My Cuttlebone is a Broken Heart and it Propels Me Forward

There are no cuttlefish at the Vancouver Aquarium. Trust me, I went and checked and they were definitely not there. Before I went, I called and asked—and that was more difficult than it sounds because it turned out nobody really knew whether or not there were cuttlefish at the Vancouver Aquarium.¹ It became a bit of a joke, me frequently calling the Vancouver Aquarium, asking my silly little cuttlefish question, them saying they didn’t know. I’m sure the Vancouver Aquarium thought it was funny too, although in a different way. Maybe more similarly to how, when I worked at the shoe store, I found it funny that so many adult men didn’t know their shoe size: not “hahaha” funny, more like “you’ve got to be kidding me” funny.

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Cuttlefish are cephalopods like octopus or squid, but unlike octopus and squid their arms come out of their face, and they have a little skirt around their oval bodies that flutters hypnotically around them as they swim. Approximately five hundred million years ago,² what-would-become-humans diverged from what-would-become-cuttlefish so people who need to believe in aliens (but not in a different part of the universe) claim that cephalopods are aliens and they are right here on OUR EARTH, no need to go elsewhere.³

At one point in history, all cephalopods had outer shells like snails do today. Slowly, octopuses and squid shed their shells completely while cuttlefish moved them to the inside, where the shell became a “cuttlebone,” an oblong disk beneath the skin that helps the cuttlefish with buoyancy regulation. Octopus and squid can squish themselves into tiny holes and hide because they have no bones.⁴ Because of the cuttlebone, cuttlefish cannot squish, which is somewhat impractical—however, what they lack in compactability, they make up for in camouflage.

Cuttlefish can drastically change their appearance in the blink of an eye, producing near perfect camouflage, flamboyant displays of colour and even changes in texture. This works via cells in the top layer of their skin called chromatophores.⁵ Each chromatophore, which contains either red, ochre or a black/brown pigment, is controlled by the brain and can be expanded or constricted to highlight or mix the various pigments. Below the chromatophores are the iridophores that filter and reflect incoming light through tiny stacks of plates that separate and direct the different wavelengths, shining back colours that may be different than the ones that went in. Below the iridophores are the leucophores, which also reflect, although they bounce the light right back out without any filters. Cuttlefish can instantaneously change their chromatophores and reflectors by controlling the spacing of the plates to select the needed colours.⁶ A common cuttlefish skin display is known as the “passing cloud formation” where a rolling band of light moves in ripples up and down their bodies like TV static. It’s hypnotising and, I imagine, quite sexy to other cuttlefish.

In addition to these three layers, cuttlefish also have papillae—bundles of muscles under the skin that allow them to alter their texture from smooth to spiky, should the need to appear sharp arise.⁷

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In 2020, my friend Joel lent me Jia Tolentino’s book of essays, Trick Mirror, which, at the time, was one of the coolest things you could read according to podcasters in Brooklyn. In the first essay, “The I in The Internet,” Tolentino writes about how we are essentially left to our own devices when it comes to the endless well of misfortune we can draw in from the internet. She points out that there is no roadmap for how to deal with the constant barrage of terribleness, juxtaposed by, well, everything else. She writes, “I had started to feel that the internet would only ever induce this cycle of heartbreak and hardening—a hyper-engagement that would make less sense every day.”⁸ It reminded me of being 8 years old and going to work with my dad at the Children’s Aid Society. The first thing he showed me was a wall of colourful pamphlets, each about a different problem a family might have. One of the pamphlets had a bright white background and a picture of a bright white baby chewing on a bright white telephone cord and the words around the baby said something like “The Dangers of Neglect!” I remember feeling a vague sense of sadness and nausea upon discovering this new way of harming children. I told my dad that seeing a baby eat a telephone cord felt really messed up and he did a kind of tired chuckle and said “ya” and it hit me that My Dad was also this other, camouflaged Work Dad who hardened himself to things every day in order to come home at night to our soft house where nobody has ever chewed on a telephone cord. Work Dad had no room to care about pictures of babies eating electronics because there were real babies not eating anything on the line right now.

