The cuttlefish hovers in the aquarium, its fins rippling and large, limpid eyes glistening. When a scientist drops a shrimp in, this cousin of the squid and octopus pauses, aims and shoots its tentacles around the prize.

There’s just one unusual detail: The diminutive cephalopod is wearing snazzy 3-D glasses.

Putting 3-D glasses on a cuttlefish is not the simplest task ever performed in the service of science.

“Some individuals will not wear them no matter how much I try,” said Trevor Wardill, a sensory neuroscientist at the University of Minnesota, who with other colleagues managed to gently lift the cephalopods from an aquarium, dab them between the eyes with a bit of glue and some Velcro and fit the creatures with blue-and-red specs.

The whimsical eyewear was part of an attempt to tell whether cuttlefish see in 3-D, using the distance between their two eyes to generate depth perception like humans do. It was inspired by research in which praying mantises in 3-D glasses helped answer a similar question. The team’s results, published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, suggest that, contrary to what scientists believed in the past, cuttlefish really can see in three dimensions. Read more …