Examining the Octopus

If there were ever a superhero with the powers of an Octopus, they would give Spider-Man, Batman, and many of the x-men a run for their money. They are amazing creatures with extremely potent talents for survival within their environments including camouflage, contortion of size, ink clouding, astounding intelligence, and even personalities according to several researchers. The Octopuses’ many characteristics and abilities are discussed here with respect to the wonder and diversity that they bring to the World and its oceans.

Octopus Basics

The most basic place to begin exploration into the Octopus, Octopus Vulgaris, is with their legs, the 8 limbed appendages for which the octopus has received its name. These eight long arms are about 2 feet long at max and proceed from a heart or globe shaped head also called the mantle (Common Octopus). These arms, not tentacles, are lined with row after row of tentacles that are used for sensing taste, holding pray, solving problems, moving their environment, and of course feeding. A single arm has nearly 3,000 suckers on it, and each sucker may have 10,000 sensory neurons (Wernick). Tentacles are a term reserved for a specific kind of neural innovation with a complementary functional architecture which is not in the octopuses’ biology (Wernick).  Not all of these arms act as arms however. Research shows that octopuses tend to have two or more of the limbs as legs, appendages which they use to ‘walk’ across the sea floor while swimming (Common Octopus). Even though the Octopus’s tentacles are extremely useful for their survival, they can still sacrifice one if need be and even regenerate the limb back overtime (Common Octopus). With their tentacles, they may move as fast as 25 miles per hour under the water (Octopus).

The globe of the Octopus is without a shell or skeletal structure making it an invertebrate and apart of the Cephalod class, a group that includes scuttle fish, squids, and other ink squirters. Even though the Octopus is without these formative shapes, they still do possess a skull, a structure used to house and protect their delicate brain structure (Common Octopus). The Octopus also has a sharp beak called the radula, a mouth placed in the bottom of the globe’s center that can be used for prying into prey such as clams and crabs. Incredibly, the Octopus is also poisonous and therefore uses such juices once it has captured its prey to paralyze and kill their target into food that is even easier to control and eat (Common Octopus). If however ocean creatures larger than themselves were to come along, the octopus may eject an ink cloud of purple-blue liquid that both serves as a cover and a deterrent to predators.

Inside their globe the Octopuses have three hearts that continuously pump blue-copper based blood. These heart systems are jet powered (Anderson, Mather, & Wood 13). Two of these hears act as accessory engines near the gills for the regular pumping of oxygen out of their lungs. The blood of the Octopus is blue because they have oxygen that carries the pigment hemocyanin in their bloodstream. Hemocyanin is not as efficient at retaining oxygen as hemoglobin, which is red, and therefore is blue (Anderson, Mather, & Wood 22). The blood is nonetheless used in much the same way that the humans use it, through circular loops that begin in the heart, cycle out to the ends of their extremities and then return to the pumping organ.

Finding the Octopus

The Octopus is distributed far and wide throughout the world’s waters. They're found in shallow waters near coral reefs all the way to some of the murkiest depths have octopuses. Also most amazing about Octopuses are their camouflage abilities. Internet videos as well as the most recent Pixar film Finding Dory, a movie that stared a constantly camouflaging Octopus, have increased awareness regarding their deceptive abilities. The Octopus’s poses and coloring can become a near exact match of their environment, at tactic that can be useful in catching prey or hiding from predators. The octopus’s skills come from their skin cells which have several pigmentation abilities including black, brown, orange, red, or yellow permutations. These pigments are then squeezed within the stretchiness of the octopuses’ skin for desired templates to arise from their combination. The Smithsonian’s Fox Meyer states that “If you squeezed a dye-filled balloon, the color would be pushed to the top, stretching out the surface and making the color appear brighter” (Hullinger). This tactic is achieved without the use of eyesight assistance as octopuses are colorblind. The Cephalopods are also capable of changing their skin’s texture as well to create important markers that help to blend them into their environment such as spikes, bumps, and ridges (Hullinger). Thus they are able to distort their appearance into the foliage or floor of the sea in a most surprising manner. In their resting state, most Octopuses are believed to be a tannish brown color not unlike Khaki (Hullinger). From this rested states, they can literally jump to any color they need to in a flash thus making the Octopus one of the most formidable of opponents and/or prey (Courage).

Octopus Character

The Octopus is well documented for its complex and impressive range of personality styles. Ever since the Seattle Aquarium’s octopuses displayed distinctively different adaption styles to their environment in 1987, the scientific community has been turned out to the possibility of Octopuses’ multiple personalities. In the group of Octopus, three were in the tank including Lucretia McEvil, who consistently tore up everything she could in the tank, Leisure Suit Larry, an Octopus who would have been charged for rape if he had been a human, and Emily Dickinson, a permanent cave dweller (Anderson, Mathers, & Wood 113). The names were given after the fact by volunteers who could sense their uniqueness. Perhaps however these temperaments do not reflect the actual character of the Octopus but rather the environment they were placed in, a confined aquarium tank. Experiments conducted by researchers who were inspired by Seattle’s findings indicated similar findings in distinctive personality traits related to shyness, activity, and various relational styles (Anderson, Mathers, & Wood, 113).

