Agile Animals

An octopus can be a canny customer – by shortening, bending, elongating and twisting its highly dexterous arms it can catch prey, build a shelter and even open jars. The dazzling array of delicate tasks that they can perform is well documented, but how exactly do they do it? Yoram Yekutieli and colleagues at the Hebrew University and Wiezmann Institute of Science in Israel built a series of octopus arm models to help answer how an octopus moves its arms and controls arm movement. The team wanted to find out if the control of the movements in an octopus’ arm is as complicated as their dexterity suggests.