Read Or Listen To The Article Click Here. They don’t have trouble in the dark waters that are found deep on the ocean’s floor. They are able to see very well both during the day and at night. The first sense to mention is their vision. This all part of what helps them to survive in their environment. DOI.org (Crossref), doi:10.1016/j.cub.2015.02.064.The Octopus has a very unique body and use of its senses. “Arm Coordination in Octopus Crawling Involves Unique Motor Control Strategies.” Current Biology, vol. et al. Motor control pathways in the nervous system of Octopus vulgaris arm. “Control of Octopus Arm Extension by a Peripheral Motor Program.” Science, vol.
Octopus anatomy how to#
With these commands in mind, each tentacle gathers its own sensory and position data, processes it, and then issues its own commands on how to move by stiffening or relaxing different parts of the arm, all without consulting the central brain upstairs. Commands like “search for food” are then received by each of the tentacles, who all have their own smaller, independent brains. These are sent as messages through groupings of neurons. This is the part of the nervous system that determines what the octopus wants or needs, such as if it needs to search for food. So how does this partially de-centralized nervous system work? The octopus does, in fact, have a central brain located between its eyes containing about 180 million neurons. The arm even adapted its movement patterns the same way a still-connected tentacle did when the arm’s environment and initial posture were changed.Īn experiment shows that an electrically stimulated octopus arm (right), when detached from its central nervous system, will still move in the same basic patterns as an arm naturally controlled by an octopus (left). showed that even when a disconnected arm was electrically stimulated, it would still move in the same basic patterns of a tentacle being controlled naturally by an octopus. That’s more than two times the number of neurons the average frog has in its entire body! An experiment conducted by German Sumbre et al.
This means that there are about 40 million neurons in each tentacle. An octopus has about 500 million neurons in its body, two-thirds of which are distributed amongst its limbs. For an octopus, though, this process is much more complicated.Įach arm of an octopus is able to control itself semi-independently from the central brain. When most people think of a nervous system, they think of a single brain sending out messages to move our arms and legs, then gathering information back to process everything we touch, see or hear.
So how does an octopus fully control all eight of its flexible limbs? The answer lies in its partially de-centralized nervous system. What was just described isn’t an alien at all, but actually the complex anatomy belonging to a common octopus, otherwise known as Octopus Vulgaris, and there is a lot we can learn from it. Oh, and they can only breath underwater, too. Rather than having a rigid skeleton, they have compact arrays of muscle tissue that stiffen and soften when they move, and their many limbs have an infinite number of degrees of freedom. Rather than having a single brain where all sensory information and motor controls are processed, they have nine brains. Picture this: Earth has made its first contact with an extraterrestrial species, and, as to be expected, their anatomy and nervous system are entirely different from our own.
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