Taste by touch in octopus

Animals evolve to sense and respond to their specific ecological niche and lifestyle. Octopuses represent a fantastic example of such adaptation, as they use their unique body plan and distributed nervous system to support voracious foraging behavior within seafloor environments. In this talk, I will discuss the octopus’ specialized “taste by touch” arm sensory system, which it uses to locally detect and respond to prey inaccessible to traditional sense organs. These studies demonstrate that the peripherally distributed octopus nervous system is a key site for signal processing and broadly highlight how molecular and anatomical features synergistically evolve to suit an animal’s environmental context.