Effectors and motor control

Abstract

Octopuses move in a mysterious way. Being flexible the movements that they make are often difficult to specify and correspondingly difficult to investigate. The literature does not contain a description of octopod walking comparable with descriptions of the six-legged, tripod gait of insects, or the stereotyped locomotor patterns of snails or polychaetes. Descriptions of posture run into very similar difficulties and perhaps partly because of this, research into motor control in cephalopods has proved a less attractive proposition than research on sensory analysis and learning.