WE MET AN OCTOPUS AT THE LA SCIENCE CENTER AND NOW WE ARE ALL BEST FRIENDS. #octopus #science #eightleggedbestfriend #probablygoodathugging
How Smart Is an Octopus?
In other words, an encounter with an octopus can sometimes leave you with the strong feeling that you’ve encountered another mind.
But that mind—if mind it is—has evolved along a route entirely different from the one that led to our own. The most-recent common ancestors of humans and octopuses lived about 600 million years ago, early in the evolution of animal life. Although much about our joint ancestors is obscure, they were probably small wormlike creatures that lived in the sea. This makes octopuses very different from other animals we suspect of sentience, such as dolphins and dogs, parrots and crows, which are much more closely related to us. In the words of Peter Godfrey-Smith, “If we can make contact with cephalopods as sentient beings, it is not because of a shared history, not because of kinship, but because evolution built minds twice over. This is probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien.”
~ Cephalopod ~
Rainy day octobath
This little guy is the first one in a series I’d like to call Bio-spheres (I was very happy when I came up with that name and found it very clever :P) I’d like each one of them to contain an animal I love (or just love to look at) or alittle environment with different animals. At the moment I decided to exclude animals with either fur or feathers for I don’t quite know how to pull that off in that scale, but I might include them once I found a good technique.
So. On to the Octopus. I made him mostly from polymer clay (this time it was a brand called pardo of which I got a bunch of jewel colours from a former job. It was a really, really lovely shade at one point, but I mostly painted over it so you can’t really see it anymore) but painted him in a lot of layers to achieve the mottled “skin”. I started off with another Octopus, which, surprise, surprise, turned out a bit too big for the sphere I envisioned, which turned out to be awesome, though, cause I was able to play around with painting techniques, and especially with the suckers. I originally planned to make them in polymer clay too, but then decided that I don’t want to get crazy yet. So I ended up painting first a little dot of paint and then taking paint away with a very fine dotting tool. To complete the piece I added a little bit of sand and small rocks to the base. The Pendant measures a bit more then 30 mm, the dome itself measures 25. The pictures truly don’t do this piece justice.
(via meglyman)
Source: asabaijan
The Seaside Aquarium posted this on facebook:
Hank, meet Henry. Henry, meet Hank! These two are so funny, they have become the most unusual pair. Every morning before the Aquarium opens Henry goes inside and sits on the octopus’s tank. The octopus is just as interested in Henry and Henry is with him. #BFF
Sooo cute !
Hidemasa - Octopus Priest. N.d., early 1800s
Page 5 of ‘Ocean wonders: A companion for the seaside.’ {1879}
A diver since 10 years, never before had Enda Kesim witnessed a phenomenon like this one. An octopus revealed itself stealthily, and then came out of its hiding place to show how it could contort and camouflage itself.
The cephalopod, a colour-changing creature, is one of the most intelligent species on the planet. It interchanges its shape and colour cleverly, in accordance to its surroundings.
The video shows how is almost impossible to differentiate the octopus from its coral surroundings, but then it comes out of its hiding place in an amazing display of camouflaging capabilities.
