BrainStuff Classics: How Can Squid 'Speak' With Their Skin?

understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics. It's possible. The same could be said about cephalopods, the group of invertebrates that include octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish. The last ancestor we shared with one of these living jello salads was probably a worm of some kind. So our DNA is

basically nothing like their's, not that they care. They didn't really do evolution the same way we did, but nevertheless managed to independently evolve into uncannily clever camouflage artists with large, complex brains, closed circulatory systems, and camera style eyes just like ours, well not just like ours. The thing about cephalopods is they've had five hundred million years of independent evolution to figure out how to do things their own way.

Any test you can create to measure something in a human intelligence, say, isn't going to work for an octopus, which is why neurobiologists studying cephalopods have jobs not unlike that of electricians figuring out the electrical grid on an alien planet. We spoke with Dr Sabrina Pankey, an evolutionary biologist in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Biomedical Sciences

at the University of New Hampshire. She said, we've known for fifty years that the cephalopod brain is easily the most complex among invertebrates, and also that they're dazzlingly intricate. Body patterning behavior is controlled by motor centers in the brain. However,

the neural architecture has been much more enigmatic. Figuring out the neural basis of complex behaviors is inherently difficult in any animal, but trying to figure out how as squid can completely change its body patterning in a matter of milliseconds, or display one pattern to the squid on its left and another to the one on its right, is a

sticky wicket. As you can imagine. One hypothesis has been that body coloration is organized in the cephalopod brain somato topically, that one specific part of the central nervous system is solely responsible for controlling the patterning in a distinct patch of skin. That's how it works in our mammalion cortex after all. But a new study published in the Journal of Neuroscience shows again cephalopods are not like us, and

are in fact very not like us. The research team proposes its study subject, the oval squid, also known as the big fin reef squid, achieves its skin patterning through mosaic organization. That these squid actually use multiple motor centers within the optic lobe of their brain to produce a sin goal skin pattern like stripes, bands, or spots. The fact that several parts of the brain work together it wants to create a single display allows for greater complexity

in the resulting pattern. It would be like using multiple keyboards to write the same document all at the same time.

We vertebrates just don't do things that way. Dr Chun tin Chio, director of the Institute of Systems Neuroscience at the National sing Hua University in Taiwan, and his co author and student Sung Han Lieu think that because several different areas of the optic lobe can be used to display a single skin pattern in a specific body part dark mantles, stripey tentacles, polka dot fins, that the squid are able to flash about fourteen distinct patterns in the

blink of an eye. We tend to think of redundancy as inefficient, but cephalopods have overlapping parts of their brains to create specific patterns on specific body parts, meaning that if one part of their brain is busy, they can still flash information onto their bodies with a inspiring quickness. Just think if you had a bunch of different parts of your brain in charge of remembering a single word, your word recall skills would be amazing, GEO said via email.

We think this research is particularly interesting because it shows how squids can efficiently modulate the expression of individual body pattern components, thus changing the appearance of their body color dynamically. This allows the squids to quickly switch different body patterns in visual communication. Thus it is sort of like an

alphabet visual language. The researchers think the color patterns displayed by the squid are not only used as communication signals to the same species, but are also used to hide or worn off other potential predators or prey. This research also highlights the fact that though we vertebrates tend to think we've got the best systems for doing everything, cephalopods might be onto something, at least when it comes to

efficient communication. Panky said, the way these body patterns can be created thanks to various combinations of brain centers activating reminds me of word creation in a glutinative languages like German. There is a linguistic mechanism to create compound words that

then take on new meaning. Maybe eventually will know enough about the cephalopod brain that we can find out whether squid learn word patterns by observation or if the information is hardwired, and whether different populations speak in different patterns. But for now, the researchers are focusing on learning how visual information from the eyes regulates body patterning in the squids when they are communicating with each other in their

natural environments. Geo said, this will be much more difficult than anything we've shown so far. Today's episode is based on the article secret alphabet of squid skin due to brains totally unlike our own on how stuff works dot Com. Written by Jesslan Shields. Brain Stuff is production of iHeart Radio in partnership with how stuff Works dot Com, and

it's produced by Tyler Clang. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.