Squid are covered in little hairs like the ones in your ear
Squid skin behaves a bit like a large, 10-armed human ear. While scientists at Case Western Reserve University were probing these enigmatic cephalopods, they discovered that squid have significantly more hair cells than was previously known. Hair cells are cells with bundles of hair-like protrusions, and researchers already knew that squid had them on their heads and arms. Now, it looks like the invertebrates have hundreds more of them all over their bodies, with potential insight for understanding human hearing. “Squid are cephalopods with a diverse population of hair cells on the surface of their bodies, which may yield insights not only into how these fascinating animals detect water movement to survive, but also into how hearing and deafness occur in humans,” Brian McDermott, a biologist and co-author of a quid study recently published in the journal Current Biology, said in a statement. That’s because these squid hairs are similar to those inside the human ear, which enables us to hear things. McDermott (who investigates hair cells) and his colleagues used an imaging technique called …
