{"id":7459,"date":"2012-08-31T09:12:09","date_gmt":"2012-08-30T23:12:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/?p=7459"},"modified":"2012-09-11T17:06:12","modified_gmt":"2012-09-11T07:06:12","slug":"dancing-chromatophores","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/nature\/animals\/dancing-chromatophores\/","title":{"rendered":"Dancing chromatophores"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Music has the ability to get these pigmented cephalopod cells moving to the beat.<!--more--><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Many cephalopods have the ability to quickly control and change their <a href=\"http:\/\/tolweb.org\/accessory\/Cephalopod_Chromatophore?acc_id=2038\">chromatophores<\/a>, skin&#8217;s pigmented cells, to reflect light. Each chromatophore has tiny muscles that contract to reveal the pigment underneath. The longfin inshore squid, for example, has three different chromatophore colours: brown, red and yellow.<\/p>\n<p>Researchers at the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mbl.edu\/\">Marine Biological Laboratory<\/a> in Woods Hole, US, wanted to see if they could control these pigmented cells using electrical stimulation \u2014 something similar to<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Luigi_Galvani\"> Luigi Galvani&#8217;s<\/a>\u00a0use of lightning to get frog legs twitching in the 1700s.<\/p>\n<p>The researchers attached a suction electrode to the squid&#8217;s fin nerve and connected the electrode to an iPod nano, which worked as a stimulator. The iPod plays music by converting digital music into a small current that is sent to magnets in the\u00a0earphones; these are connected to cones, which vibrate and produce sound. In this experiment, the researchers removed the earbuds and placed the wire into the squid&#8217;s fin nerve. When the iPod sent bass frequencies (less than 100Hz), the axons had enough charge to fire an <a href=\"http:\/\/bcs.whfreeman.com\/thelifewire\/content\/chp44\/4402002.html\">action potential<\/a>. This caused the muscles in the chromatophores to contract, i.e. change colours.<\/p>\n<p>This video is a view through an 8x microscope zoomed in on the dorsal side of the squid&#8217;s fin \u2014 and yes,\u00a0the chromatopheres seem to be dancing.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Source: <a href=\"http:\/\/backyardbrains.com\/home.aspx\">Backyard Brains<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Music has the ability to get these pigmented cephalopod cells moving to the beat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":7464,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,32,10],"tags":[684,390,205],"class_list":["post-7459","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-animals","category-marine-biology","category-video","tag-dancing-squid","tag-music","tag-video-2"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7459"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7459"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7459\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7514,"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7459\/revisions\/7514"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7464"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceillustrated.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}