30 Awesome and Amazing Facts About Octopus | Amazing Facts 4U
- There are around 300 recognized octopus species. The largest octopus weighs about 15 kg.
- Their intelligence is amazing. They have an extremely complicated nervous system. Their brain is formed by 500 million large neurons ( The human brain contains about 100 billion smaller neurons).
- They are very intelligent and can navigate through mazes. They possess a long-term memory.
- Amazingly octopuses do not have any internal or external skeletons. They have no bones and will not be able to maintain their shape out of water.
- The amazing fact is that an octopus is about the size of a flea at birth.
- Female blanket octopuses are 40,000 times heavier and 100 times larger than male blanket octopuses. Females grow about 6.6 feet in length while males grow 0.9 inches. The males are there just to mate as they die immediately afterward.
- For all their innovation, intelligence and abilities, octopuses don’t live very long. The Common Octopus lives about 2 years, the Giant Pacific Octopus may live for 5 years. This limits their abilities to gain information.
- The octopuses primarily prey on crabs, worms, clams, etc which mainly reside at the bottom of the ocean. However, those that dwell in the open-ocean predominantly rely on fish, prawns, shelled mollusks, etc.
- One of the major causes of octopus death is reproduction as males, after mating, can only survive for few months. Females pass away right after the eggs hatching.
- Female big blue octopuses are known to eat males after mating.
- The amazing fact is that after a male octopus breed with a female he develops dementia and spends the rest of the life confused with no knowledge of previous events.
- There are certain female octopuses that keep the sperms lively inside her for months until the maturity of eggs. The female octopuses lay around 200,000 eggs.
- Many believe that if octopuses had lived more, they would have been the dominant intelligence on Earth.
- They can solve problems like removing a plug or unscrew a lid to get prey from a container.
- They have been found to play with a ‘toy’ and to have individual responses and individual temperaments.
- Octopuses have four pairs of arms. The 1,600 cups found in the arms are not just tactile organs, but also olfactory. In other words, octopuses smell with their arms.
- Amazingly octopuses have three hearts. Two pump blood through each of the two gills, while the third pumps blood through the body. However, the vascular system is weak and lifespan short.
- Their blood contains a copper-rich protein and is blue in color.
- Octopuses have wonderful eyesight and a complex sense of touch and taste. Amazingly they are deaf.
- Since octopi have no bones, their bodies are amazingly flexible. They can squeeze through openings not much bigger than their eyeballs.
- The octopus’s eye is the most complex amongst invertebrates, very similar structurally and functionally to the human eye. Octopuses have rectangular pupils.
- The amazing fact is that when they go upside down their eyes stay in the same position. So they never see anything upside down.
- Using a network of pigment cells and specialized muscles in its skin, the common octopus can almost instantaneously match the colors, patterns, and even textures of its surroundings. Predators such as sharks, eels, and dolphins swim by without even noticing it.
- The amazing mimic octopuses are capable of changing their body shape to mimic other animals.
- When discovered, an octopus will release a cloud of black ink to obscure its attacker’s view, giving it time to swim away. The ink even contains a substance that dulls a predator’s sense of smell, making the fleeing octopus harder to track.
- Amazingly an octopus’s testicles are located in its head.
- The amazing fact is that the Giant Pacific Octopus can kill a shark by breaking the shark’s spine with its tentacles.
- All octopuses are venomous, but only the small blue-ringed octopuses are known to be deadly to humans.
- The blue-ringed octopuses are the most venomous creatures on this earth which are found in the Pacific ocean typically found around Australia. They are about 10-100 gm heavy and are typically the size of a golf ball. They have a very powerful muscular neurotoxin.
- The blue-ringed octopuses though small in size have the ability to kill 25 human beings within a few minutes. There is no anti-venom.
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