Other forms of evidence exist as well to validate the intelligence of the Octopus. For instance, it is now known that Octopus may recognize people with whom they have regular interactions and respond to them with either anger or affection (Wernick). In one research setting, an octopus would take any chance it got to squirt a particular researcher with water (Wernick). This finding is even more interesting in the light of the fact that the greatest concentration of their intelligence is in their arms. Nearly three fifths of the octopus brain is in their arms thanks to the enormous concentration of sensory neurons in each of its many thousands of suckers (Wernick). While humans have a central and peripheral nervous system, Octopuses have this system rolled all into one cohesive mind that extends from the globe center out through the limbs. Perhaps it is this unified neural circuitry that has given the Octopus the tendency to ‘attach first’ and ‘ask questions later’ (Wernick). The Octopus will however not attach to itself as the tissues of its own body as they have a specialized set of self-recognition receptors which prevent self-entanglement, something that one might expect to occur in an organism as long and many limbed as the Octopus. With their extra intelligent arms, Octopuses have been known to use tools for predation and camouflage (Octopus).

Octopus Species

The family from which the Octopus is derived is actually a highly developed genome of DNA. The Octopus’s DNA is composed of 2.7 billion base pairs, a figure about 90% of the human genome’s relative size of 3.2 billion (Wernick). This total is many times higher than most other animals. Also perplexing and stunning is that 10% of the Octopus’s genomes have no matches in other animal species (Wernick). Such a distinction certainly makes them highly prized creatures of study for naturalist and biologists alike. The family of Octopuses is very unique from squids. Squids and octopuses diverged nearly 270 million years ago, a time before even the first dinosaurs walked on the Earth (Wernick). Hence, the Octopus is one of the most ancient and successful creatures on Earth. Octopus reproduction is achieved in mass quantities. During the year’s Early spring, the Octopus will move from deeper waters into the shoreline regions in order to mate. Once inseminated, the female will release 100,000 to 500,000 eggs which she will defend from predators, deliver oxygen to through regular water squirting and clean regularly (Common Octopus).

Octopus species are roughly 300 in number although not all are named or identified. The Octopus will live in many forms and locations. The Spoon-Arm Octopus for instance is found, in the coldest and darkest parts of the ocean at 3,000 feet below the ocean’s surface. The Hawaiian Octopus, among several other sorts of Octopuses, lives in shallow water or tide pools (Anderson, Mather, & Wood 15). Furthermore, there are Argonaut Octopuses that drift freely in the open oceans. The Abdopus Aculeatus, a long-armed version of the Octopus, is without a common name because it is so very rarely found along sea grass beds in the Easter Pacific. There even are Octopuses that live in deep-sea vents near the bottom of the ocean at 6000 feet below sea level (Anderson, Mather, & Wood 15).

Conservation Octopus

Like many of the ocean’s species, octopuses are threatened by human activity. The octopus can be ensnared by fishing nets and octopus pots, plastic traps which lure octopuses into them through the bait that they would be a suitable home (Common Octopus). Octopuses then are used for food in many Asian and Mediterranean food items such as Sushi. The report holds that if these traps and net trawling continue, the octopus could become endangered. Nevertheless, Octopuses are extremely resilient creatures who clearly have many types of defense mechanisms to keep them safe including ink jets, a well-developed intelligence, a perfect camouflage system, and a highly maneuverable yet strong and durable physiological structure that permits them great and subtle movement across the ocean’s floors and open water. Thus, they are not at the same degree of risk as many other creatures in the ocean who not so fortunate. Still, certain problems like ocean pollution are going to be a problem.

Conclusion

The Ocean is filled with amazing and surprising creatures, hence the need for maintaining a clean and sustainable environment. The octopus is perhaps the most refined of all these in terms of dynamism, diversity, and intelligence. Their ability to move their limbs with expert control coupled with their brilliance, ink ejection, sensory neuron count, and camouflage gives them an edge in the oceans like nothing else. Hopefully, their species will remain in the oceans for a long time to come.

Works Cited

Anderson, Roland, Mathers, Jennifer, & Wood, James. Octopus: The Ocean’s Intelligent Invertebrate. Timber Press, 2013. Print.

Common Octopus. Animal fact guide, 2016. Web. July 11, 2016. http://www.animalfactguide.com/animal-facts/common-octopus/.

Courage, Kathrine. How the Freaky Octopus can Help us to Understand the Human Brain. Wired, 2013. Web. July 7, 2013. http://www.wired.com/2013/10/how-the-freaky-octopus-can-help-us-understand-the-human-brain/.

Hullinger, Jessica. Mental Floss.com, 2016. Web. July 11, 2016. http://mentalfloss.com/article/61532/explaining-octopus-amazing-camouflage-skills.

Octopus. National Geographic Kids, 2016. Web. July 11, 2016. http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/animals/octopus/#octopus.jpg.

Wernick, Adam. More Surprising things about the Octopus. Keranews. 2016. Web. July 11, 2016. http://keranews.org/post/more-surprising-things-about-octopus-our-favorite-cephalopod.