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Naomi Klein defines states of shock like this: “[it is] when we experience a sudden and unprecedented event for which we do not yet have an adequate explanation. At its essence, a shock is the gap that opens up between an event and existing narratives to explain that event.”¹⁰ At the risk of diluting her theory, this seems to happen many times a day on the internet. The fresh breaks of the heart are gaps where shock can calcify and then be ignored.

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Will sets the alarm ten minutes earlier than it needs to be set so we can wake up slowly.  It used to bother me, but now I think it’s one of the most beautiful things in the world. We have breakfast and he’s scrolling through the news on his phone, hovering above its blinking surface, and I’m reading a book about books bound in human skin when he says something like, “Oh my god the mass graves are unending and this winter will be so bad that it will actually never end.” And so I say, “Wait, what? In this place where we live?” And he says, “No, not here,” and pauses and shows me a meme of a dog sitting at a table like a perfect gentleman. I say, “Excuse me, how am I supposed to continue my day now?” And he says, “Elon Musk is a turd,” and then, against all odds, I have a pretty normal day.

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When I first started paying attention to cuttlefish, I came across a lot of articles about how cuttlefish are colourblind, but not really.¹¹ While they don’t see colour how we see colour, scientists suggest that they can see a detailed range of polarised light.¹² External information and its body’s own chromatophores both take part in a brain-powered transformation that lets the cuttlefish camouflage and communicate.¹³

Here’s where, for me, cuttlefish transition from a curiosity to a full-blown muse. Just as we absorb vast amounts of information without being equipped to properly process it, cuttlefish take in information about their surroundings and reflect it back without necessarily being able to “see” it. Maybe there is something to glean from letting most news only penetrate our outer layer as a means of turning it into something productive and communicative. Is there a sneaky vulnerability in wearing your hardest parts on the inside and the softest parts on the outside? Is it a way to tune in without breaking your heart to oblivion?

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Hey, Siri, How do I make art with a hard heart? How do I stay open when it feels like the entrances have become impenetrable?

Hi, Lauren. As a digital assistant devoid of human thoughts or emotions necessary for creating art, I’ve gathered tips from online sources that could prove beneficial:

The artist acts as a vessel and a mirror. You observe, you absorb, and then you make decisions about the art’s appearance or sound. Eventually, the art reflects meanings, some beyond your control, necessitating acceptance. If you become hardened, what’s inside remains stuck inside. This is at odds with the essence of art—an outward expression. Think of the cuttlefish: its cuttlebone is not, in fact, a bone at all. A cuttlebone is a porous internal shell-like structure made of aragonite. It contains gas-filled chambers and primarily assists in regulating buoyancy by adjusting the gas-to-liquid ratio within these chambers.¹⁴ So, as you can see, making art isn’t about resisting solidification; it’s about staying an open conduit, no matter how narrow, throughout transformations. A tough exterior doesn’t hinder embracing softness. Shells can take on diverse forms.

Is there anything else I can help you with?

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There are cuttlefish at the Toronto Aquarium, but it’s a worse aquarium in every other way than the Vancouver one because it looks like an arcade and is, it seems, for children. After locating the small cuttlefish tank at the Toronto Aquarium, I knelt and watched them as people around me said things like, “Oh my god these things are weird,” and, “Is that a squid?” before moving on. These comments and questions were mostly based on their shape—disc-like, skirted, arms gently undulating beneath exotic W-shaped eyes—and not their potentially spectacular surface.¹⁵ The cuttlefish in there were all mostly beige.

They had all their needs met, plenty of leisure time, and not a lot of socializing, so they got to stay beige. They’ve been separated to the safety of a tank in the Toronto Aquarium, the safety of a constructed subtropical suburbia where everyone is basically the same and the only goal is to keep things that way, to keep things beige.

