![]() ![]() And it seems to live primarily in tropical and subtropical waters, spending its life swimming in the water column, rather than crawling on the seafloor like most octopus species. These octopuses have been found at a variety of depths-from 150 to 2,000 meters. The arms have sparse white suckers speckled down their length. Its long, gelatinous web extends much of the way down its arms. It seems to swim with its oblong opaque stomach and eyes aligned vertically, perhaps to reduce its profile that might be seen by predators below. ![]() ![]() UCSB Researchers Study Octopus Camouflage from UC Santa Barbara on Vimeo.Like the glass octopus, the telescope octopus (named for its eye stalks) is largely transparent. "That expansion or relaxation causes changes to be made in the color of the skin," Oakley saysįurther research is needed to make an explicit link between opsins and this behavior in the skin, Oakley cautions, but that skin is able to quickly react to light without help from the brain is a remarkable finding in itself. ![]() Opsin changes shape when light hits it, and this shape-shifting triggers a cascade of signals that cause the muscles connected to the chromatophores to either expand or contract. "It's the same protein that's used in the eye," he says. The key to octopus skin's superpower of sight is a type of protein known as opsin, according to Oakley. "You can think of them as acting like pixels on a computer monitor - their colors can be changed individually, so the animal can change the size of these thousands of 'pixels' for purposes such as blending into their surroundings or communicating with other cephalopods." "There are thousands of these chromatophore organs covering the skin of cephalopods," says Oakley. By expanding or contracting its chromatophores, an octopus can change its skin color. They then shined light on the skin and watched what happened:Įven though the skin was not receiving any information from the brain, it responded by expanding its chromatophores, tiny organs which are attached to muscles within the skin. Oakley and his colleagues determined this by isolating the skin of a two-spot octopus ( Octopus bimaculoides) from its brain, this way they could be sure that the brain was not mediating the skin's responses. ![]()
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