Octopus vulgaris has individuals of both sexes. During mating, the male approaches the female, who defends him for a while, but then accepts him. He sits next to it or mounts it, inserting the hectocotylus into the mantle cavity to pass the spermatophores. They can copulate for several hours.
Once the octopus reaches adulthood, it will eventually feel like mating. As with most creatures, the octopus's primary purpose in life is to reproduce. However, if you knew what awaited you soon after, you could think twice. Both male and female octopus die soon after mating.
The male dies a few months later, while the female dies soon after the eggs hatch. For octopuses, mating is a rather tenuous matter. Some species have eye-catching mating rituals, but many octopuses seem to be doing business. Unlike women, males have a modified right third arm called hectocotylus, which has a spermatic groove and a specialized tip, Mather said.
To mate, a male will insert his hectocotylus into the cavity of the female's mantle and deposit spermatophores (sperm packets). This process can take several hours, depending on the species. The mating process is very unusual, as males use one of their arms to place a sperm sac in the female's body cavity. The sperm sac can stay inside the female for many months before it produces an egg.
Your body heat is able to keep you alive. There is a large volume of sperm that is given to the female due to the large number of eggs that hatch. But the last days of a female octopus after breeding are rather gloomy, at least for human eyes. Octopuses are semelparous animals, which means they reproduce once and then die.
After a female octopus lays an egg clutch, it stops eating and goes to waste; by the time the eggs hatch, she dies. In the later stages, some captive females even seem to intentionally accelerate along the death spiral, hitting the sides of the tank, tearing off pieces of skin, or eating the tips of their own tentacles. If you're wondering, males don't get off easier. Females often kill and eat their partners; if not, they also die a few months later).
Common male octopuses (Octopus vulgaris), for example, are known to stand up and display several large suction cups on the underside of their tentacles to identify as males, but only if they approach a larger female, who may decide to attack and eat them. Most young octopuses hatch as paralarves and are planktonic for weeks or months, depending on the species and water temperature. Octopuses inhabit several regions of the ocean, including coral reefs, pelagic waters and the seabed; some live in the intertidal zone and others in abyssal depths. Octopuses have an innate immune system; their hemocytes respond to infection by phagocytosis, encapsulation, infiltration, or cytotoxic activities to kill or isolate pathogens.
Octopuses appear in mythology as sea monsters such as the Kraken of Norway and the Akkorokamui of the Ainu, and probably the Gorgon of ancient Greece. In most octopus species, males have an intriguing adaptation; an arm modified to deliver sperm called hectocotylus. On the next page, you'll meet an octopus named Lucretia McEvil and find out if cephalopods live up to their reputation as brains of the invertebrate world. The octopus is bilaterally symmetrical along its dorso-ventral axis (from back to belly); the head and foot are at one end of an elongated body and function as the anterior (front) part of the animal.
Now, a new study by neurobiologists at the University of Chicago uses modern genetic sequencing tools to describe several distinct molecular signals produced by the optic gland after a female octopus reproduces. In the new study, she used the same California two-point octopus to study their strange maternal behaviors. The brown octopus changes its colors to match those of the model species and contors its arms to match particular shapes and shapes. Research shows that the octopus can even decide which particular animal to imitate depending on the predator.
Octopuses offer many possibilities in biological research, including their ability to regenerate limbs, change skin color, behave intelligently with a distributed nervous system, and make use of 168 types of protocadherins (humans have 5, the proteins that guide the connections that make neurons with each other. The study, published in the Journal of Experimental Biology, also details four separate phases of maternal behavior and links them to these signals, suggesting how the optic gland controls the death of the maternal octopus. In 1977, Brandeis University psychologist Jerome Wodinsky showed that if he extracted the optic gland of female two-point Caribbean octopus (Octopus hummelincki), something interesting happened. Octopuses have three hearts; a systemic or main heart that circulates blood through the body and two gill or gill hearts that pump it through each of the two gills.
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