🐙Octopus

Let’s meet the friend and companion of Miette Lore: the octopus.

These creatures are genuinely fascinating, as if nature decided to set aside some of the usual rules when making them

For starters, they have three hearts and blue blood! If you’ve seen Finding Dory, you might already know this one. But let’s take a closer look.

Two of their hearts pump blood to the gills, while the third sends oxygenated blood to the rest of the body.
And the weird part, when an octopus swims, its main heart stops beating. This makes swimming more tiring for them, which is one reason they usually prefer to crawl along the seafloor.

But why is their blood blue? I don’t know if they were secretly aristocrats at some point, but there’s a perfectly scientific explanation.

Instead of hemoglobin like ours (an iron-based protein that transports oxygen and gives our blood its red color ) octopuses use a protein called hemocyanin to carry oxygen.
Hemocyanin is copper-based, and this system works particularly well in the cold, low-oxygen conditions of the ocean. And, conveniently, it makes their blood look blue

Smoke bombs, but make them octopus

Many octopus species can release a cloud of ink when they feel threatened, while simultaneously pushing water out of their bodies to propel themselves rapidly away from danger.

But the ink isn’t just a smoke screen for hiding. It contains compounds that can irritate a predator’s eyes and temporarily interfere with its sense of smell and taste.

And the main pigment in octopus ink? Melanin. Yes, the same pigment found in our skin, hair, and eyes

And no, the ink isn’t their venom

If you thought octopus ink was the same thing as octopus venom, you’d be very wrong.

All octopuses produce venom.
Of course, the toxicity varies between species, and blue-ringed octopuses are the most dangerous group to humans. The venom of some species can be deadly to humans, even though they usually grow to less than 20 centimeters.
Tiny body. Absolutely not tiny problem.

The other end of the size spectrum belongs to the Giant Pacific Octopus, the largest known octopus species. It can reach more than 5 meters across when its arms are fully spread out (meaning from the tip of one arm, across the body, to the tip of the opposite arm.)
The exact record is debated, but one particularly enormous specimen was reported at around 9.1 meters. (They’re very pretty too)

Back to the venom: it’s mainly used for hunting.
An octopus uses its hard beak (yes a beak, like a bird) to injure its prey, while the venom helps immobilize it and can even begin breaking down the prey’s tissues for digestion

The ultimate disguise

One of the most famous abilities of octopuses is camouflage.

Get Miette Lore’s stories in your inbox

Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.

Remember me for faster sign in

They can rapidly change the color, brightness, patterns, and even the texture of their skin to blend into their surroundings, or to send visual signals to other animals.

And this brings us to an interesting puzzle. Given the structure of an octopus’s eyes, scientists have long wondered how they can produce such precise changes in color. Their photoreceptors are not like ours, and they have only one type of visual pigment, which means they don’t have color vision in the same way humans do.

One hypothesis is that the unusual shape of their pupils helps them detect different wavelengths of light more effectively.
So somehow, despite having a visual system that seems like it should make this difficult, they’re still ridiculously good at matching their surroundings

Eight arms, and none of them are just arms

All eight of an octopus’s arms can perform different tasks to a remarkable degree, sometimes at the same time.

A huge portion of the neurons in an octopus’s body (around two-thirds) are located in its arms. Each arm also has a large neural network near its base that helps control its movements.

And then there are the suckers. An octopus can have more than 2,000 suckers across its arms, and they aren’t just there for grabbing things.
The suckers contain chemical sensors, allowing them to detect not only touch but also chemical information about whatever they’re touching — essentially giving the arms a kind of sense of taste and smell.

So when an octopus touches something with one of its arms, it isn’t simply feeling it. Its arm can also gather chemical information about what it is.

This means that while an octopus is hunting, one arm might be helping move its body, another could be exploring the seafloor, another might be investigating a crevice, and another could be working on opening some food it found earlier.

All at once

And then there’s the intelligence.

Among invertebrates, octopuses are exceptional when it comes to intelligence.

They can navigate mazes, solve problems, remember things, recognize and predict patterns, use tools, and interact with objects in surprisingly complex ways

Some coastal octopus species can even leave the water briefly at night during low tide to look for crabs and shellfish.

They can’t stay out of water for very long, though. Moving their boneless bodies around on land takes a lot of energy, and breathing becomes more difficult

And there’s still a whole lot more weirdness to talk about. So you’ll definitely be seeing octopuses around here again.

And their emoji will be making appearances the whole time ^-^