Sensorial Hierarchy in Octopus vulgaris’s Food Choice: Chemical vs. Visual

Abstract

Octopus vulgaris possesses highly sophisticated sense organs, processed by the nervous system to generate appropriate behaviours such as finding food, avoiding predators, identifying conspecifics, and locating suitable habitat. Octopus uses multiple sensory modalities during the searching and selection of food, in particular, the chemosensory and visual cues. Here, we examined food choice in O. vulgaris in two ways: (1) We tested octopus’s food preference among three different kinds of food, and established anchovy as the preferred choice (66.67%, Friedman test p < 0.05); (2) We exposed octopus to a set of five behavioural experiments in order to establish the sensorial hierarchy in food choice, and to evaluate the performance based on the visual and chemical cues, alone or together. Our data show that O. vulgaris integrates sensory information from chemical and visual cues during food choice. Nevertheless, food choice resulted in being more dependent on chemical cues than visual ones (88.9%, Friedman test p < 0.05), with a consistent decrease of the time spent identifying the preferred food. These results define the role played by the senses with a sensorial hierarchy in food choice, opening new perspectives on the O. vulgaris’ predation strategies in the wild, which until today were considered to rely mainly on visual cues.

Evaluation of reproductive performances of the common octopus (Octopus vulgaris) reared in water recirculation systems and fed different diets

“…Currently, octopus is considered an innovative species for aquaculture due to a number of interesting biological traits, such as its short life cycle, high growth rate, favourable food conversion index, high fertility rate, easy adaptation to captivity, good variability in the diet, characterized by acceptance of food of low commercial value 1 , 3 – 9 . Based on these factors, there is increasing interest in Europe concerning the development of new techniques for octopus rearing, using both closed and semi-closed systems or floating cages 7 .…”

OctoPartenopin: Identification and Preliminary Characterization of a Novel Antimicrobial Peptide from the Suckers of Octopus vulgaris

“…Octopus arm suckers are specialized chemo-tactile organs with high sensitivity, equipped with millions of distributed sensory receptors allowing the animal to process in parallel massive amounts of mechanical and chemical information resulting from its densely innervation [16,21,22,[79][80][81]. In fact, the octopus uses suckers for a variety of tasks, such as anchoring to the substratum, catching prey, locomotion, clean maneuvers, recognition by chemoreception, behavioral displays, and as a manipulating tool for collecting objects [82,83]. Octopus suckers are made of a tightly packed three-dimensional array of (radial, circular, and meridional) muscles with different fiber orientations [84,85].…”

Cognitive Stimulation Induces Differential Gene Expression in Octopus vulgaris: The Key Role of Protocadherins

“…Water was treated with biological filters and protein skimmers. First days of captivity were considered as the acclimatization period, during which several physiological and behavioral parameters were monitored to verify the welfare and healthiness of the octopuses [ 59 , 60 ]. During the acclimatization phase, animals were fed by experimenters with their natural prey: Crabs ( Carcinus mediterraneus ) or mussels ( Mytilus galloprovincialis ) once a day.…”