Thread by @imacuriosguy

My fav animal Octopuses are older than dinosaurs, they have blue blood, and they have three hearts.
Octopuses not only have eight arms, they can also regrow them, so they honestly don’t care too much about losing limbs...

Anyway, octopuses regularly rip off their arms for whatever reason. Some of these floating Cthulhu heads will literally disarm themselves to distract a predator so they can escape. Octopuses don’t even have to worry about nicking an artery,

as they can apparently close it off to reduce blood loss. Octopuses usually sever their limbs by biting them off. Some, however, don’t spit it out later. in octopuses, one of their tentacles is the penis...

They use that tentacle to deposit packets of sperm into a female, but the problem they run into is the fact that the female is often larger than them and might try to eat them, but not in the fun way...

So some males don’t risk it and instead rip off their penis tentacle and give it to the female instead of flowers or whatever. In the world of octopuses, it’s not at all unseemly for a gentleman cephalopod to give a lady cephalopod a gift and tell her to go and fcuk herself...

Most of the Cephalopods move by jet propulsion. It works like this: cephalopods are basically just heads and feet. That’s literally what their name means. the mantle, which is located in the back of the head and holds most of the animals’ organs.

Squids and octopuses are able to fill it with water, which can then be released through a tube called a siphon. Because the siphon is wider on one end, pushing water through it compresses it the same way as pinching the end of a garden hose,

allowing the liquid to come out at a great force that propels cephalopods to 25 mph. While jetting, cephalopods can use their arms or small fins on their body to steer them in the right direction.

The siphon can also be used to expel ink, which technically makes squids and octopuses the Bond spy cars of the sea.

Their skin is magic. Near all cephalopods, besides nautiluses, can change the color of their skin to blend in with their surroundings...

When a male cuttlefish is out trying to get laid and there are rivals nearby, he’ll project male coloring on the side facing the female, and female coloring on the side facing the rivals.

This way, the other cuttlefish will only see two ladies chatting and move on, while in actuality, the first cuttlefish is trying to talk the real lady cuttlefish to invite her over for coffee or to help him destroy Batfish.

Cephalopods can even change the texture of their skin to better resemble rocks or coral as they close in on their prey. Their internal mechanism that allows them to do all that is so ingenious that scientists are now copying it to make energy-saving TV screens.

Also, according to new research, some cephalopods have gene sequences in their skin that are usually only found in retinas. Scientists still aren’t totally sure what it means but some suspect it may mean that cephalopods SEE WITH THEIR SKIN..

Most of their bodies might in fact be one giant alien eyeball. Cephalopods Are So Smart, They Need Puzzles to Keep Their Minds Busy.

This might have something to do with the size of their brains, which are some of the biggest among all invertebrates. Cephalopods may have also developed higher intelligences thanks to a process called RNA editing,

and it apparently could one day lead to better treatments for all sort of diseases.

Cephalopod Motherhood is a Nightmare. The cephalopods spend most of their life in solitude, selfishly focusing on themselves. Girl octopuses will mate with as many males as they can find, collecting their sperm packets left and right..

When they’re done, they choose to impregnate themselves with the smartest of all the males. What happens next, though, is 100% verified, horrifying fact. After an octopus lays her eggs, she gives up on life.

She stays with the eggs until they hatch, not moving away from the nest or even eating.

As the days pass, the octopus mother slowly starves to death (though some captive cephalopods will occasionally snack on their own arms during this process), all to ensure that her children survive. It’s the ultimate act of love. Or, you know, cruel evolution.

this behavior is actually all due to secretions from the cephalopod equivalent of the pituitary gland. Laying eggs triggers them, shutting off the animal’s digestive and salivary glands. So it’s not that octo-moms don’t want to eat.

They’re physically unable to eat because their evolution-optimized bodies decided that once they have reproduced, they’re no longer needed and so they start to turn off all the lights.

From an evolutionary stand point, this makes perfect sense. Octopuses can lay thousands of eggs, and they technically never stop growing, so without a system in place to cull their population, all the oceans would be JUST giant octopuses.

So next time you visit an aquarium, say my Hi to him or her. 😁
Thanks for reading my octopus obsession. #nature