THE CUTTLE. SEPIA - FAMILY SEPIIDAE. Shell SiX to ten inches long, internal, consisting of a broad, leaf-like expanse of spongy, chalky substance, the posterior portion narrowed to a beak and made up of thin plates with air spaces between, the front portion not chambered, broadened and much thickened. Body short and broad, scarcely longer than the shell ; head short ; eyes large, with cornea complete ; arms short, with stalked, horny-rimmed suckers in four rows ; fourth arm on left hectocotylised at base ; tentacles long, contractile into pockets behind eyes ; clubs with suckers. Distribution, world-wide. Used as food and for bait.
Genus SEPIA, Linn.
The cuttle bone, on which the canary whets his beak, is a well-known object, but few would know where to go if sent to "original sources" to get one. Even if one saw them in plenty scattered on the beach after a storm — as is common on the Atlantic shores, or picked them up afloat, one is still far from knowing the secret. Watch the gulls after the storm picking up what the waves left stranded in the way of fresh meat for them. You are fortunate if you find a half-eaten cuttle, revealing intact the porous cuttle-bone. With the clue thus furnished, examine the clefts of rocks in search of a perfect specimen. It has a broad body, considerably less than a foot long, brown, cross-banded and spotted with purple, with white on the back.
450 The Cuttle. Sepia A pair of flat, narrow fins edge the body all around. At one end is the head, which bears two large black eyes and a crown of eight short arms, flattened and pointed, each one black and smooth outside — white on the inner faces and studded with four rows of suckers. One on each side, directly above the eyes, are
two long tentacles, slender and smooth except at their extrem ities which widen into spoon-shaped expanses lined with suckers. These tentacles are so flexible that when the creature desires it can draw them into pockets in the head, completely hiding them from view.
The cuttle is not a patient mollusk. It resents your poking it with a stick. You were not expecting to be sprayed with a liquid black as ink. But the cuttle is at bay, and uses its natural weapon. In the water it swims by throwing out in jets the water that continually enters the gill-chamber, and finds exit through the funnel. Beset by an enemy, the cuttle presses a but ton and behold! a cloud of ink darkens the water, confuses the pursuer, and the cuttle scuttles to a safer neighbourhood.
The ink of the ancients was obtained from this mollusk's ink bottle. Painters got their sepia colour from the same source. This is the genuine, original India ink, for which no satisfactory substitutes have been manufactured.
Denys Montfort, the most voluminous writer on squids, declares that although the ink-bag of Sepia is rarely larger than a man's thumb, the force exerted upon the bag throws the jet of ink six feet; and this one bagful is enough to colour black several buckets of water.
A dead cuttle does not let its ink flow freely until the body is perfectly relaxed. In extracting sepia ink commercially the Chinese pile the cuttles in vats and drain off the fluid which flows without restraint after the cuttle has been dead twenty four hours.
Carry your specimen home in a bucket of sea water, and put it in a roomy aquarium. It will be shy at first, but on ac quaintance will show its tricks freely. The use of those eight arms will be demonstrated if you drop in a shrimp after the cuttle has fasted a few hours.
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