Six Young Cuttlefish (IMAGE)
Caption
A composite image of six young cuttlefish in the lab, use their neurally innervated skin to express different types of body color patterns and different levels of papillae expression. Papillae are the skin "bumps" that make the animal skin look leafy or corrugated, which helps in breaking its own silhouette and avoiding detection and recognition by predators. As reported by Gonzalez-Bellido et al., these muscular structures contain a mix of muscle types that allow the animal to express and flatten the papillae quickly, and to maintain papillae expression for extensive periods without the need for neural input. The circuit that controls them appears homologous to the squid skin iridescence circuit.
Credit
Paloma T. Gonzalez-Bellido
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