I was wondering how the octopus controls it's suckers? Does it change the shape, and pull back from the inside to create the vacume to hold onto things?
Thanks

Good question here... My thinking (as a layman) would be that they are naturally adhesive, given their shape... they are essentially suction cups, and as such, when something of that shape and texture (I assume they're kinda like cartilidge?) pushes up against a surface, the air (or water in this case) escapes but the natural recoiling of the cup that ensues causes it to attach to that surface, because the cup pulls back, yet there is no opening for water to enter back into that space... so it pulls against the surface it's attached to.

Then, because those cups are attached to the octo's muscular arm, the octo can pull its arm, and because the object is attached to the cups the object is pulled along with it... but the cups themselves are nerveless and naturally preserve their form given their composition.

That's my guess, and boy, I really wish someone else would have responded to this question... :oops: :bonk:

Don't feel too bad, Tony...it's my understanding that the science of adhesion and suction is deeper and more complex than most of us realize. Check out some of the news stories floating around now about "Gecko adhesive" or "Gecko gloves." Most of 'em aren't worth the paper or electrons they're written on, but the POINT is, we don't really know how most things that stick (even tape, glue, etc.) actually stick. Gecko feet prove that it's not as simple as you'd think. They don't use glue or other secretions, they don't use hooks, they stick like crazy, and they can lift their feet any time they want.

rusty

ive always been interested in herpetology, and used to keep lizards... i remember reading a couple years ago that if the a gecko used all of its pads at once, it could hold several kilos....but of course, they roll the pads, otherwise they probably would get stuck...sticking, i think is the easy part, making the sticking useful is the trick.... but then again this has come up a couple times in the last 10 yrs (but never this widespread) so my guess is to wait another decade :|

Well...here's my halfhearted crack at explaining the gecko foot thing, as I somewhat remember reading:

:grad: Gecko feet are a lot like hook-and-loop fasteners (velcro.) Without the hooks. And the loops are microscopic, and solid, so not really loops at all, but rather just little "papillae" or "nubs." Think of your tongue with longer, taller taste buds on a microscopic scale. Hey, gimme a break, I'm tryin' here! :P

The theory is that these eensy little flexible nubbins of gecko skin are the key element, thus efforts to reproduce gecko feet in the lab have focused on mimicking the tiny nubs. The research has confirmed that these are indeed what's working. Less certain is why. Speculation is that this is molecular interaction between the skin and the surface--something on the order of hydrogen bonding or such. Or perhaps friction. The little nubs may serve to drastically increase surface area, magnifying a weak little adhesive force dramatically, and/or perhaps allowing the force to be broken easily.

The reason this is so cool isn't so much the sticking (though the sticking is quite respectable) as it is the instant on/off nature of the sticking. Slap the foot down, it's stuck...no need for glue to set or cure, etc. To remove the foot, peel up one edge of it--comes off like it's not stuck at all. The little nubs each have a terribly weak adhesion, so peeling an edge up only pulls on a few at any given time--thus they let go like nothing happened. Pull on them all at once, however (by, say, climbing the walls) and they hold fast. Thus, you've got an adhesive that's instant on/easy off and totally reusable. Sort of like post-it notes, but infinitely better.

I love stuff like this, sci-fi stuff popping up for real. Even if I'm totally off in remembering what I've read on it, I don't care...it's just too cool. :heee:

from the monterey bay aquarium site:

To grab a crab, an octopus draws up the centers of its suckers to create a vacuum. Octopuses have tremendous gripping power. It takes a 40-pound (18-kg) pull to release the grip of a three-pound (1.4-kg) octopus.

I don't know the answer, but here's a pic of some big suckers on a REALLY big GPO that may help a little:

http://www.tonmo.com/phpBB/download.php?id=385

Hi everyone!

That's one HUGE Sucker!!! :shock: I wonder if the circle in the back of the sucker is what helps them to release at will? Seems like if it was totally like the rest of the surface, they would have a problem. Like when we try to remove a suction cup from something without first breaking the suction.

