Tenticular Gesticulation

Being a blog about my inexplicable fascination with octopodes

NOTE: I am not a marine biologist, I am just an idiot with a blog


The More You Know

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Hand-hand-hand-hand-hand-hand-hand-hand-eye coordination

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NeuroDojo has a really cool article about a study that was done in to see if octopodes could integrate sight and touch. It's true that octopodes are smart, but they are smart in a very non-human kind of way.

Many (most?) vertebrates like us humans have brains that work (in part) by creating motor memory maps.It's the thing that let's you execute complex tasks like riding a bicycle, where once you learn the task it becomes second nature without requiring conscious thought. Invertabrates like the octopus, however, quite literally don't think like that.


OctoPorn

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Bow chicka bow wow! BBC Earth very helpfully put together an infographic to show exactly how octopodes do it. I am certain that if an octopus where to watch humans, their response would also be "You put your what where...?"


For OCTOber Third: Three Hearts

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In honer of OCTOber 3rd: Did you know that octopodes have three hearts? It's true!  They have two branchial hearts, one each for their two gills. Being molluscs, the gills are fully vascuralized and so each gill gets its own individualized heart. Then there is a third  systemic heart that pumps blood to the rest of the body.  Interestingly, octopus blood is rich in hemocyanin (a copper-rich protien) that is is dissolved in the blood plasma, as opposed to vertabrates which have hemoglobin (an iron-rich protien) that is carried in the red blood cells. Hemocyanin is much more efficient at transporting oxygen in cold conditions with low oxygen pressure.

 


A ???? of Octopodes

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A pride of lions. A school of fish. A parliament of owls. A murder of crows. An incompetence of politicians. It seems like every group has a special name. So what do you call a group of octopodes?

Turns out, that's a trick question. The octopus is a solitary creature, and will even resort to murder and cannibalism if another octopus enters its domain. Even mating is a dicey situation (and ain't that often the truth in general?)  At most you might see "a couple of octopodes" or "a pair of octopodes". which will very likely coincide with "a flurry of tentacles" and/or "a cloud of ink". 

So it turns out that it is not just an oversight that there is no group name for octopodes; as they say in my day job, "it's a feature, not a bug."


Octopuses Octopi Octopodes

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Why 'Octopodes' (ahk·TOP·uh·deez)?

First things first - if you run on down to your local aquarium, or go scuba diving in the right places, and you see several eight-legged cephalopods hanging out together, you would be perfectly correct to call them octopuses. As weird and incorrect as it may sound, that is indeed the commonly accepted and proper pluralization of octopus. Discregarding the root language, that pluralization follows normal English rules (for varying definitions of "normal", which have only a passing intersection with the English language.)

If, on the other hand, you decide to call them octopi, well, you're wrong. Seriously, you are just wrong. I mean, nobody is going to send you to prison or anything, but you are likely to be assaulted by any passing Grammar Nazi. What makes octopi so horribly wrong? It's because pluralising by changing 'us' to 'i' is a Latin grammatical rule, whereas octopus comes from a Greek root.

The scientific Latin term octopus was derived from Ancient Greek ὀκτώπους (oktōpous), which literally translates to "eight-foot" (ὀκτώ "eight" + πούς "foot").

- Source: Wikipedia (If I read it on the internet, it must be true.)

Because it comes from a Greek root, the grammatically proper way to pluralize octopus is octopodes. Being Greek, it is also not pronounced in three syllables like AHK·tuh·PŌDZ but rather in four syllables like ahk·TOP·uh·deez. (Speaking of Grammar Nazis, I am neither a grammarian nor an English teacher. Feel free to send me hate mail regarding my incorrect phonetic spellings. I'll ignore it, but by all means send it if it makes you feel better.)

I will readily admit that octopodes is not frequently used, and I may sound pretentious in preferring it over octopuses, but there you have it. To my ear it sounds so much more delightful and alien, as befits the weird and wonderful beings to which it applies.

Here's an editor from Merriam-Webster explaining the whole thing: