ABSTRACT
Locomotion can be broadly defined as movement through one’s environment (DeMont et al., 2005; Dickinson et al., 2000). It is important for accomplishing various goals such as finding food and mates, escaping predators, and migrating to find resources. From a physical point of view, locomotion can simply be thought of as a force exerted by an organism on its environment that, in obedience to Newton’s laws, produces movement of the organism in the opposite direction. However, we see that the distribution of forces is anything but simple when we compare the diversity of locomotor abilities exhibited by animals (both vertebrates and invertebrates) in a suite of environments (e.g., water, substrate, and air). Locomotor design can be a key driver in the evolutionary history of animals that rely on movement. It can produce changes in morphology and physiology that affect their speed, acceleration, efficiency, endurance, and agility when moving in different environments (Dickinson et al., 2000). This is particularly true for the group of animals that will be discussed in this chapter, the cephalopods, which exhibit a wide array of locomotor types in their mostly water environment (there is one case of air-borne locomotion).
