Octopuses also have an excellent sense of touch. An octopus's suction cups are equipped with chemoreceptors so that the octopus can taste what it is touching. The arms contain tension sensors so that the octopus knows whether its arms are stretched out. However, the octopus has a very poor proprioceptive sense. The tension receptors are not sufficient for the octopus brain to determine the position of the octopus's body or arms. (It is not clear that the octopus brain would be capable of processing the large amount of information that this would require; the flexibility of an octopus's arms is much greater than that of the limbs of vertebrates, which devote large areas of cerebral cortex to the processing of proprioceptive inputs.) As a result, the octopus does not possess stereognosis; that is, it does not form a mental image of the overall shape of the object it is handling. It can detect local texture variations, but cannot integrate the information into a larger picture.[10]
The neurological autonomy of the arms means that the octopus has great difficulty learning about the detailed effects of its motions. The brain may issue a high-level command to the arms, but the nerve cords in the arms execute the details. There is no neurological path for the brain to receive feedback about just how its command was executed by the arms; the only way it knows just what motions were made is by observing the arms visually.[10]
There are two main regions, an infundibulum (IN) on the attachment face of the sucker, and a deeper chamber called the acetabulum (A) (if you don't recall any Latin, "infundibulum" just means "funnel", while "acetabulum" is "vinegar cup"anatomy is littered with funnels and cup-shaped structures, so these are actually very generic names). Both regions are muscular, covered with a dense sheet of radial muscles (R) and rings of circular and meridional muscles (C and M).The whole thing is surrounded by supple sheets of connective tissue and epithelia.
The way it works is that the sucker is pressed against a surface, and the flexible outer margin of skin conforms to it, forming a seal. Then the radial muscles contract. Now muscle is a relatively incompressible tissue; when it contracts, it changes its length, but it cannot change its volume. When you make a muscle in your arm to show off to the girls, you are reducing the length of the bicep, so it has to bulge outwards to maintain a constant volume. This principle is also how your tongue works: when muscles contract to flatten it, the volume has to stay the same so it protrudes.
When the radial muscles in the sucker contract, the walls of the acetabulum and infundibulum get thinner. The muscle volume has to go somewhere, so the circumference of the cup-shaped acetabulum has to increase, increasing the volume of the acetabular chamber. Since the infundibulum is sealed against a surface, water can't get in; so we have the same quantity of water in a larger chamber, which means the pressure is reduced, generating suction. They can release their grip by relaxing the radial muscles, or contracting the circular muscles, which would reduce the volume of the acetabulum.
An octopus can generate a respectable amount of force with this mechanism. At sea level, they can create a pressure differential of 100-200 kPa (kilopascals; 100 kilopascals is approximately equal to one atmosphere), and at greater depths, where the water pressure is greater, they can generate correspondingly greater amounts of force.
The infundibulum is grooved. This allows the pressure differential to be distributed to the entire surface of the sucker as it is flattened against an object. Further, the surface of the infundibulum is covered with chitinous denticles that provide a fine network of channels that similarly transmit the force everywhere, and also provide a raspy surface that restricts lateral movement (remember how when you shot your rubber-tipped dart gun at a window it would stick, but you could easily slide the dart around? Octopus suckers wouldn't do thatthey'd be locked firmly in one place.)
The authors mention that squid have an additional refinement that makes their suckers even more effective. They contain a piston-like structure inside an interior chamber, coupled so that when something tries to pull away from the sucker, it lifts the piston, further decreasing pressure inside and strengthening its griplike a Chinese finger-trap, the more you struggle, the harder it is to get away.
