This is kind of sort of one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen at 9 AM on a Friday morning. A giant shoutout to Edvard from Sweden for sending this story in to me. The photos above are of a squid’s chromatophores, or pigmented cells, that are pulsing in tune to the 1993 hit Insane in the Brain by Cypress Hill. Here’s the weirdly cool part – squid’s don’t even have ears! But as a team of researchers over at Backyard Brains demonstrated in an experiment at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, they can still be extremely affected by music. The same impulses created when audio is converted to an electrical signal, like what happens inside a microphone, can actually be gently applied to tissue, in this case the dorsal side of a squid fin. Via YouTube:
“The video is a view through an 8x microscope zoomed in on the dorsal side of the caudal fin of the squid. We used a suction electrode to stimulate the fin nerve. Chromatophores are pigmeted cells that come in 3 colors: Brown, Red, and Yellow. Each chromatophore is lined with up to 16 muscles that contract to reveal their color.”
The lights are blinkin’ I’m thinkin’ ♫
