Cuttlefish are smart. Like, human-level smart. While they’re not quite on par with an adult human with a college degree, studies show that the common cuttlefish can delay gratification, a trait found in creatures we commonly consider intelligent, like primates, corvids, some dog breeds, and humans.
A 2021 study tested the cognitive abilities of cuttlefish with a modified version of the famous Stanford marshmallow experiment. The cuttlefish were divided into tanks with two types of food — a delectable live shrimp and a less delectable raw dead prawn.
A door with a circle on it would open immediately, revealing the prawn. Meanwhile, a door with a triangle on it would open between intervals of 10 and 130 seconds, revealing the live shrimp. The last door, one with a square, never opened.
The researchers found that the cuttlefish so preferred the live shrimp that they would delay the instant gratification of the immediately available dead prawn so they could wait whatever amount of time they needed for the triangle door to open, granting them the live shrimp.
The cuttlefish understood the live shrimp as the more delicious and enticing of the two, so it chose to wait until its preferred snack was available.
Other species can delay gratification for reasons that are a little more complicated than those of the cuttlefish, such as storing food for later. In its natural habitat, the cuttlefish is vulnerable to predators while it’s out looking for food, so maybe the cuttlefish is being a little more discerning, waiting for the ideal food source.
“Cuttlefish spend most of their time camouflaging, sitting and waiting, punctuated by brief periods of foraging,” lead author Alexandra Schnell said in a press release.
“They break camouflage when they forage, so they are exposed to every predator in the ocean that wants to eat them. We speculate that delayed gratification may have evolved as a byproduct of this, so the cuttlefish can optimize foraging by waiting to choose better quality food.”
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