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Animal of this Month – OCTOPUS Name : OCTOPUS Habitat : Oceans, Ocean floors, Coral leafs Life Span : 6 months to five years (Depends on the type of the Octopus)
Octopuses belong to the Cephalopoda class, that means these creatures have symmetrical body, head and some pairs of tentacles or arms. As a part of their class octopuses have a pair of eyes, 4 pairs of arms and symmetrical body. Another important fact is octopuses have no internal or external bones and this characteristic makes their body more flexible. The eight arms of the octopus have suction cups with special sensors through which the could find the taste of the thing whatever they touch. What do they eat? Their diet differs from species to species as they could live on open water areas and ocean floors. Prawns, fishes and other small Cephalopodaes are the main food of the octopuses that live in the open sea places. Octopuses live in the seabed mostly eat crabs, worms and clams.
Yes. Octopuses are intelligent invertebrates. Octopuses have a complex nerve system. According to some studies, their arms work with independent brains. Thought the arms receive command through the nerve cords from the central brain, their nerve systems are not designed to send signals back to the brain that a particular movement is achieved by each of the arms. They judge their arm movement by viewing the movements through vision and thy act accordingly. So it is considered that octopuses have 9 brains. Their intelligence is mainly used to protect themselves from their enemies and to catch their prey. Scientists have observed many interesting learning behaviors of octopuses. They have claimed that the octopuses learn from observing things and they could be trained to distinguish between shapes and patterns. They tried to use other tools such as coconut shell and crab shell as their hide or shelters.
Yes. When they see a prey around them, they could camouflage and change their body color to suit the environment. The moment the prey comes near them, they inject some saliva like liquid that paralyses the prey. Now, the prey will be squeezed by the eight powerful hands of the octopus and it feeds on the prey with its beak by breaking into pieces.
Being intelligent creatures, octopuses use their camouflage skills to escape from their enemies. Their specialized skin cells helps them to escape from their enemies by changing their color to yellow, black, red and brown color that suits the environment around them. Mimicry is another method they used to escape by confusing their enemies. Some octopuses could change their body shapes like sea snakes and eels. One more way of defense is they could create a “cloud effect” by releasing a black ink like substance with melanin when they are in danger. This cloud acts like a hide to the octopus and it escapes swiftly before the enemy could realize the situation. The chemicals in the released ink has the power to reduce the sensing efficiency of the enemy and it could not trace out the escaped octopus when the ink cloud clears. Another interesting way of escape is that they could autotomize their limbs and the separated limb distracts the predators. In this way, one of their arms will be detached from their body to confuse their enemies and they escape swiftly. No problem! Their arms re-grow again.
For slow moving they crawl using their arms. To move fast, their arms act like jet propulsion system that helps to swim. Do they have enemies? Octopuses are rarely attacked by other predators since they have good escaping skills. Sometimes that are hunted by the people for their meat. |
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