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It turns out it’s not about an inability to navigate the onslaught of news, but rather my horror at how easy it is to ignore. It feels as though this business of “heartbreak and hardening” is not an active sadness. Instead, it’s a passive activity we’re all subjected to by default. The only way out seems to be that two things must be true at once—we have to ignore so much in order to care so much. Making art, reflecting, means caring more than is normally necessary while also ignoring more than is normally necessary. It means parsing through the constant arrival and disappearance of images and information, often without warning or context. It means we must decide to be calloused or catalysed. It means every spring we take the long way around to avoid upsetting the wild geese, and yet it was to you and me She pronounced, “let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”¹⁶ It means I’ve scrolled past 1000 Telephone Babies just this morning and am somehow sitting here trying to meet a writing deadline. It means grief is almost worth living for.¹⁷ It means holding several truths at once, most of them contradictory.

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I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but it’s true that cuttlefish only live about a year and a half, and then their vivid skin sloughs off to reveal an off-white surface so plain it could only mean the end.¹⁸ The screen is fleeting. The screen falls away. The surface is actually Dorian grey. The body has to hold the surface, and the surface is often unbearably heavy.

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There is a cuttlebone on my desk and it’s not even that hard. I just broke it and it crumbled, creating a calcium-rich dust I could feed to a bird.

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Lauren Prousky is a multidisciplinary artist, writer and culture worker based in Kitchener, Ontario.

1. Look, I’m sure some people know, but they were not the ones answering the phones the 4 times I called.
2. “Cuttlefish with Meg Mindlin,” 2023, in Just The Zoo of Us podcast, 46:28, https://maximumfun.org/episodes/just-the-zoo-of-us/203-cuttlefish-w-meg-mindlin/.
3. Elle Hunt, “Alien Intelligence: The Extraordinary Minds of Octopuses and Other Cephalopods,” The Guardian, March 28, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/mar/28/alien-intelligence-the-extraordinary-minds-of-octopuses-and-other-cephalopods.
4. Piero Amodio, Phylogenetic-tree-depicting-the-evolutionary-relationship-between-cephalopods-and-the.jpg, n.d., https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Phylogenetic-tree-depicting-the-evolutionary-relationship-between-cephalopods-and-the_fig1_344151907.
5. This is how it works in giant cuttlefish. Other types of cuttlefish might have slight variations to this process.
6. Peter Godfrey-Smith, “Making Colors,” Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017) 109–112.
7. Michael Brooks, “The Secret Language of Cuttlefish,” New Scientist, June 1, 2016, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19826531-000-the-secret-language-of-cuttlefish/.
8. Jia Tolentino, “The I in The Internet” Trick Mirror, (Random House, 2019), 31. Wolfgang Laib, Milkstone, 1978 | moma, n.d., https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/50/754.
9. Wolfgang Laib, Milkstone, 1978 | moma, n.d., https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/50/754.
10. Naomi Klein, In Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 2023.
11. Patrick Monahan “How ‘colorblind’ Cuttlefish May See in Living Color,” Science, July 6, 2016, https://www.science.org/content/article/how-colorblind-cuttlefish-may-see-living-color.
12. Veronique Greenwood, “Did a Cuttlefish Write This?” The New York Times, July 9, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/09/science/cuttlefish-cognition-cephalopods.html.
13. Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds, 112.
14. Ting Yan, Zian Jia, Hongshun Chen, Zhifei Deng, Wenkun Liu, Liuni Chen, and Ling L, “Mechanical Design of the Highly Porous Cuttlebone: A Bioceramic Hard Buoyancy Tank for Cuttlefish,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117, no. 38 (2020): 23450–59. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2009531117.
15. Despite them being quite foreign to many of us in Canada, most cuttlefish species are abundant in the places they live. While spotting a live one in the wild might be difficult (re: incredible camouflage), you can find cuttlebones all over beaches on every continent except for the Americas and Antarctica.
16. Mary Oliver, Wild Geese, n.d. http://www.phys.unm.edu/~tw/fas/yits/archive/oliver_wildgeese.html.
17. Ada Limón, “After the Fire,” On Being, February 16, 2023, https://onbeing.org/poetry/after-the-fire/.
18. Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds, 112.