- Joined
- Mar 8, 2004
- Messages
- 4,883
Very interesting stuff:
Mollusks Taste Memories To Build Shells
preprint of paper here (I can't find the official one yet):
http://www.cnr.berkeley.edu/~goster/pdfs/Shells.pdf
The short version is that the shape and pigmentation of gastropod shells have been found to be (at least in simulation) controlled by a neural network with a small number of parameters. The preprint also has a brief section on applying the same results to cuttlefish patterns.
It looks like they didn't study the shape of nautilus septa (or I just missed it on my first skim) but it would be fascinating to see if their simulation can get the complex suture patterns in ammonites! After all, for a computer simulation, you don't need the living animal!
Mollusks Taste Memories To Build Shells
preprint of paper here (I can't find the official one yet):
http://www.cnr.berkeley.edu/~goster/pdfs/Shells.pdf
The short version is that the shape and pigmentation of gastropod shells have been found to be (at least in simulation) controlled by a neural network with a small number of parameters. The preprint also has a brief section on applying the same results to cuttlefish patterns.
It looks like they didn't study the shape of nautilus septa (or I just missed it on my first skim) but it would be fascinating to see if their simulation can get the complex suture patterns in ammonites! After all, for a computer simulation, you don't need the living animal!