This Is The Last Thing You See Before You Die (If You Are A Crab)

You, a purple mangrove crab, have had a good run. You began your life as a larva drifting around the tropical blue waters of the Indo-Pacific. When you had molted enough to settle on the seafloor, you spent your days scuttling around the chandelier-like roots of mangroves and nibbling on leaf litter. Then, one day, you found yourself scooped up into a plastic container, tied to a string, and anchored to coral rubble off the Raja Ampat islands of eastern Indonesia. There you must wait until your worst nightmare appears. It might look like a gray spaceship, one dark stripe moving across its body in the gloaming sea. It might look like a leaf, olive green and drifting slowly toward you. It might resemble an innocuous branching coral, arms kinked outward. Or, most mysteriously, it might appear as a whitish specter containing one dark, pulsing inkblot that appears and vanishes as it comes your way. But it does not much matter which of these four (sea)horsemen of your apocalypse heaves onto your horizon, because by the time they have come, it is already too late. You, precious crab, are about to become dinner.

A group of scientists have described the four distinct hunting displays of the broadclub cuttlefish in a paper recently published in the journal Ecology. They also captured video footage of each display—passing-stripe, leaf, branching coral, and pulse—from the perspective of the final moments of a crab (RIP).