Octopus

Ben Goldsmith’s remarkable memoir begins with his daughter, Iris, swimming into the sea to place her hands on the carcass of a humpback whale, captured by whalers off the island of Bequia in the Caribbean. The powerful image of the “teenage girl in the blood-red water unafraid, tenderly handling the dead monster” illustrates Iris’s reverence for the natural world as well as being a portent of tragedy.In 2019, the gentle rhythm of a normal summer’s day was shattered by Iris’s death in an accident on the family farm in…

Octopuses are the chameleons of the sea, so it's hard to keep tabs on who is who at a glance.Thanks to small, pigment-filled skin tissues called chromatophores, color-reflecting iridophores, and light-reflecting leucophores, the mollusk can change its patterns and coloring in a blink.Combined with their hydrostatic skeletons and dexterous muscles shifting their shapes and textures, individual octopuses rarely look the same from moment to moment.Now a new study has found one octopus species with a base pattern that, like…

Do you remember the 2016 viral photo of an octopus swimming next to parked cars in a flooded Miami parking garage? A particularly high tide had likely pushed the unsuspecting creature through a drain pipe and into alien territory. For Rob Verchick, climate law scholar, it was a clear sign of climate change—and a preview of how humans might need to adapt. Squid Change Color to Hide in Plain Sight When those drainage pipes were first installed, they were above the water line. But after years of sea level rise, the waterline…

Octopus is a popular ingredient in many cuisines, with some 420,000 metric tons of this mollusc being caught worldwide each year.The rising global popularity of octopus has been attributed to the increasingly adventurous tastes of younger consumers, its nutritional benefits and the decline of traditional fish stocks such as cod.This helps explain why the food processing corporation, Nueva Pescanova, aims to build the world's first indoor octopus farm in Gran Canaria: a thousand-tank facility for producing 3,000 tons of…

While the current "Spider-Man" run reveals the truth behind Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson's break-up with the mystic Benjamin Rabin, Marvel is teasing a more familiar foe for the webhead in future issues of the hero's comic. CBR.com shared a look at Amazing Spider-Man #27 and #28 by Zeb Wells and Ed McGuinness, where Doctor Octopus will come back to make Spider-Man's life a living hell. Issue #27 hints at Peter trying to recover from a shocking death (strongly hinting at Mary Jane Watson) in his world,…

Enypniastes eximia or headless chicken monster? You be the judge. Image: NOAAWhy leave Earth in search of aliens when you can just dive right into our oceans? No doubt, the seas are filled with all sorts of oddities that often defy description, from incomprehensibly shaped comb jellies through to gigantic isopods that more rightly belong in a 1960s B-picture. Case in point, these 12 bizarro sea animals, all of which will have you questioning reality.This article was originally published on November 12, 2020.…

Octopuses' sucker-covered arms can act as if they contain partly independent mini brains. Each arm gathers sensory information to drive its own movements—and even those of other arms—without consulting major brain regions. “Their arms are so mobile; they're soft, and they can bend and twist and do all sorts of things,” says Melina Hale, a biologist at the University of Chicago. In a study in Current Biology, she and her colleagues reveal the strange connections that may facilitate these supple limbs' decentralized…

Some scientists have already made the argument that octopuses might be aliens. While the claim seems a bit out of this world, new research into their brains continues to show just how alien the octopus is, even if it doesn’t end up being of extraterrestrial origins. According to a new study published in Current Biology, octopus brains create complex signals that scientists don’t yet understand. The study was made possible thanks to a new technique discovered by the researchers behind the study. This new…

In February 2023, researchers announced that they had managed to record brain activity in freely moving octopuses for the first time. The scientists implanted electrodes and a data logger into day octopuses (Octopus cyanea).Brain activity patterns recorded in the research have not yet been tied to specific behaviors, but if the practice sticks, it may provide more information about the inner workings of the octopus, and specifically how their brain activity corresponds to their movements.There are ethical questions here,…

If a lion could speak,” Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “we could not understand him.” Swap “lion” for “octopus” and you have the philosophical challenge at the heart of this deeply interesting work of science fiction. What if the first alien intelligences we encountered were already living with us on planet Earth?Rumours of sea monsters off the shores of an archipelago in Vietnam have attracted the attention of a tech giant specialising in AI, Dianima, which has bought and sealed off the islands. A marine biologist, Dr Ha…