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was partly supported by an MBL Neurobiology Post Course Research award to co-author Lydia F. Naughton.

As a marine biologist, knew hogfish could change color to match their surroundings. But as an angler, she noticed something that wasn’t in the textbooks: Hogfish can camouflage even after they’re dead.

When Dr. Schweikert saw a hogfish with a conspicuous spearfishing hole through its body change color to match the texture of a boat’s deck, “it gave me this idea that the skin itself was ‘seeing’ the surrounding environment,” she said.

New research by Dr. Schweikert and her team provides a compelling explanation for how and why hogfish blend into their background, even in the afterlife. In published on Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, they identified a mysterious new type of cell deep in the hogfish’s skin that might allow the fish not only to monitor its surroundings but also to edit its skin color.

Source: Hogfish ‘See’ With Their Skin, Even When They’re Dead | The New York Times

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