bouts.
"A lot of science, especially animal behavior, needs to be done outside, in the field, with wild animals," Allen explained the cuttlefish battle. "You have to be lucky enough to catch them on film to analyze what they are doing, but science is happening outside all around us, all the time."
YouTube/LiveScience
