As added protection, these eight-armed sand dwellers historically utilize abandoned bivalve shells to encapsulate their bodies while beneath the surface. Unlike most of their relatives that live and hunt around reefs with plenty of hiding holes, Coconut and other sand-dwelling octopuses bury beneath the sand to avoid predators. If a bivalve shell isn’t available, use coconuts! The perfect home. She speculated at the time that the animals employ the behavior to mimic a coconut while they make their escape from predators, or, in my case, a pesky diver. Huffard offered her finding: The octopus used the outer halves of its two back arms like tank treads, alternately laying down a sucker edge and rolling it along the bottom, while tightly wrapping the remaining six arms around their bodies. Basing her study on a short video captured by National Geographic filmmaker Bob Cranston, Ms. Making the news item even more interesting, her colleagues at the university investigating applications for soft robotics took a keen interest in how the octopus was able to pull off this two-legged feat. By coincidence, her paper described the same behavior by the same species, Amphioctopus marginatus, that we observed in Indonesia. Crissy Huffard, then a graduate student at University of California, Berkeley who had recently documented the first bipedal walking behavior in octopuses in the March 2005 issue of Science. Not a week after returning to the States, National Public Radio broadcast an interview with Dr. Although impressed, I naively chalked up the curious behavior to a chance happening and put it out of my mind. Then, even more amazing than the maverick coconut, the octopus wrapped six arms around its body and walked away on its two remaining appendages. Eventually the shells opened wide and the occupant appeared in all its Coconut Octopus glory. If so, it would represent an unexpectedly ingenious adaptation for an invertebrate.įive minutes later the halves separated slightly and an eye peered out. I passed the time contemplating the rather fanciful notion that the cephalopod inside just might have intentionally instigated its unorthodox roll down the slope. So I set the nut down, backed away and settled in for a wait. The overlapping edges of the mismatched halves offered a clue: A Coconut Octopus must live inside! I tested my theory with a tug, and sure enough the two sections, gripped heroically from inside by eight sucker-lined arms, wouldn’t budge. I caught up with the wayward nut as it came to rest at the edge of a sponge bed, picked it up and inspected the brown orb in the palm of my outstretched hand. Even though much of the Strait’s mountainous terrain is fringed with copra plantations, and huskless shell halves commonly litter the seafloor, I had never seen an intact coconut underwater, much less one tumbling along the bottom. While exploring the pumice plain of Lembeh Strait in northern Sulawesi, Indonesia, I watched a coconut roll down the steep sandy slope of Teluk Kembahu Bay. Note: Portions of this article were originally published in Asian Diver magazine 2006 and in Scuba Diving magazine 2008. The amazing Coconut Octopus, Amphioctopus marginatus
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |