How Can Squid 'Speak' With Their Skin?

Squid can communicate via patterns they flash on their skin, and the way they create those patterns is stranger than anyone thought. Learn what researchers are learning about it in this episode of BrainStuff.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain stuff from how stuff works, Hey, brain Stuff.
Lauren vogelbamb Here. Caltech physicist Richard Feynman once said, if
you think you 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

(00:23):
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

(00:45):
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 some thing in a human intelligence, say, isn't going
to work for an octopus, which is why neurobiologists studying

(01:06):
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

(01:28):
that there 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

(01:50):
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.

(02:11):
That's how it works in our mammalian 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.

(02:34):
That these squid actually use multiple motor centers within the
optic lobe of their brain to produce a single 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

(02:54):
same document all at the same time. We've vertebrates just
don't do things that way, not to Chun Tin Chio,
director of the Institute of Systems Neuroscience at the National
Singhua University in Taiwan, and his co author and student
Sung Han Liu, 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,

(03:18):
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

(03:41):
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 dyna amically. This
allows the squids to quickly switch different body patterns in

(04:04):
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

(04:27):
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

(04:48):
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,

(05:11):
this will be much more difficult than anything we've shown
so far. Today's episode was written by Jesselyn Shields and
produced by Tyler Clang. Brain Stuff has merchandise now. You
can contain your liquids, electronics, and or body in brainy
style by visiting t public dot com slash brain stuff,

(05:32):
and of course, for lots more on this and other
Squidgee topics, visit our home planet, how stuff Works dot
com