A giant Pacific octopus has more than 2,000 suckers spread across its eight arms, which they use for tasting, smelling, and clinging to the glass inches from your camera.
Our little kraken is still as feisty as ever! She is constantly amazing me with her unique behavior and with the things she is able to learn and do. We have yet to come up with an enrichment device that she is not able to figure out, and I am currently searching for some fun holiday-themed items to use with her in the coming weeks. It’s safe to say that my octopus obsession is far from over <3
Grimpoteuthis
sp., (aka “Dumbo” octopus) was spotted on the seafloor 3,500 meters
below the ocean surface offshore of Monterey Bay.
Cirrate octopuses have
a small, internal shell and two fins on their head, separating them
from other octopuses (Incirrata), which have neither.
This group
includes the famous dumbo octopus, Grimpoteuthis, as well as flapjack
octopus, Opisthoteuthis, and some lesser known genera.
They are usually
found on or near the deep seafloor, where they use the finger-like cirri
on their arms to catch small crustaceans, worms, and other prey items. ⠀
Ghostly critters from the deep sea: CIRRATE OCTOPUS
Making a rare appearance just in time for Halloween, this
ghostly-looking orange cirrate octopus was recently observed by MBARI’s
ROV Doc Ricketts swimming over the Taney Seamounts. These finned
octopuses belong to an order of animals called Cirrata named for the
presence of hair-like structures called ‘cirri’ on their arms which may
aid these animals in the capture of food.
Meet the two-spot octopus (Octopus bimaculoides), now in Tentacles. This medium-sized
octopus (mantel length is 7 inches, arms 23 inches) is named for its main
identifying features, the two bright blue eyespots on either side of its mantel.
The glowing eyespots
may trick predators and prey alike into thinking that the blue-eyed beauty
marks are its actual eyes. Meanwhile the cunning two-spot octopus lives to see
another night while feasting on a shelled morsel.
This octopus is
found in deep waters from central California to northern Baja, California. This species, like many
species of cephalopods, lives for a brief 1-1.5 years.
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.
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.
’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!
