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A role for nautilus in studies of the evolution of brain and behaviour

Robyn J. Crook and Jennifer A. Basil

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Nautilus is an ancient remnant of a largely extinct cephalopod lineage.1 Its status within its clade is the subject of ongoing debate – its morphology, behaviour and neuroanatomy may or may not be representative of an ancestral condition, and therefore its value as a model for ancestral cephalopods is uncertain. While the nautilus brain is simpler than that of more derived cephalopods2 (coleoids), it is plausible that this is a secondary simplification related to ecology, and not a precursor to the vertebrate-like CNS of modern cephalopods. However, the absence of the vertical lobe complex, implicated in learning and memory in coleoids, makes studies of cognition in nautilus particularly interesting from a comparative perspective. Our research on the behaviour and sensory biology of Nautilus pompilius gives the first indications of learning and memory in this ancient genus3, and suggests that even with a far simpler brain containing no clearly defined ‘memory’ center, nautilus performs simple cognitive tasks comparably to its more derived relatives.

Authors

Robyn J. Crook

Brooklyn College (CUNY)

Jennifer A. Basil

Brooklyn College (CUNY)

This is an open-access article

 Download PDF

If the document does not open, please right-click on the link (control-click on a Macintosh) and select the option to save the file to disk.