Ryan Howard celebrates after his successful MS thesis defense.
Congratulations to Ryan Howard, who successfully defended his thesis titled “The influence of nociceptive sensitization and self-referential visual cues from superficial injuries on camouflage behaviors of Indo-Pacific Octopuses” on May 14th. In his study, Ryan demonstrated the first evidence for visual self-referencing of skin camouflage match in cephalopods, and showed that nociceptive cues are necessary to drive this hyper-vigilant inspection behavior. Ryan will be publishing his work in the coming months (look out for his paper on the Publications page!) and applying to PhD programs in the Fall. Great work Ryan!!