Carol

yea maybe the octo can release water into the suckers at will viola insta release

I know this thread is really OLD but I just stumbled over this thread while browsing through the archives.

Anyway, here is a more scientific description of how the suckers work.
This text was published at BioOne.org.
It goes like this :P :

Octopus suckers consist of a tightly packed three-dimensional array of muscle with three major muscle fiber orientations: 1) radial muscles that traverse the wall; 2) circular muscles arranged circumferentially around the sucker; and 3) meridional muscles oriented perpendicular to the circular and radial muscles. The sucker also includes inner and outer fibrous connective tissue layers and an array of crossed connective tissue fibers embedded in the musculature. Adhesion results from reducing the pressure inside the sucker cavity. This can be achieved by the three-dimensional array of muscle functioning as a muscular-hydrostat. Contraction of the radial muscles thins the wall, thereby increasing the enclosed volume of the sucker. If the sucker is sealed to a surface the cohesiveness of water resists this expansion. Thus, the pressure of the enclosed water decreases instead. The meridional and circular muscles antagonize the radial muscles. The crossed connective tissue fibers may store elastic energy, providing an economical mechanism for maintaining attachment for extended periods. Measurements using miniature flush-mounted pressure transducers show that suckers can generate hydrostatic pressures below 0 kPa on wettable surfaces but cannot do so on non-wettable surfaces. Thus, cavitation, the failure of water in tension, may limit the attachment force of suckers. As depth increases, however, cavitation will cease to be limiting because ambient pressure increases with depth while the cavitation threshold is unchanged. Structural differences between suckers will then determine the attachment force.


ok so.. that should cover it up ;-)

Neat! Thanks for posting this. I will have to re-read it to get more of it, but just learning that even the suckers (or perhaps especially the suckers) have really complex muscular structure is a start.

Melissa

Hey, I read that back in November and then completely forgot to mention it. :oops:

The article corresponding to the abstract quoted above is:

Kier, W.M.and A.M. Smith 2002. The structure and adhesive mechanism of octopus suckers. Integrative and Comparative Biology. 42 (6) : pp.1146-1153

Thanks, Jakxx, for giving it the attention it deserves.

Attached is a schematic diagram of a (generic) octopus sucker, brazenly snatched from said article. A nice animation would be illuminating, since the concept is pretty simple. If only I had the skillz and the time...

http://www.tonmo.com/phpBB/download.php?id=3029

Basically it works like this: (simplified) The small hole in the middle of the disc leads to another small chamber that is more or less a muscle, when the muscle contracts, water (or air, if not under water) gets drawn inside the chamber and thus creates a vacuum which vanishes again when the muscle relaxes.
Basically a pretty simple construction although there seems to be much more to them than just this :-)

Actually, the sucker works because water can't get drawn in when the radial muscles of the acetabulum are contracted...

The concept is simple but the structure and control are amazing!

I've always wondered how octopus suckers could grip on to rough porus surfaces, if you try with suction cups it won't work.

Actually, the sucker works because water can't get drawn in when the radial muscles of the acetabulum are contracted...

Uh, yes, right, I probably said it the wrong way :wink: I actually meant the water that is already inside :roll: ... I'm just too stupid to explain things in english :bonk:

I've always wondered how octopus suckers could grip on to rough porus surfaces, if you try with suction cups it won't work.
Actually, they can't hold onto everything out there :-) The basics of your normal household rubber-suction cup still apply here too, in a limited way though. You see, the texture of the sucker, unlike inflexible rubber, is very yielding and soft, thus I conforms itself to almost any shape much more easily. Still I doubt that an octo would be able to hold onto too rough or even porous surfaces but it still is an amazingly effective mechanism.

