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Reach for lasers, with eight arms!
Just in case you forgot what a generic octopus looks like
Humans and octopuses may have radically different brains, but both react in a surprisingly similar way under the effect of the MDMA drug, more commonly known as Ecstasy.
Octopuses are solitary creatures, preferring to sneak around cracks and crevices in the rocks of the seabed rather than bothering to socialize with their own species. Some have even been known to kill and eat other species of the same species.
But give them a bit of Ace class (or program them 1 for you Yanks) and they will enjoy the molly. Seven California octopus octopus (Octopus bimaculoides) were immersed in a tank containing MDMA dissolved in saline water. After ten minutes in the drug bath, the animals were placed in a tank containing a toy and another octopus.
As the euphoria began, the happy cephalopods began to feel delicate, caressing their friends' abs and circling the tank in a trance. They also exposed their beaks – a part normally hidden under their bodies used to eat and mate – more frequently. The same type of behavior has been observed in humans waving light sticks in nightclubs flooded with deafening music that collide with a large number of beats per minute.
MDMA impairs the brain by releasing more of the neurotransmitter serotonin. The chemical adheres to the serotonin receptors and triggers electrical impulses to excite the axons, making people fuzzier and stronger. It seems that the same process also occurs in octopuses.
The results were published Thursday in a study in Current Biology. Eric Edsinger, one of the co-authors and researcher at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Chicago, USA, also participated in the sequencing of the two-point octopus genome in California and identified the proteins responsible for the disease. absorption of serotonin.
"The binding site of MDMA and serotonin in the carrier of ions is 100% between octopus and man," said Edsinger. "This is an extraordinary level of conservation, which means that, pharmacologically, we could predict that MDMA should work in the octopus as it is in humans.
Oh no, they are too loved!
Edsinger and coauthor Gül Dölen played with the disco biscuit dosage by giving some octopuses more based on their body weight. In three pilot studies, the results were not included because the animals appeared to have overdosed.
In clinical trials on humans, MDMA is administered in a range of 0.67 to 2 milligrams per kilogram, assuming that an average adult weighs about 60 kilograms. The seven creatures in the study received 0.5 to 0.005 milligrams per kilogram and all weighed less than 200 grams. When the dosage was 10 to 400 milligrams per kilogram, this resulted in severe behavioral changes in the crazy cephalopods.
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Some started to breathe very quickly or slowly, changing color quickly and some became white. They were extremely excited and began to move wildly in a catatonic state. These animals were "excluded from further analysis" and, hopefully, taken to a relaxation tank with Kruder & Dorfmeister.
The human genome and the octopus are separated by more than 500 million years of evolution, and if a particular gene sequence has been preserved for so long, it must be very important, Edsinger said.
"A human being is an extremely complex system and if you only look inside this system, it is difficult to know what is relatively important," he adds. this evolution has simply not been able to change for millions of years. From a pharmacological or medical point of view, it is the elements – such as this serotonin transporter – that can be very important to ensure proper functioning. "
Dölen, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University, Maryland, said he had decided to conduct this experiment to test the use of MDMA for therapeutic purposes.
"We had no idea what we could expect – and we were really surprised and intrigued from the beginning," Edsinger said. The register. It is not known if octopus receive post-ecstasy blues. ®
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