His main research interest is in camouflage, in particular how it evolves in response to the colour vision of other animals such as predators.
He was a Junior Research Fellow at Brasenose College Oxford until 1989 when he became a lecturer at the University of Bristol.
[2] He has published over 250 research papers, mainly on vision and camouflage,[3] though he has also written on the use of statistics in biology, cited over 2700 times,[4][3] and was co-author of the ARRIVE and ARRIVE2 guidelines for reporting the use of animals in research, cited over 10,000 times.
[5][3] Cuthill won the Scientific Medal of the Zoological Society of London in 1998, the Nature and NESTA award for mentoring in science in 2005.
[6] He gave the Tinbergen Lecture of 2014 [7] and won the 2018 ASAB medal for contributions to the science of animal behaviour.