Tenticular Gesticulation

OCTOber Ninth: Nine Legs?

What do you think, does this octopode have nine legs? Does that make in a nonopode? The answer after the picture:

As the always-awesome website IFLScience.com reports, this octopus was collected in Puerto Angel, Oaxaca in 2012. Although she clearly has nine limbs, it turns out that two of them are the result of a single bifurcated arm that divided into two branches. This is not uncommon, frequently as the result of injury. (If you didn't know, an octopus will sometime just straight-up detatch an arm in order to escape danger, and then subsequently grow it back.)