I have been told by a gecko collector/chemist that the actual mechanism
for gecko feet is van der Waals force. A brief google search confirms that
this is the case (and molecular-sized hairs seem to be involved as well.) This is particularly wacky, since van der Waals force is otherwise largely relegated to footnotes in high school chemistry class.

As for cephalopod sucker musculature, Kier is definitely the authority. However, the abstract quoted above doesn't make it clear (to me, anyway) that the sucker has what is essentially a big piston in the middle that can be withdrawn by muscles, so, unlike a passive suction cup like you'd find on a toy dart, an octopus can change the volume, hence the vaccum force, by some large factor, I'd guess 5 or 10, under active control.

And yes, there are things that suckers don't work so well on. I've read that
at the Monterey Aquarium, they use astroturf to keep the octo from climbing out of the tank, since it doesn't provide a surface the sucker can seal against.

non ceph related note, but as i youngester i kept lizards..... ive seen estimates that say if a gecko kept all of its pads on a surface at one time instead of rolling them it could hold several kilos.... dont remember the number but i know it was double digit.... not bad for a lizards weighing a couple of ounces....

(sorry for mixing measurements)

i havent followed this thread too closely... if you started enlarging the tentacle system, would there be limit where you start running into diminishing returns?

i havent followed this thread too closely... if you started enlarging the tentacle system, would there be limit where you start running into diminishing returns?Eh.. huh? :|

Oh b.t.w. octopusses actually don't really have tentacles. They're arms :-) Squids and Cuttlefish have tentacles, but only the two long ones used for catching prey. People often seem to confuse these two terms since almost everyone tends to say tentacle to everything (alive) that is long and wriggles :-) (besides tails of course)

so now tentacles dont have suckers? only octos and their arms have suckers? way to discriminate against the noble squid you hate monger.... :) give me an ounce of credit (but not much more)....

i merely meant to refer to the sucker system... whether attached to tentacle or arm ......

happy? :goofysca:

I'm sorry I totally didn't understand what you were trying to say in your other post :bonk: I didn't mean to sound offending to you, I apologize if I did. But, well, atually I still don't get it, call me stupid :wink:

I was just about to edit my post, wanting to add a "I thinky you already know that" :-) But you beat me to it with your reply :P

Ok.. I think I MIGHT get it.. or maybe.. no.. sorry :-) Enlarging the tentacle system? running into diminishing returns? No clue.. somehow I can't really translate that into something that makes sense to me (bad english skills)... or maybe I'm just too tired :-)

not offended, just being playful.... :jester:

i imagine its much later for you than me..... :sleeping:

if you expanded the sucker diameter to say 5 or 10 meters, would the strength of the suckers hold up? if not where would the design start to show cracks?

im a fan of this site, so i know scaling in the sense you see in movies isnt exactly umm.... possible.....

http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/

Aaah! Now I got it :-) thanks for simplifying it.
Well I think that it more or less comes down to muscle power in this case. If you enlarge the whole thing the power would probably hold up if everything is scaled up proportional. But there is also the physical aspect. I am by no way a physican but I believe that the bigger the diameter, the less actual "muscle strenght" is needed to hold onto the same weight.

--edit---
b.t.w. it's 6:27am here while I write this ;-)

--edit number two---
I've just visited the link you posted.. lol that site is hilarious! They really excoriate the movies there. Very funny :lol:

non ceph related note, but as i youngester i kept lizards..... ive seen estimates that say if a gecko kept all of its pads on a surface at one time instead of rolling them it could hold several kilos.... dont remember the number but i know it was double digit.... not bad for a lizards weighing a couple of ounces....

6.5 million setae of a single tokay gecko attached maximally could generate 130 kg force [!!!].

Quoted from the abstract of:

Autumn, K. and A.M. Peattie 2002. Mechanisms of adhesion in geckos. Integrative and Comparative Biology. 42 (6) : pp.1081–1090

Please try to forgive them for using units of mass to quantify force. :)

if you started enlarging the tentacle system, would there be limit where you start running into diminishing returns?

