Awesome Octopuses

Awesome Octopus (Octopoda)

Blue blood, 3 hearts, and 9 brains!! Octopuses are amazing and we learn more about them everyday, and they keep surprising us!! You know they have 8 arms, but did you know each arm has its own “mini brain”! That’s crazy! We humans don’t even have that yet we put ourselves on a pedestal! Each octopus arm is able to operate independently and quicker with these mini brains, and the main donut-shaped brain in the head can still send messages to the extremities when needed.

With all of those brains, is the octopus smart? Well, they have about 500 million neurons, about as many as a dog, and two-thirds of those neurons are located in their arms. The octopus brain is larger than any other vertebrate, but not mammals. They are also quite clever and curious. I love to see them when I am SCUBA diving because if you hang out long enough, they will extend their arms to you and ‘feel’ you and try and figure out what you are. There have also been many scientific experiments done with captive octopuses, such as giving them mazes to solve and bottles to unscrew, and other tricky tasks which they seem to be able to do. Here is a cool link to watch a video of a giant Pacific octopus (Enteroctopus dofleini) poaching crabs from a fisherman’s crab pot! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILBQKe51xzg&list=PL50KW6aT4Ugyv68Lmn5-Zjx4D250-ZsGv

Once I was SCUBA diving the kelp forest in San Diego, and I always pick up trash on the seafloor to try and do my part. This time I found a PVC pipe that looked like a piece of garbage that had been there awhile so I picked it up, I don’t see anything inside it because it's pretty dark, and I head to the surface. About 10 feet from the surface a little octopus jumps out of the pipe, turns and looks at me, inks me, and swims back to the seafloor. I dropped the pipe immediately hoping it would be reunited with its home. Now I am much more careful about what I pickup. Some folks’ trash is another creature's treasure!!

Octopus are also known to use tools, which is somewhat rare for most animals in the animal kingdom (although there are several that do). They have been seen using rocks, bottle caps, and other hard things to open up shells, and even to make a ‘fort’ in front of their hideouts to block the entrance. One of the things I look for when SCUBA diving is a bunch of shells or objects piled up near a reef or rocks, because that usually indicates an octopus is or was inside there. I read somewhere about the Veined octopus in Indonesia being observed collecting coconut shells, cleaning them with jets of water, and carrying them to different locations, making shelters out of them. When an octopus leaves the confines of its hideout, it is at risk of predation, so to take the risk of gathering these shells must have been very important to them!

An unhappy part of the octopus life is that when a male mates with a female, he dies within a couple of months. The female doesn’t fare much better, either, because her part of the child-rearing is once the eggs hatch, she also dies. She watches over her clutch of eggs, protecting them from predators, oxygenating them, and she doesn’t eat and is actually slowly dying. This lasts on average about 3 months, although researchers observed an octopus mom brooding her clutch for 53 months!!! They dove 18 different times over that period and watched her lose weight, get saggy skin, and eventually on the last dive, the eggs and the mom were gone. This video link explains this in more detail. https://youtu.be/lFCQltYMLQk?list=TLGG0KYw8WOYzbswNjEwMjAyMg

One of my favorite features of the octopus is its ability to disguise itself. There has been so much research done on this and I wish I could put all of it in this blog, but it would be far too much! To highlight this amazing feature, octopuses can not only change the color of their skin, but also the texture of their skin using thousands of cells called chromatophores and papillae which they can expand and retract to match their surroundings. Once I was doing a night SCUBA dive in Honduras and I was cruising along the reef when a rather large octopus all of a sudden started moving along next to me, and it was changing colors every time it went over a different colored reef. It was like watching a disco ball or something. If only I had a video camera back then!!

Octopuses can also imitate other underwater creatures such as sea snakes, or lionfish by contorting their body into the shape of the animal. This hopefully confuses or scares off the predator that may be advancing on it. The mimic octopus does this on a regular basis and scientists even suspect they chose what to mimic based on what animal lives in the area they are in at the time. This video is fun to watch and shows what unusual locomotion some octopuses can use when needed. https://youtu.be/23qzi88k3aM?list=TLGGGiV_Pw0nKHcwNjEwMjAyMg

This leaves one last topic I want to touch on because it’s pretty cool. They have blue blood!! This is because unlike us who have iron in our hemoglobin, octopuses have copper in the oxygen-carrying protein, haemocyanin. This copper-based protein is much more efficient in transporting oxygen molecules in cold and low-oxygen environments like the ocean is. We are learning more about octopuses everyday, how they can regenerate their arms and so much more that scientists study not only to understand this incredible creature, but to see what we can learn from them for our own human bodies!!