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	Podcast:		UC Science Today
	Episode:		The bizarre anatomy of octopus pupils
	Category:		Science & Medicine
	Duration:		00:01:03
	Publish Date:		2016-08-24 19:00:00
	Description:		Despite their amazing ability to change color and camouflage, cephalopods like octopus and cuttlefish only have one type of light receptor in their eyes, giving them black and white vision. But a new theory proposed by graduate student Alexander Stubbs of the University of California, Berkeley explains how cephalopods might still have the ability to detect color through the manipulation of light. "There’s a variety of pupil shapes in organisms in general. So you can have a vertical slit pupil, a dot pupil, like you or I might have, and that’s generally speaking the best for overall image sharpness. If you have a pupil that has more off-axis distance, so a bigger aperture in photographic terms, then that narrows your depth of field. You have to really pay attention to what’s going to be in focus and what’s going to be out of focus. Now, with cephalopods, when you have that off-axis pupil, it actually splits the image colors into constituent wavelengths, much like a prism. They could use this to be able to effectively focus through colors instead of focusing through distance."
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