Here we have the cuttlefish, looking rather startled. Perhaps he has just found out he is destined to end up being slowly gnawed up in a budgie cage, poor thing.
Cuttlefish are actually invertebrates, not fish. In fact if you look at them scientifically they are molluscs, and they are related to squids and octopi, which must have been what the artist of John Player`s "Fishes of the World" was thinking of when they started drawing theirs. In fact that card, which looks like it is the oldest cuttlefish card ever issued, for it dates from 1903, has a lot of things wrong, not just the picture, but the text, which tells us that "Some species grow to an enormous size, with thick body 14 feet long, arms 10 feet, and tentacles 24 feet in length, armed with large suckers Such monsters are easily capable of killing a man, or sinking a large boat". in actual fact, though, the largest of all the cuttlefish is the Giant Australian Cuttlefish (Sepia apama), which only grows to twenty inches; even with its tentacles at full stretch it only adds another nineteen.
However though the cuttlefish is part of the octopus family, it alone has what we know, after its death, as a cuttlefish, the strange spongy centre shell which acts as a flotation device. And, for such a basic creature, it is an engineering marvel, for within that hard shell are tiny chambers, each with a miniature pump that takes the water out and replaces it with gas, a lighter substance, so that the cuttlefish can rise to the surface, and then, even more magically, taking the gas out and replacing it with water, a heavier substance, when they wish to descend.