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Thought this was kinda neat. Figured some of you may enjoy it. It's been recently observed that certain species of octopuses walk on 2 legs in order to conceal themselves.

Here are two videos:

Rolling Like a Coconut

Walking and Looking Like Seaweed

And here is the article courtesy of www.newscientist.com:

If you are using your limbs to disguise yourself, how do you flee danger without giving yourself away? The answer, when you have eight arms, is to use six arms for disguise and to walk across on the seafloor on the other two.

That is the extraordinary behaviour observed for the first time in two species of octopus by Christine Huffard's team from the University of California, Berkeley, US.

Defying the notion that bipedal motion requires muscles attached to a rigid skeleton, the octopuses used the strong, flexible muscles in their back arms to walk across the seabed when pursued by camera-wielding biologists.

The two species have slightly different strategies. Octopus marginatus from Indonesia wraps itself into a ball while walking, perhaps to imitate a coconut rolling with the current.

Tiny Octopus aculeatus of Australia holds up six of its arms to disguise itself as a clump of seaweed, while walking at up to 14 centimetres per second - faster than it can manage using more than two arms.

"This camouflage is so good, it's easy to lose sight of the animal," Huffard says. Many other octopus species have back arms that might be strong enough to allow walking, she says.

"I have never ever heard of any behaviour remotely similar to this," says Steve O'Shea, a cephalopod expert at the Auckland Institute of Technology in New Zealand. "This is yet another example of how little we know about these creatures."



Last edited by lil_mikey69 at 26-Mar-2005 01:00

Last edited by jason_r_s at 26-Mar-2005 23:50

Cool article...but only the first video worked for me

Thats odd. I just watched both videos again to check the links, and they both worked for me.

Saw those videos! I want to get my acryllic 55 gallon goin' so bad for my future Bimac!

~using *** to trick the censors is not permitted on FP.com

Last edited by Oleta at 26-Mar-2005 15:39

It's just amazing how creatures learn behaviors.. This octopus reminds me of the Mimic octopus.. There was a documentary about them on Discovery channel several months ago and it was just fascinating..

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