Abstract
Cephalopods like cuttlefish and octopus transform visual scene information into full-body camouflage patterns. This process begins with a camera-type eye not unlike our own, and ends with up to a million ‘pixels’, directly controlled by motor neurons, recapitulating salient textures of the environment on the animal’s skin. In this talk I will discuss my work on the circuits and physiology of the key brain region that performs this remarkable behaviour, the optic lobe of Sepia. This includes connectomic reconstruction and in vivo calcium recordings of the cortical optic lobe, which resembles a vertebrate-like ‘deep retina’, as well as investigations into the higher-order area of the optic lobe, where neurons are organized into a fractal-like ‘tree’.
Biography
Dominic Evans is a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research (Frankfurt am Main, Germany), studying the neural basis of camouflage behaviour in the department of Prof. Gilles Laurent. After studying Neuroscience at UCL, Dominic joined Prof. Tiago Branco’s lab at MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge and later at UCL Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, working on escape behaviour in mice.