Building an Octopus Dictionary, One Arm Movement at a Time | New York Times

This feature is about a from the Roger Hanlon laboratory at MBL.Chelsea Bennice is a Whitman scientist at MBL.

The eight arms of an octopus are right there in its name. But these biomechanical marvels share more in common with appendages found in other animals. Like an elephant’s trunk. Or your tongue.

That’s because octopus arms, like those other fleshy protuberances, are examples of muscular hydrostats, which produce force when different muscle groups relax and contract against one another. Such muscular contractions allow for “almost infinite degrees of freedom to bend, shorten, elongate, twist and turn,” said Chelsea Bennice, a postdoctoral researcher at the Florida Atlantic University Marine Science Laboratory.

In a study published on Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, Dr. Bennice and her colleagues sought to make that seemingly infinite catalog of motions a bit more finite.

Source: Building an Octopus Dictionary, One Arm Movement at a Time | The New York Times