I've always had a serious fascination with marine life, especially the octopus. They are strange and stretchy and can be tiny or huge. Because of my love for aquatic creatures and swimming I decided to take scuba diving lessons in college. It was probably one of the most fun and rewarding experiences ever. Completing the course and getting my license actually felt like receiving an invitation to another planet. Although most of the time we sat on the bottom of the SC pool trying to make our ears pop we did get to take a few trips into the sea for our final test. We went to Rockport, Mass (where Mermaids was filmed. No big deal.) at the end of November, and jumped into the water in the middle of a blizzard. You could only see about a foot in front of you and we had to hold on to each others fins, but we still managed to find grouper, lobster and flounder. Once we were out of the water and warming up our instructor, Day, told us an amazing story about an octopus that made friends with a scuba diver. The diver would frequent the octopus' hang out and one day when the diver came to visit the octopus wrapped her tentacle around her arm and pulled her along the ocean floor. They finally stopped at a long pipe and the octopus released her; the diver looked inside the pipe and there was another octopus tangled in some plastic. The diver helped him out of the snarl and the two octopuses went about their business! How's that.
I read this article by Sy Mongomery in Orion magazine recently which reminded me of that story. The article talks about how incredibly smart octopuses are and the ways in which scientists measure their intelligence. I love this part about an octopus' neurons:
The common octopus has about 130 million of them in its brain. A human has 100 billion. But this is where things get weird. Three-fifths of an octopus’s neurons are not in the brain; they’re in its arms.“It is as if each arm has a mind of its own,” says Peter Godfrey-Smith, a diver, professor of philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and an admirer of octopuses. For example, researchers who cut off an octopus’s arm (which the octopus can regrow) discovered that not only does the arm crawl away on its own, but if the arm meets a food item, it seizes it—and tries to pass it to where the mouth would be if the arm were still connected to its body.
wild in the wild.
If you are now insanely curious about octopuses I encourage you to read the whole article above and to check out this whacky video of an octopus "walking" on land!
In celebration of the octopus and to serve as a constant reminder of their intelligence I'm on the hunt for a beautiful octopus print, I quittte like this one from etsy.
Top photo from National Geographic
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