![]() ![]() In fact, Aristotle himself has been described by his contemporaries and modern scholars as cephalopodan, with the simile that “he is like the cuttlefish who obscures himself in his own ink when he feels himself about to be grasped”. Aristotle wrote about inking cuttlefish 2500 years ago. As Venetian cooks have shown, it’s only the mellow, velvety, warm-tasting ink of cuttlefish-seppie-that is suitable for pasta sauce, risotto, and other black dishes.”-Marcella Hazan, Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking (1992).Ĭephalopods have stimulated the scientific minds, artistic emotions and sensory palates of humans for millennia, and as the above quotations reveal, their ink has played a central role in this fascination. “To the Italian palate, the harsh, pungent ink is the least desirable part of the squid. ![]() A work done under the impulse of an emotion has always a stamp of its own.”-Honoré de Balzac, La Vendetta (1830). “She took a sheet of paper and began to sketch in sepia the head of the hidden man. They darted tail first, with the rapidity of an arrow, from one side of the pool to the other, at the same instant discolouring the water with a dark chestnut-brown ink.”-Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (1839). Although common in the pools of water left by the retiring tide, these animals were not easily caught. “I was much interested, on several occasions, by watching the habits of an Octopus or cuttle-fish. ![]() Aristotle XII: Parts of Animals Movement of Animals, Progression of Animals (1937). Translated by Arthur Leslie Peck and Edward Seymour Forster. “When the Sepia is frightened and in terror, it produces this blackness and muddiness in the water, as it were a shield held in front of the body.”-Aristotle, The History of Animals, Book IV ( ca. Towards closing that gap, future directions in research on cephalopod inking are suggested. As is hopefully evident from this review, much is known about cephalopod ink and inking, yet more striking is how little we know. Topics include: (1) the production of ink, including the functional organization of the ink sac and funnel organ that produce it (2) the chemical components of ink, with a focus on the best known of these-melanin and the biochemical pathways involved in its production (3) the neuroecology of the use of ink in predator-prey interactions by cephalopods in their natural environment and (4) the use of cephalopod ink by humans, including in the development of drugs for biomedical applications and other chemicals for industrial and other commercial applications. This review summarizes our current knowledge of cephalopod ink. Their ink, which is blackened by melanin, but also contains other constituents, has been used by humans in various ways for millennia. One of the most distinctive and defining features of coleoid cephalopods-squid, cuttlefish and octopus-is their inking behavior. ![]()
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