Important Octopus Facts
At Smithsonian Mag, some octopus knowledge: they’ve been around for almost 300 million years; they have three hearts; the plural is “octopuses” and not “octopi”; 2/3 of their neurons are in their tentacles and not in their heads; they have blue blood; if they do not escape their own toxic, camouflaging ink clouds, they can die; if they don’t die by self-inflicted ink cloud, they will die shortly after mating. Cool stuff about octopus mating:
Multiple males either insert their spermatophores directly into a tubular funnel that the female uses to breathe, or else literally hand her the sperm, which she always accepts with one of her right tentacles (researchers do not know why). Afterwards, males wander off to die. As for the females, they can lay up to 400,000 eggs, which they obsessively guard and tend to. Prioritizing their motherly duties, females stop eating. But she doesn’t starve to death–rather, when the eggs hatch, the female’s body turns on her. Her body undertakes a cascade of cellular suicide, starting from the optic glands and rippling outward through her tissues and organs until she dies.
A cascade of cellular suicide. Multiple males insert their spermatophores directly into a tubular funnel that the female uses to breathe. Jesus Christ. Stay woke on the octopus.