Through a chance accident in the lab, scientists discover how octopuses achieve their amazing arm control, giving this eight-armed master of dexterity the ability to precisely control octopus movements. The subdivided nervous system that controls this has been revealed.
Groundbreaking research by the University of Chicago nature communicationsthat octopus arms contain a sophisticated nervous system organized like corrugated pipes, with separate parts that cooperate with each other to enable their smooth, graceful movements. is shown.
accidental discovery
The discovery was made when graduate students Cassady Olson and Grace Schultz were examining a thin section of an octopus arm under a microscope. When the sample continued to fall off the slide, they tried observing the longitudinal strips instead. This was a frustrating moment that led to unexpected progress.
“If you think about this from a modeling perspective, the best way to set up a control system for this very long, flexible arm is to break it up into segments,” Olson explains. “There has to be some communication between the segments. I can imagine that helping smooth the movement.”
There’s a brain in every arm
Each arm of an octopus contains more neurons than the animal’s brain, concentrated in large nerve cords that weave back and forth along the length of the arm. The researchers found that these neurons were organized into distinct columns separated by gaps where nerves and blood vessels exit into nearby muscles.
This segmented structure creates what researchers call “suckers.” This is a spatial map that helps control the hundreds of independently moving suckers that allow the octopus to taste and smell its environment by touch.
evolutionary solution
“If you’re going to have a nervous system that controls dynamic movements like this, that’s a good way to set it up,” notes Dr. Clifton Ragsdale, professor of neurobiology and lead author of the study. . “We think this is a feature that evolved specifically in soft-bodied cephalopods with suckers to allow for insect-like movements.”
2 The story of cephalopods
The researchers also studied squid, which diverged from octopuses more than 270 million years ago. They found that the squid’s tentacle clubs (the sucker-covered ends used to capture prey) share the same segmental structure, whereas the sucker-free stalks do not. This suggests that segmented nerve cords evolved specifically to control sucker-equipped appendages.
“An organism with insect-like, sucker-containing appendages needs the right kind of nervous system,” Ragsdale explains. “Different cephalopods have come up with segmented structures, the details of which vary depending on environmental demands and hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary pressure.”
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