...small suckers produce greater pressure differentials than large suckers. Suckers larger than 7.5 [square] mm, both decapod and octopod, typically achieve pressure differentials of 100 kPa. As their size decreases below 7.5 [square] mm, octopod suckers get slightly stronger, sometimes producing pressure differentials of 250–300 kPa, while decapod suckers get exponentially stronger, sometimes producing pressure differentials near 800 kPa.

...

The reason for the greater strength of small suckers is unknown. It is possible that sucker size affects the ability to maintain a seal at the rim. Similar to Laplace’s law for pressurized containers, the stress in the wall of a container holding a reduced pressure may be proportional to the container’s radius. Thus, at a given pressure differential, a smaller sucker may experience lower stresses that might cause the seal at the rim to fail.


A. Smith 1996. Cephalopod sucker design and the physical limits to negative pressure. The Journal of Experimental Biology. 199 (4) : pp.949–958

The amazing thing to me about the suckers is that there are so many of them (like 2,240 on a full grown female GPO) and it's all controled by that tiny little brain! And eight arms!

Non-ceph note- A few months ago I made a elephant (I'm a metal sculptor) to donate for a benefit auction, and I got to go to a ranch that has three rescued elephants. During my private photo shoot, I got fondled by one of them with the trunk. Talk about strong. But the thing I wanted to mention is that the trainer told me that an elephants truck has OVER 100,000 individual muscles, and they are still counting them. At the time I was still working on my GPO as well, and I realized that an elephants trunk and a cephs arms are very similar. Neither of them has any bones, so the only leverage comes from other contracted muscles.

There is a series of books by science fiction author David Brin on the "uplifting" , or intelligence inhancing, of animals. Neat stories, cool ideas, but I dolphins never would have been my first choice. I think that elephants and cephs are much more likely to become sentient than dolphins because they would be much better tool users. This is rather anthropomorphic for sure; assuming that all intelligence is based on our own, but within the reasoning of the books parameters cephs would make much more interesting characters than dolphins!!!

Damn, I'm more tired than I though, that last post has an awful lot of errors :sleeping:

The amazing thing to me about the suckers is that there are so many of them (like 2,240 on a full grown female GPO) and it's all controled by that tiny little brain! And eight arms!
[quote]

Actually, a lot of the control is from nerve ganglia in the arms near the suckers-- a lot of octopus motor control is distributed around the body, much more so than vertebrates (although vertebrate spinal cords have a fair bit of computational ability, too). Supposedly, severed octopus arms can exhibit a fair amount of behavior, although they can't learn. Also, interestingly, while octopi can learn to distinguish various textures on objects, they can't learn to distinguish between weights of objects. It is (or was, at least) belived that this is because deciding how much force is needed to lift objects is decided locally in the arms, and the result is used for the lifteing but not reported back to the learning center of the brain.

[quote="pipsquek"]
Non-ceph note- A few months ago I made a elephant (I'm a metal sculptor) to donate for a benefit auction, and I got to go to a ranch that has three rescued elephants. During my private photo shoot, I got fondled by one of them with the trunk. Talk about strong. But the thing I wanted to mention is that the trainer told me that an elephants truck has OVER 100,000 individual muscles, and they are still counting them. At the time I was still working on my GPO as well, and I realized that an elephants trunk and a cephs arms are very similar. Neither of them has any bones, so the only leverage comes from other contracted muscles.


Yeah, Bill Kier, mentioned above, originally studied trunks, tongues, and
tentacles. I think his advisor continues to study trunks and tongues; I can't remember her name off the top of my head, I'm afraid (I'm sure google knows it, though). Trunks, tongues, and cephalopod limbs (and other molusk body parts) are all "muscular hydrostats," which means that they are muscles that can change their relative dimensions, but their volume remains constant, so if they get narrower, they get longer, etc. Kier's work is really interesting and he's a good writer. I recommend it if you're into hanging out at your local university biology library...

- M