Dataset Information

Sensorial Hierarchy in Octopus vulgaris's Food Choice: Chemical vs. Visual.

ABSTRACT: Octopus vulgaris possesses highly sophisticated sense organs, processed by the nervous system to generate appropriate behaviours such as finding food, avoiding predators, identifying conspecifics, and locating suitable habitat. Octopus uses multiple sensory modalities during the searching and selection of food, in particular, the chemosensory and visual cues. Here, we examined food choice in O. vulgaris in two ways: (1) We tested octopus's food preference among three different kinds of food, and established anchovy as the preferred choice (66.67%, Friedman test p < 0.05); (2) We exposed octopus to a set of five behavioural experiments in order to establish the sensorial hierarchy in food choice, and to evaluate the performance based on the visual and chemical cues, alone or together. Our data show that O. vulgaris integrates sensory information from chemical and visual cues during food choice. Nevertheless, food choice resulted in being more dependent on chemical cues than visual ones (88.9%, Friedman test p < 0.05), with a consistent decrease of the time spent identifying the preferred food. These results define the role played by the senses with a sensorial hierarchy in food choice, opening new perspectives on the O. vulgaris' predation strategies in the wild, which until today were considered to rely mainly on visual cues.

SUBMITTER: Maselli V

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7143185 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Sensorial Hierarchy in Octopus vulgaris's Food Choice: Chemical vs. Visual.

Maselli Valeria V Al-Soudy Al-Sayed AS Al-Soudy Al-Sayed AS Buglione Maria M Aria Massimo M Polese Gianluca G Di Cosmo Anna A

Animals : an open access journal from MDPI 20200310 3

Octopus vulgaris possesses highly sophisticated sense organs, processed by the nervous system to generate appropriate behaviours such as finding food, avoiding predators, identifying conspecifics, and locating suitable habitat. Octopus uses multiple sensory modalities during the searching and selection of food, in particular, the chemosensory and visual cues. Here, we examined food choice in O. vulgaris in two ways: (1) We tested octopus's food preference among three different kind ...[more]

PMID: 32164232

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Project description:Cephalopods are highly visual animals with camera-type eyes, large brains, and a rich repertoire of visually guided behaviors. However, the cephalopod brain evolved independently from that of other highly visual species, such as vertebrates, and therefore the neural circuits that process sensory information are profoundly different. It is largely unknown how their powerful but unique visual system functions, since there have been no direct neural measurements of visual responses in the cephalopod brain. In this study, we used two-photon calcium imaging to record visually evoked responses in the primary visual processing center of the octopus central brain, the optic lobe, to determine how basic features of the visual scene are represented and organized. We found spatially localized receptive fields for light (ON) and dark (OFF) stimuli, which were retinotopically organized across the optic lobe, demonstrating a hallmark of visual system organization shared across many species. Examination of these responses revealed transformations of the visual representation across the layers of the optic lobe, including the emergence of the OFF pathway and increased size selectivity. We also identified asymmetries in the spatial processing of ON and OFF stimuli, which suggest unique circuit mechanisms for form processing that may have evolved to suit the specific demands of processing an underwater visual scene. This study provides insight into the neural processing and functional organization of the octopus visual system, highlighting both shared and unique aspects, and lays a foundation for future studies of the neural circuits that mediate visual processing and behavior in cephalopods.HighlightsThe functional organization and visual response properties of the cephalopod visual system are largely unknownUsing calcium imaging, we performed mapping of visual responses in the octopus optic lobeVisual responses demonstrate localized ON and OFF receptive fields with retinotopic organizationON/OFF pathways and size selectivity emerge across layers of the optic lobe and have distinct properties relative to other species.

Dataset Information

Sensorial Hierarchy in Octopus vulgaris's Food Choice: Chemical vs. Visual.

Publications

Sensorial Hierarchy in <i>Octopus vulgaris'</i>s Food Choice: Chemical vs. Visual.

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