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@flange5 Deep breaths. (via EVNautilus)
Prowling coral colonies, the Caribbean reef octopus (Octopus briareus) is built to blend in. This camouflage artist flashes through skin textures and shades of blue, green, red and brown–allowing it to sneak up and envelop prey in a gauzy web of tentacles.
Get up close in our Tentacles exhibition
who needs space really i mean this is no doubt an alien
Octopuses freak me out
Intrigue!
Who decided this is edible…. why do people eat this?!
THERES SO MUCH GOING ON OMG
@why-animals-do-the-thing WHAT IS GOING ON HERE
The octopus is pretty much just chilling and pushing water over it’s gills via the siphon (the hole you see pulsing that tentacles poke out through at the beginning) in order to breathe. It’s a pretty vigorous motion compared to most resting/sleeping octopus I’ve seen, so I might guess it’s paying attention to something. Sometimes you can tell an octopus’ mood from skin texture or changes in color, but it tends to be very specific to each individual.
The whole ‘tentacles poking through the siphon’ thing is pretty fascinating. Octopus don’t totally have purposeful control of all of their tentacles, as far as we know. They do, however, have neurons that go all the way down each arm - it’s sort of thought each arm operates independently because of that - they don’t really check in with the central nervous system for instructions each time there’s sensory input, instead responding locally to the stimulus. The brain gives the arms high-level commands like ‘catch a fish’ or ‘pass the food to the mouth’, but the instructions for how to do so and the neural impulses required to make the details of the actions happen come from each arm. So a lot of time, the arms move pretty independently… and sometimes end up in weird places, like poking through the siphon.
@aquaristlifeforme, @thesmileoctopus, anything else to add?
This particular octopus was actually part of my thesis trials (at@aquaristlifeforme’s aquarium, actually). So. It’s not necessarily that the animal totally doesn’t know where its arms are or what they’re doing, or else they would be losing arms left and right. This behavior here is actually a very purposeful grooming of the gills and siphon, kind of the octopus equivalent of picking your nose. They shed dead skin about once a week, and rubbing their their arms (tentacles are those feeding appendages that squid and cuttlefish have) over their bodies. The GPOs in my lab in Alaska do this too!
