Common cuttlefish

Where does the common cuttlefish live?

Home: Sandy sea floors of the north-east Atlantic and Mediterranean.

In the wild it lives in these countries: Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Greece, the United Kingdom, Morocco, Tunisia.

Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.

The short profile

Fully grown: mantle up to 45 cm long, with eight arms and two tentacles. It weighs about 1.5 kilograms. On the menu: meat.

The story behind it

A cuttlefish carries thousands of tiny colour sacs in its skin. Muscles pull them wide open or squeeze them shut, so a wave of stripes and spots can run across the animal in an instant. It uses this to hide on the sea floor, to warn rivals and to court a mate, even though its own eyes cannot see colour at all. It hunts crabs, shrimp and small fish by creeping close and shooting out two long tentacles faster than a blink. Inside the body sits the cuttlebone, a chalky plate full of gas chambers that keeps the animal floating at the right depth. Most common cuttlefish live only one or two years and die soon after laying their eggs.

Find it on the globe

Common cuttlefish is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.

It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.