This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Cephalopods are a group of soft-bodied marine mollusks that include cuttlefish, octopuses, squid and nautiluses. Many of these mollusks have muscular suckers on their arms that allow them to seize prey or grip other surfaces in their surroundings.
Compared with octopus suckers, cuttlefish suckers can generate greater suction pressures (i.e., pressure differences that produce the force holding a sucker against a surface). Studying them could help develop more effective suction cups for a wide range of real-world applications. Researchers at Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands carried out a study aimed at better understanding how common cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis) grip prey with rough skins or uneven surfaces.
Their paper, published in Journal of the Royal Society Interface, offers insight into the biomechanics (i.e., the physical principles governing how living structures function) of cuttlefish suction, which could guide the design of new materials or technologies inspired by biological systems. "This study came about from looking at a cuttlefish's suction cup under the microscope, where we noticed it had these microscopic pillars all over the suction cup rim," Guillermo Javier Amador, senior author of the paper, told Phys.org. "These structures, known as papillae, confused us, since we normally think of suction cups having very smooth rims to ensure that a secure seal is formed.
However, we realized that cuttlefish use their suction cups to stick to their prey, which typically have very rough skins." Amador and his collaborators wanted to dive deeper into the intricate biomechanical mechanisms that allow cuttlefish to grip prey so tightly. Specifically, they wished to determine whether microscopic structures called papillae help cuttlefish suckers stick to rough surfaces. "Early on in my postdoc, we realized that most of the biological sucker research has been on octopus and clingfish," said Brett Klaassen van Oorschot, co-first author of the paper.
"We learned from earlier work that cuttlefish suckers worked via a totally different mechanism. Through observations in the wild and in the lab, we saw that they could adhere extremely fast to a variety of different prey surfaces. We were really interested in quantifying this observation and testing the hypothesis that their papillae play a role in suction." To perform their experiments, Amador, Klaassen van Oorschot and their colleagues bought freshly caught cuttlefish from local fisheries and then dissected their arms.
They glued each arm to a glass slide, a thin piece of glass commonly used in laboratory settings to hold samples under a microscope. During each gripping test, an arm was placed at the bottom of a small water tank, with the suckers facing upward. "We then used an automated, custom-built indenter to measure the stickiness of the suction cups," said Amador.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
