Read on to find out and learn more about the power of suction cups! All eight arms of an octopus have a whopping 2, suction cups, each used to taste, grip and smell. However, each arm of the octopus can have up to suckers each. The suction cups of octopus are so powerful, in fact, each one has more taste receptors than that of a human tongue!
Surprisingly, the suckers on an octopus are individually controlled. This means they can be isolated to rotate, grasp, and feel surfaces. Most octopus have suction cups about the size of a quarter or smaller, but giant pacific octopus cups have been measured up to 2. So, how strong are these suckers?
The suction cups of the giant pacific octopus are incredibly strong. These small muscles allow the animal to grasp surfaces, pull apart prey, and even unscrew jars and pill bottles! Believe it or not, the largest suction cups, located near the beak of the animal, are even stronger.
These suckers can lift up to 35 pounds each! Well, if an octopus attached its suction cups to you, it could be difficult to remove them due to their strength and size.
However, suction cups are not the part of the octopus you should be concerned about. Levy, Hochner and their colleagues in the U. Each chemical signal may also be unique to the octopus, which would prevent these sometimes-cannibalistic organisms from eating severed pieces of their own arms, too.
Scientists are interested in these alien-looking animals because similar to humans , they have big brains. These brains are comprised of million neurons and capable of problem-solving and memorization and even predicting important soccer games. The octopus nervous system differs from ours in a key way: million peripheral neurons extend through their tentacle arms and facilitate movement. So, when an octopus arm gets chopped off by accident or in a fight with a predator, it remains active for about an hour—instinctively grasping and holding anything it touches.
Because of their autonomy, the researchers saw amputated octopus arms as a way to try to answer questions about how these cannibalistic animals recognize their own attached and unattached arms from potential food.
The researchers began by humanely amputating an arm from common octopuses Octopus vulgaris in their lab. The researchers put an octopus and different objects—amputated arms, skinned arms, fish, shrimp, and petri dishes partially covered in octopus skin—in a tank and watched what happened.
Amputated arms never attached to themselves or grasped the arms of the live octopus in the tank, instead avoiding its former neighboring suckers. The severed arms, however, did latch on to skinned octopus arms and the plastic part of petri dishes. In addition, scientists found diversity in what the receptors responded to and the signals they then transmitted to the cell and nervous systems.
The scientists believe this research can help uncover similar receptor systems in other cephalopods, the invertebrate family that also includes squids and cuttlefish. Along with Giesen, other co-authors from the lab include Peter B.
Kilian , an animal technician, and Corey A. Allard , a postdoctoral fellow. The team set out to uncover how the receptors are able to sense chemicals and detect signals in what they touch, like an arm around a snail, to help them make choices.
Octopus arms are distinct and complex. Because the arms operate partially independently from the brain, if one is severed it can still reach for, identify, and grasp items. The team started by identifying which cells in the suckers actually do the detecting.
0コメント