The “prawn-in-the-tube” procedure: What do cuttlefish learn and memorize?

Abstract

For several decades the “prawn-in-the-tube” procedure has been extensively used in the exploration of behavioral plasticity and its neural correlates in cuttlefish. Although the nature of the task has been characterized, the effect of reinforcement and the extent of different cues cuttlefish can use to solve and memorize the task remain unclear. To determine whether cuttlefish learned to inhibit predatory behavior because of pain incurred when the tentacles hit the glass tube, the shrimp prey (typically attacked with a tentacle strike) was replaced by crabs (normally caught by a jumping strategy, using all eight arms together, which is thought less likely to be painful). We showed that the cuttlefish is still capable of learning inhibition of predatory behavior when it adopts another catching strategy, which suggests that pain from the tentacles hitting the tube has little effect on the learning process. The two latest experiments have shown that cuttlefish do not learn to inhibit predatory behavior towards a specific type of prey, but rather learn and memorize visual (light polarization) and tactile information from the glass tube.The “prawn-in-the-tube” procedure is a powerful and user-friendly tool in the investigation of the processing and retention of multisensory information in invertebrates. Our recent findings now open up new areas of investigation into the neural correlates of learning and memory processes in cuttlefish.