Can octopuses, squid and cuttlefish reveal fundamental principles of brain evolution and function? More and more neuroscientists think they can and are flocking to research these enduringly fascinating creatures. My latest for @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Excited to share a new review by @kocherlab.bsky.social and me: Nature-inspired neuroscience We discuss diverse sensory systems and behaviors across the animal kingdom and argue for their integration into neuroscience. New tools in diverse systems are making this possible ✨ tinyurl.com/y5y9du27

New preprint alert 📣 We are sharing our protocol for calcium imaging of acute brain slices from Octopus vulgaris hatchlings during application of neurotransmitters. Another fruitful collaboration between the Schafer and Seuntjens labs www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Celebrating Professor Anne Warner, an extraordinary woman whose pioneering work in cell biology and belief in opportunity and education continues to shape lives today. https://www.mba.ac.uk/donate/leave-a-gift-in-your-will/ #InternationalWomensDay

BIG UPDATES! OCTRON now supports the new SAM3 models (alongside SAM2)! We’ve also added a global switch for Detection vs. Segmentation: Use the same annotations to train either lightweight detection or full segmentation models. Plus, we’ve added support for the new YOLO26 models. ⤵️ 1/12

Do you love quantifying animal behavior as much as we do? We have just the tool for you! Presenting #OCTRON - a pipeline that helps you create rich annotation data and enables training of custom segmentation models. Have a look, particularly if you work with non-model / invertebrate organisms!

Really cool video. @ecomorph.bsky.social guides us through all eyes in the animal kingdom! Cephalopod (especially squid/cuttlefish) eyes are the most beautiful of course. www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vjm...

Very excited and proud to finally share this story! 🐙 We discovered surprising roles for dopamine and acetylcholine in the Octopus visual system… doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Cationic DOPAMINE-gated ion channel! In the octopus visual system! Absolutely wild discovery from @amycourtneyyy.bsky.social ♥️🐙 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The first Octopus paper from the Schafer lab @mrclmb.bsky.social in collaboration with @eveseuntjens.bsky.social lab. 🐙dop-gated cation channel 🐙Ach-gated anion channel 🐙single-cell resolution Ca2+ imaging in optic lobe slices and more! Led by the amazing Amy Courtney www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Very excited to share that we developed a new non-invasive way to predict spawning time in Octopus vulgaris. Until now, we had no means of knowing when a female was going to spawn, which made planning of our experiments very difficult. But now we solved it! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...