Huffpost Science  Here's Why An Octopus Doesn't Get All Tangled
Up (VIDEO)  Posted: Updated:  The hundreds of suckers on an
octopus’s eight arms leech reflexively to almost anything they
come into contact with — but never grasp the animal itself, even
though an octopus does not always know what its arms are doing.
Today, researchers reveal that the animal’s skin produces a
chemical that stops the octopus’s suckers from grabbing hold of
its own body parts, and getting tangled up.  Octopus arms have a
built-in mechanism that prevents the suckers from grabbing
octopus skin,” says neuroscientist Guy Levy at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, the lead author of the work, which
appears today in Current Biology. It is the first demonstration
of a chemical self-recognition mechanism in motor control, and
could help scientists to build better bio-inspired soft robots.
To find out just how an octopus avoids latching onto itself,
Levy and his colleagues cut off an octopus’s arm and subjected
it to a series of tests. (