Cephalopods:
By Judit Pungor     Awards: Myers

Cephalopods are highly visual animals. They use their vision to guide their most fundamental behaviors, from predator avoidance and prey capture to camouflage and mating. Fascinatingly, their visual systems developed independently from the visual system of vertebrates, whose ancestors diverged from those of cephalopods over 600 million years ago.

While a tremendous amount of work has been done to characterize the visual system of vertebrates, relatively little has been done to characterize that of the cephalopods. My research focuses on exploring the visual systems of the cephalopods to fill this gap in knowledge.

Using a technique called Serial Array Tomographic Reconstruction (SATR), I am examining the fine scale differences in the organization of the optic lobes of a variety of species of cephalopods. In SATR, a section of fixed tissue is sliced into ultrathin sections of 50-200nm. These sections can be stained using immunofluorescent dyes for neurotransmitters and other neuroelements, up to 40 times on a single section. The images of these stains are computationally reconstructed into a three-dimensional map of the tissue, where precise relative location of neurochemicals can be seen on an unprecedentedly fine scale.

Using SATR, I am looking at the differences in distribution of neural cell types in a wide variety of species of cephalopods. I am examining species with disparate life histories in order to document how different environmental stimuli might have driven evolution of the visual systems. Does a deep-sea squid use the same neural circuits to detect bioluminescence as its cousin, an octopus, uses to detect prey living on rocky shores? Does a cuttlefish optic lobe look anything like that of a zebrafish? What fundamental characteristics are shared in visual systems, and what differences have arisen? These are all questions I hope to address through my research.

My work is generously funded by the Myers Trust Grant and SCORE