NEWS: Fun with Cephalopods

I had a friend back in high school who volunteered at the invertibrate house in DC's National Zoo. She related a story that the Octopus had to be kept in a tank separate from other tanks because it had learned to escape and take "vacations" in adjoining displays and occiasionally eat the other animals' food and sometimes the other animals. Fear the Cephalopod.

Along those same lines , I remember watching a show that had a octopus in a tank with a jar in it . In the jar ( which was also full of water ) was a live fish . They left the jar in that tank with the octopus , & just by looking at it & feeling it , it figured out how to unscrew the lid . It did so , climbed into the jar & ate the fish . Octopuses are the coolest . It's probably lucky for us they have such short life spans . If they didn't , I'm sure they would have wiped us out long ago .

Octopuses are well-known for their ability to escape. Wouldn't surprise me in the least.

-TM

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Cthulu is coming...

you guys can mock Cleveland all you want, but the only thing in Lake Erie that will kill me is the water!

I, for one, welcome our new squid overlords.

Pass the butter.

There's water in Lake Erie?

Cool Octopus Tricks

That first one looks to be a pretty close re-creation of the show I posted about earlier . The last one makes me want a tank with a habitrail in it so I could have a pet octopus playing in it all hours of the night .

Woo! Squidy-squids! My favorite ocean-inhabiting creatures!

The video capturing of the giant squid that aired a few months ago on the Discovery Channel made me cream my pants... or should I say, Ink! my pants! Har har har.

All I can think of when I watch the last one is how it'd be to have a fuckin' octopus squeeze up through one's toilet pipes and just chill in there 'til discovered. Terrifying. Jeebus.

Wow flux, thanks for the great article. But did anyone get the story within the story? I'm talking about the science behind the expansion of their range... Yep, climate change (and pollution) rears it's ugly head yet again... In another closely related flux story: NEWS: It's a Plastic Fantastic World!

Also, I've been SCUBA diving all over Southern California and have seen regular "market squid" darting around to great psychedelic effect (they have bio-luminescent currents that ripple through their bodies!), but just missed the great Humboldt Squid die off in La Jolla cove (theories that they became trapped in the cove aren't adequate in my opinion and some marine biologists have suggested that they may have experienced a mass die off due to neurological damage, possibly due to something that poisoned them). I did manage to dive the next day (and the beach reeked!) but we didn't see a single one. After reading up on them and seeing video footage of these giant beasts, I'm kind of glad we didn't.

Great article. I'm glad someone bumped it or I would have missed it.

Sweet article! I've always been fascinated with these creatures of the deep. They are some of the most complex and intelligent creatures that exist in the world, not to mentions supremely beautiful.
I love how in the first part of the above video, the octopus appears to be sitting and thinking of how to get the crab out of the closed jar..