Scientists Get One Step Closer to Figuring Out What Makes Octopuses Tick
Octopus nervous systems are structured entirely differently from our own. However, the eight-limbed molluscs are known to be very intelligent, prompting many questions as to how exactly their neurological networks function.
Two teams of scientists recently produced state-of-the-art 3D models of octopus nervous systems that begin to outline how these complicated networks function for the first time.
In the future, the experts hope these models will facilitate our understanding of these strange and fascinating creatures.
Octopuses are wild creatures. They’re objectively weird, squishy, alien-esque creatures that blob around the ocean and can fit through anything that the only hard surface on their body—their beak—can fit through. No bones, no spine, all squish.
But, arguably, the strangest thing about octopuses is that they are smart. Surprisingly smart. And they’re smart in a very different way than we are. Octopuses have what is sometimes called distributed intelligence, which comes from the fact that their nervous system is arranged in a totally different way than the human nervous system is—or, frankly, the nervous system of any kind of animal with a spine.
In humans, all thought, movement, and impulse starts in the brain. The brain then sends signals out into the body, and the body completes whatever task or reaction it was functionally assigned. That’s not the case with octopuses. They have a central brain, but the rest of their nervous system is sort of organized around various smaller high-neuron-concentration blobs that can (and do) work independently from the central brain. This is most noticeable in those wiggly, bendy arms—all eight of an octopus’ arms can move independently, sense, and explore without express commands from the brain. They literally have minds of their own.
Now, we know that this is true. And we know the basic layout of neurons that makes it possible. What we don’t know, on a cellular level, is how exactly that works. And that’s exactly what the teams behind two new papers—both published in the journal Current Biology and led by researchers from San Francisco State University—are trying to find out.
Both teams set out to create 3D reconstructions of the neurons that make up the nervous systems of these creatures, allowing them to see the complex makeup of these impressive limbs like never before. One team—led by postdoctoral fellow Gabrielle Winters-Bostwick—tagged different types of neurons at a molecular level, examined several sections along an arm, and combined the data gathered from those sections to create a 3D model. The other team—led by graduate student Diana Neacsu—built their model using a technique called 3D electron microscopy.
“Having [these two papers] converging at the same time means the amount we can learn from any single experiment is just astronomically higher,” Robyn Crook, who runs the lab that both studies were completed in, said in a press release. “I would say these papers are really facilitating discovery in new ways.”
And she certainly wasn’t wrong. The two teams were able to learn a lot from their combined results. From Winters-Bostwick’s study, the experts were able to learn that the type of neurons found near the base of the arm (closer to the central brain) is substantially different from the type of neurons found near the tip. And Neacsu’s study provided even more discoveries, including that there is “symmetry in the organization of the ganglia and repeating patterns in nerve branching, blood vessels and more,” according to the press release.
Additionally, Neacsu’s study revealed that some of those repeating patterns are organized around the suckers that ironically line octopus arms. “To see how closely the [nervous system structures] associated with the suckers was really surprising,” Neacsu said in the press release. “But it makes sense because the suckers play such a huge role in the octopus’s ecological niche, helping them hunt, sense and more.”
All of this research is fairly first-line, and has predominantly been limited (until now) by access to the technology used to complete these investigations. But the experts behind these studies expect them to be a jumping-off point for even more in-depth research in the future.
“Why do you have an animal with this much complexity that doesn’t seem to follow the same rules as our other example—humans—of a very complex nervous system?” Crook asked in the press release. “There’s a lot of hypotheses. It might be functional. There might be something fundamentally different in the tasks octopus arms have to do. But it could also be an evolutionary accident.”
Looks like we still have a lot of work to do to truly understand these deeply alien creatures.
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