Mollusks, features and articles | Educational Science

May 15, 2014

So Many Arms! How Octopuses Avoid Tying Themselves in Knots

Octopus arms are amazing things. They live on for an hour after being amputated; they move on their own; they sport hundreds of suckers that grasp things reflexively; and they can bend and stretch in seemingly infinite combinations. But all of those features should mean that octopuses spend most of...

Sep 24, 2014

In Photos: See an Octopus Cannibal in Action

Cannibalistic octopus (Image credit: Jorge H. Urcera (Cefaparques Project CSIC).)Researchers have documented three cases of cannibalism in wild members of the common octopus species – Octopus vulgaris. Previous studies of stomach contents have suggested the existence of cannibalism in wild O. vulgaris in the Western Mediterranean Sea and the South...

Sep 24, 2014

Octopus Cannibalism Caught on Video for 1st Time

When octopuses go hunting for prey, they sometimes end up dining on members of their own species, and the cephalopods seem to have a taste for their victims' arm tips. Divers have captured video of this octopus-on-octopus action in the wild for the first time on video. In a new...

Feb 2, 2015

Animal Sex: How Octopuses Do It

Often considered the smartest invertebrates (animals without backbones) on the planet, octopuses can use tools, unscrew jar lids and tightly control their body color to match their surroundings. They use this sharp intelligence especially in situations of survival — including when they are trying to avoid getting eaten by their...

Jun 22, 2015

From Blobfish to 'Adorable' Octopus: 9 Animals with Perfect Names

Adorable probably isn't the first adjective you'd use to describe an octopus. But then again, maybe you've never met a tiny octopus with big, beady eyes and a pink, jellylike body. One biologist, Stephanie Bush of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California, has been tasked with giving just...

Oct 30, 2017

Octlantis: See photos of tight-knit gloomy octopus communities

Enter Octlantis (Image credit: Peter-Godfrey Smith)The gloomy octopus (Octopus tetricus) is usually a solitary species. But at two sites now, researchers have discovered gloomy octopuses living in high densities and interacting with one another in Jervis Bay in Australia. From mating to signaling to evicting one another from dens, these...

Nov 1, 2017

Mysterious Walking Octopuses Appear on Welsh Beach

Spooky happenings were afoot last weekend in Wales … or should that be an arm — or eight? According to local news reports, bunches of octopuses were seen oozing along the beach on Friday night (Oct. 27). Local marine tour operators told WalesOnline they saw about 20 of the cephalopods...

Nov 22, 2017

You'd Never Suspect an Octopus Was Lying on this Seafloor

A video of an octopus' hiding in plain sight before popping out to spook a diver has gone viral. The video shows a nearly invisible octopus, seamlessly blending in with the seafloor, before turning white, floating up from its hiding place and transforming into what looks like a terrifying, bug-eyed...

Feb 19, 2018

1st Video of Dumbo Octopus Hatchling Is Adorbs

Scientists didn't know what kind of octopus egg they'd plucked from the bottom of the sea until the shell started to hatch — then, they saw the elephant ears. The adorable cephalopod hatchling, which you can see in a new video taken by researchers on a National Oceanic and Atmospheric...

Apr 18, 2018

Hundreds of Purple Octopus Moms Are Super Weird, and They're Doomed

Miles beneath the ocean's surface, in the darkened waters along a rocky seafloor, a submersible vehicle unexpectedly encountered a bizarre spectacle: hundreds of small, purple octopuses, many of them mothers protecting clusters of eggs, clinging to the hardened lava from an undersea volcano. The sight was astonishing, researchers said. During...

May 17, 2018

No, Octopuses Don't Come From Outer Space

Like Fox Mulder, I want to believe. I want to believe the conclusions of a new paper that says octopuses are actually space aliens whose frozen eggs first came to Earth aboard an icy meteor. I want to believe that humans, too, are aliens — the final descendants of an...

Jun 26, 2018

Australia's 'Gloomy Octopus' Finds Warmth, Food, Happiness in Tasmania

Warming ocean temperatures are encouraging Australia's notably reclusive gloomy octopus to branch out. The heat-loving cephalopod, also known as the common Sydney octopus (Octopus tetricus), has expanded its territory from the shores of New South Wales on the east coast of Australia down to the now-warmer waters off the northeast...

Sep 20, 2018

Confirmed: If You Give an Octopus MDMA, It Will Get All Cuddly

If you give an octopus some Molly, it'll probably ask for a cuddle. That's what a pair of scientists were hoping would happen, anyway, when they devised an experiment to test the effects of MDMA — also known as the psychoactive drug ecstasy or Molly — on octopuses. The goal...

Oct 24, 2018

Octopus Moms Enter Death Spiral Before Eight-Armed Bundles Are Born

For an octopus mom, the miracle of life is bittersweet. After wandering the seas alone, she meets up with a mate, collects his sperm and then goes on to deprive herself of any food while caring for her now-fertilized eggs. When it nears time for the little eight-armed bundles to...

Oct 25, 2018

Ridiculously Tiny Baby Octopus Riding Ocean Trash Is So, So Smol

A baby octopus the size of a pea was hitchhiking on a piece of plastic floating in the Pacific Ocean when Hawaiian researchers spotted it and scooped up the smol, smol cephalopod. Photos shared on Facebook by Hawaii's Kaloko-Honokōhau National Historical Park show the wee baby rescued from the trash...