{"id":2189752,"date":"2026-02-26T18:00:42","date_gmt":"2026-02-26T17:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/?p=2189752"},"modified":"2025-12-18T14:52:01","modified_gmt":"2025-12-18T13:52:01","slug":"octopuses-use-their-arms-to-sense-and-respond-to-microbiomes-on-the-seafloor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/focusingonwildlife.com\/news\/octopuses-use-their-arms-to-sense-and-respond-to-microbiomes-on-the-seafloor\/","title":{"rendered":"Octopuses use their arms to sense and respond to microbiomes on the seafloor"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the beginning of life on Earth, microbes, small but influential single-celled organisms, have shaped the environment that animals must adapt to in order to survive. Distinct microbial populations, known as microbiomes, inhabit nearly every surface on Earth. Now scientists have found that octopuses can detect signals from the microbiomes they encounter, revealing one of the ways these cephalopods navigate their environment.<\/p>\n

Humans can also detect signs of microbial activity, such as when we smell that meat has gone bad or milk has spoiled. But we can\u2019t sense those microbes by touch. Octopuses, on the other hand, touch and taste the world with their arms, which collectively have more neurons than their central brain. Those arms are also lined with chemotactile receptors, which enable them to reflexively react to specific chemical signals from microbiomes as they explore their environment, according to research published recently in Cell.<\/p>\n

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The California two-spot octopus (Octopus bimaculoides). Photo by Anik Grearson.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Microbes have long been known to influence internal animal development, disease, and digestion. To explore whether the microbiomes in our environment also shape external animal behavior, a team led by biologist Rebecka Sepela, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, chose as their subject the octopus \u2014 an animal that does a lot of exploring by touch.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a huge interest in this right now. From human biology to animal biology, from agriculture to medicine,\u201d said Spencer Nyholm, an invertebrate zoologist and microbiologist at the University of Connecticut, who was not involved in the study. \u201cWe are surrounded by microbes, and they\u2019re critically important for our health.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sepela and her team exposed brooding California two-spot octopuses (Octopus bimaculoides) to microbes found on seafloor surfaces that the animals would likely encounter in their environment. The scientists made fake octopus eggs out of a nontoxic gel derived from algae and loaded them with a molecule derived from bacteria that the researchers collected from octopus eggs that had been ejected from a clutch. The octopus mothers rejected those fake eggs much quicker than fake eggs that were not treated with the molecule.<\/p>\n