The neural basis of cuttlefish camouflage and social behavior

All animals form internal neural representations of the external world that guide their behavior. Cuttlefish, coleoid cephalopods related to octopus and squid, perform visually driven adaptive camouflage by dynamically altering the color, pattern, and texture of their skin to create an approximation of their surroundings - a process directly controlled by the brain. Thus, cuttlefish perform a remarkable sensorimotor transformation: they recreate what they see on their skin, generating a motor output that approximates the sensory input itself. In addition to camouflage, cuttlefish use their dynamic skin to communicate with conspecifics using a series of innate skin patterns that reveal the animal’s internal state. We are using the cuttlefish skin behaviors to understand how the physical properties of the visual world are represented by patterns of neural activity in the brain, and how this representation is transformed into an approximation of the physical world on the skin. We have performed a series of experiments to develop the dwarf cuttlefish, Ascarosepion bandense, as a model to investigate the neural basis of camouflage and social communication. We have sequenced the genome, developed gene editing techniques, completed a 3D brain atlas, developed camouflage and social behavior paradigms, examined dwarf cuttlefish behavior in the wild, and adapted miniscopes for underwater imaging. Furthermore, we recently succeeded in generating transgenic cuttlefish that express genetically-encoded calcium indicators in the brain, permitting the live imaging of neural activity. We are now using these technologies to simultaneously record neural activity and measure behavior to uncover how visual information is deconstructed in the brain, and then reconstructed into an image of the physical world on the skin.

Speaker: Tessa Montague, Columbia University