Soft-bodied sea slug reconfigures anatomy to simplify feeding control

Automated news aggregation. Headlines and summaries are gathered from public feeds; see our editorial standards for sourcing, corrections, and AI-assist disclosure.

Made entirely of muscle, with no rigid skeleton, muscular hydrostats like octopus arms, elephant trunks and human tongues can move in ways traditional mechanical systems cannot. Between crawling across the seafloor, picking up a peanut and enabling speech, scientists have long wondered how soft structures can perform so many different functions without becoming impossible to control.