Octopuses are found in every ocean in the world and on every coast of the United States. Octopuses live in coastal marine waters and spend much of their time in dens, small holes and crevices in rocks and corals. They are usually solitary and territorial. 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.
A Battle with an Octopus appears in Victor Hugo's book Toilers of the Sea, inspiring other works such as Octopussy by Ian Fleming. Octopuses appear in Japanese erotic art, Shunga. Humans eat them and consider them a delicacy in many parts of the world, especially in the Mediterranean and Asian seas. Like Fox Mulder, I want to believe.
Octopuses, squid and cuttlefish are real aliens to us. No other intelligent animal is so far from us in the tree of life. They show us that the intelligence of a large brain is not a single event, because it evolved independently, at least twice, first among vertebrates and then again among invertebrates. There are about 300 species of octopus and they are found in all oceans.
Most live on the seabed, but some, such as the paper nautilus, approach the surface. Octopuses feed mainly on crabs, shrimps and molluscs. Fowler's use of Modern English states that the only plural acceptable in English is octopus, that octopuses are ill-conceived and octopuses are pedantic; however, the latter is used often enough to be recognized by the descriptivist Merriam-Webster 11th Collegiate Dictionary and Webster's New World Dictionary university. Connected to the brain are two organs called statocysts (sac-like structures that contain a mineralized mass and sensitive hairs), which allow the octopus to sense the orientation of its body.
While it contained many surprises, a relevant finding was that the genes of the octopus nervous system separated from those of squid only about 135 million years ago, long after the Cambrian explosion. In addition to their intelligence, personalities and complex biology, some octopuses seem to exhibit otherworldly powers. Octopus sometimes catches more prey than it can eat, and the den is often surrounded by a dump of dead and uneaten food. It collects a spermatophore from its spermatophore sac with the hectocotylus, inserts it into the cavity of the female's mantle and deposits it in the correct place for the species, which in the giant Pacific octopus is the opening of the oviduct.
Another explanation, they propose, could be that an extraterrestrial virus infected a population of primitive squid, causing them to evolve rapidly into octopus as we know them today. The document suggests that cryopreserved eggs of squid or octopus could have reached frozen racing cars several hundred million years ago, and points out that these creatures seem to have some evidence of pre-existence. The giant Pacific octopus, one of the two largest species of octopus, can live up to five years. But despite its complexity (and therefore a higher probability of mutation), octopus DNA has changed very little compared to the rate of change in other animals.
Other octopuses have been reported to spit out jets of water to turn off the aquarium lights that bothered them and even sneaked into other tanks for a midnight snack. Transforming genes that lead from consensus ancestral nautilus to common cuttlefish, squid and common octopus, cannot be found in any pre-existing life form, authors say. Octopuses can create distracting patterns with dark colored waves all over their bodies, a display known as a passing cloud. The octopus's arms can move and perceive autonomously to a large extent without the intervention of the animal's central nervous system.
The reproductive organs of the octopus mature due to the hormonal influence of the optic gland, but cause the inactivation of its digestive glands. But the octopus's nervous system is still so little understood that we can't yet compare its brain organization with ours and guess how similar it could be in its algorithms and car models. . .
