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Neurobiology

Motor control of flexible octopus arms

Nature volume 433, pages 595–596 (2005)Cite this article

The octopus borrows a jointed-vertebrate strategy to transfer an item between points.

Abstract

Animals with rigid skeletons can rely on several mechanisms to simplify motor control1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 — for example, they have skeletal joints that reduce the number of variables and degrees of freedom that need to be controlled. Here we show that when the octopus uses one of its long and highly flexible arms to transfer an object from one place to another, it employs a vertebrate-like strategy, temporarily reconfiguring its arm into a stiffened, articulated, quasi-jointed structure. This indicates that an articulated limb may provide an optimal solution for achieving precise, point-to-point movements.

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Figure 1: Octopus fetching movements involve a quasi-articulated structure that is based on three bending sites, or ‘joints’.

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Author information

Author notes

  1. Germán Sumbre

    Present address: Division of Neurobiology, Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley, California, 94720, USA

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Neurobiology and Interdisciplinary Center for Neuronal Computation, Institute of Life Sciences, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 91904, Israel

    Germán Sumbre & Binyamin Hochner

  2. Laboratorio di Neurobiologia, Stazione Zoologica di Napoli “A. Dohrn”, Naples, 80121, Italy

    Graziano Fiorito

  3. Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, 76100, Israel

    Tamar Flash

Authors
  1. Germán Sumbre
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  2. Graziano Fiorito
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  3. Tamar Flash
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  4. Binyamin Hochner
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Binyamin Hochner.

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Competing interests

The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Methods

Includes technical information on video and EMG recordings and kinematical analysis of the fetching movements. It also describes how the quasi-articulated structure is dynamically adjusted according to the position of the grasped food along the arm and demonstrates the positive correlation between the geometrical characteristics of the quasi-articulated structure and the recorded muscle activities. (DOC 35 kb)

Supplementary Figure

EMG recordings are positively correlated with the length of the quasi-articulated structure. (DOC 52 kb)

Movie

A movie showing an octopus in captivity fetching a living crayfish to its mouth. (QT 10356 kb)

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Sumbre, G., Fiorito, G., Flash, T. et al. Motor control of flexible octopus arms. Nature 433, 595–596 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/433595a

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