The extraction of accurate kinematic information of animal appendages is of great importance for many biologically-inspired robotic applications. Octopus arm trajectories during a two-stroke arm-swimming motion have been initially analyzed through a vision-based 3D process, that reconstructs the arm spatial configurations and captures their 3D motion; this work is presented in [Kazakidi et al, ...

Tracking animal movements in 3D space is an essential part of many biomechanical studies. The most popular technique for human motion capture uses markers placed on the skin which are tracked by a dedicated system. However, this technique may be inadequate for tracking animal movements, especially when it is impossible to attach markers to the animal's body either because of its size or shape o...

1.Abstract 2. Why study complex nervous systems in invertebrates? 3. The vertical lobe of cephalopods and the insect mushroom body are unique brain structures involved in the advanced behavior of these animals 4. The morphological organization of the octopus nervous system 5. The learning and memory system of Octopus vulgaris 5.1. Morphological organization of the octopus VL-MSF syste 5.2. Elec...

Comparative analysis of brain function in invertebrates with sophisticated behaviors, such as the octopus, may advance our understanding of the evolution of the neural processes that mediate complex behaviors. Until the last few years, this approach was infeasible due to the lack of neurophysiological tools for testing the neural circuits mediating learning and memory in the brains of octopus a...

PURPOSE We previously reported the differential expression and translation of mRNA and protein in dark- and light-adapted octopus retinas, which may result from cytoplasmic polyadenylation element (CPE)-dependent mRNA masking and unmasking. Here we investigate the presence of CPEs in alpha-tubulin and S-crystallin mRNA and report the identification of cytoplasmic polyadenylation element binding...

A d-octopus of a graph G = (V; E) is a subgraph T = (W; F) of G such that W is a dominating set of G, and T is the union of d (not necessarily disjoint) shortest paths of G that have one endpoint in common. First, we study the complexity of 5nding and approximating a d-octopus of a graph. Then we show that for some NP-complete graph problems that are hard to approximate in general there are e9c...

The motor control of the eight highly flexible arms of the common octopus (Octopus vulgaris) has been the focus of several recent studies. Our study is the first to manage to introduce a physical constraint to an octopus arm and investigate the adaptability of stereotypical bend propagation in reaching movements and the pseudo-limb articulation during fetching. Subjects (N=6) were placed inside...

DNA methylation is a common regulator of gene expression and development in mammalian and other vertebrate genomes. DNA methylation has been studied so far in a few bivalve mollusk species, finding a wide spectrum of levels. We focused our study in the common octopus, Octopus vulgaris, an important organism for neuroscience, physiology and ethology research as well as for human consumption. We ...