why-animals-do-the-thing:

4gifs:

Cuttlefish pretending to be a hermit crab

Cuttlefish have such an incredible capacity for mimicry that isn’t talked about enough. Not only can they pretend to be a different sex in order to get sneaky matings with females who are already being guarded by a male, and change their skin color for camouflage, now they’re apparently pretending to be crabs. 

What’s interesting is that when I went to look up pharoah cuttlefish mimicry, the only result I got was this behavior that potentially looks like hermit crab mimicry (the paper on it wouldn’t confirm for sure that’s what the behavior was, just that it seems likely) I couldn’t find evidence of cuttlefish mimicking any other species. So it’s just hermit crabs, I guess.