One of the most exciting (and daunting!) projects we proposed to the Allen Foundation was to reconstruct the connectome of the octopus arm and sucker ganglia. The first stage in this enormous project is to acquire the 3D-EM dataset, which is being collected for us by the expert imaging team at the Cleveland Clinic. We’re collecting complementary datasets at multiple resolutions, to build a complete picture of the gross, three-dimensional anatomy of the ganglia, to trace individual fibers as they pass through from the arm ganglion into the sucker ganglion, and to reconstruct complete dendritic arbors of different types of neurons in the main arm ganglion. This low-resolution “atlas” dataset is shown here at 10% of its actual resolution, but cells, tracts, blood vessels and other features are clearly visible. We are incredibly excited to start recruiting SFSU undergrads to work on creating a ground-truth dataset of manually-traced cells, and we’re immensely thankful to the Frontiers Group of the Allen Foundation for supporting the acquisition and analysis of these incredible datasets. We expect to make these datasets freely available once we’ve performed the initial analysis.