Still, this venom gives us a better idea of how octopuses actually kill. Since the blanket octopus stops using the Physalia tentacles when they’re small they can’t deliver a fatal blow to an adult human. Granted, only the blue-ringed octopus has powerful enough venom to kill a human. As recently as the past decade, marine biologists have come to discover that octopuses carry a venom protein similar to that found in snakes.Ī study from Bryan Fry of the University of Melbourne Australia identified that all octopuses are venomous, and this appears to extend to other coleoids, cuttlefish and squid. The blanket octopus with its makeshift stinging weapons, and the blue-ringed octopus with its fatal bite, are not the only venomous octopuses. Which is about 1/10,000th the mass of a female. The female tremoctopus can reach about 2 meters in length.Īn extreme example of sexual dimorphism, the males may only grow to 2.5 cm. Once the octopus hits about 7.5 cm they seem to discard the tentacles. It’s like having your daddy give you a roll of nickels or a can of mace. They start off pretty small, so to keep themselves safe they need to arm themselves. This behaviour has only been observed in juvenile tremoctopus. The crazy thing is, it’s only the little fellass packing heat. “Float like a deflated balloon, sting like a million bees.” They can paralyze, stun, or kill their prey as well as fending off potential attackers. The blanket octopus uses it both offensively and defensively. Regardless of their origin, their use as a weapon is devastatingly effective. “But it's no George Clooney, that's for sure.”īrowse the full Absurd Creature of the Week archive here.Their sting raises whip-like welts that can cause pain for 2-3 days.Īlthough often mistaken for a jellyfish the man o’ war is actually a siphonophore (basically a large jellyfish-like organism made out of several, smaller organisms). “So it's not the world's worst male,” says Tregenza. Having fulfilled his purpose, he perishes as the female trucks on, flashing that majestic cape and from time to time taking more lovers. Sadly, things don’t turn out so rosy for the male. "The female blanket octopus will have the male's arm inside her," Tregenza says, "and when she comes to need to fertilize her eggs, she can pull that arm out and squirt the sperm over her eggs like squirting soy sauce onto fried rice." Thus concludes the greatest analogy in the history of science. The male then jets away, though the female isn’t necessarily fertilized just yet. “The arm then breaks off and crawls into the female's mantle cavity.” There, it may even find company: Females can retain the arms of multiple males simultaneously. “The blanket octopus male puts all the sperm its got into a modified arm,” says Tregenza. He’ll be lucky to find a female, but once he does, he leaves his mate something special to remember him by-like, uh, a limb. So the tiny male blanket octopus finds himself floating out there all alone in the vast ocean. These are invaluable defenses because unlike their cousins, blanket octopuses don’t ever spend time on the seafloor, and thus don’t have the luxury of crevices to squeeze into for protection. Stretched between the cephalopod’s highly elongated arms are vast sheets of flesh, and when the octopus feels threatened, it splays out its arms to deploy a stunning cloak that maybe, just maybe, will convince an encroaching predator to piss off.Įven if that doesn’t do the trick, the octopus’ arms will break off in its enemy’s mouth, like a lizard losing its tail, hopefully allowing the erstwhile prey to beat a retreat. Bear because I was apparently a painfully uncreative child, my sister had one named Beary because she was a little bit more creative, and Linus from Peanuts had his famous blanket.īut roaming the open oceans is a creature that sports a true security blanket: the so-called blanket octopus. Odds are that as a kid you had what is known as a “security object,” perhaps a stuffed animal or toy that you carried everywhere with you.
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