Cephalopods: Colour on demand
What colour is an octopus? How do you describe the look of an animal when its colour and shape are in constant flux? John James Wild “figured” the Australian Giant Cuttlefish, Sepia apama, as a uniformly dark creature, an utterly inadequate representation of its flashing skin that shimmers and shifts in the blink of an eye. A drawing of a cuttlefish, even when exquisitely rendered, preserves just a moment with no sense of what came before or after.
