BrainStuff Classics: 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.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of I Heart Radio.
Hey brain Stuff. I'm Lauren vogel Bomb In. Today's episode
is a classic from our archives. In this one, we
delve into the differing communication styles of squid. They can
create patterns on their skin to talk to each other
even when the parts of their brains that make the
talking happen are busy. Hey brain stuff, Lauren vogel Bomb here.

(00:27):
Caltech physicist Richard Feinman 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 last ancestor
we shared with one of these living jello salads was
probably a worm of some kind. So our DNA is

(00:48):
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

(01:10):
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

(01:30):
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,

(01:54):
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

(02:17):
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

(02:40):
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

(03:04):
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

(03:26):
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

(03:49):
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

(04:11):
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

(04:33):
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

(04:56):
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.

(05:18):
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

(05:40):
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
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