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Octopus study finds sex, lies and murder |
 A recent study by UC Berkeley marine biologists Roy Caldwell
and
Christine Huffard found that octopuses* have complex sex
lives. Males scope out the largest female because she has the
most eggs. Once they've chosen the love of their life they guard her
fiercely from other males by fighting and sometimes strangling
competitors to death. Weaker competitors sometimes try to
sneak through the defenses by disguising themselves as females.
And get this... if a competitor makes it through
the arms of defense and deposits his sperm in a female then the
guarding male may reach in and pull the sperm out of the female.
The female lays tens of
thousands of eggs and stays in a den to protect them and keep them
clean
until they hatch. But the kids don't get a chance to know mom
and dad. Mother and father
die a few months after mating. The life span of an octopus is
about a year. It's unclear to researchers whether octopus
behavior is instinctual or learned. Studying octopuses is
hard. "They're obsessively secretive, solitary and pretty
spooky," Caldwell
said. "If you watch them, they watch you back. It's hard to study them.
This is the first study to show a level of sophistication not
previously known in the sexual behavior of an octopus."
*Side note: I always thought that the stuffy fussy pinky
curled proper plural for octopus was "octopi". It turns out
that this is not the case because octopus comes from Greek rather than
Latin. Here's what the authoritative Oxford English Dictionary
says on the subject:
"Although it is often supposed that octopi is the 'correct' plural of
octopus, and it has been in use for longer than the usual Anglicized
plural octopuses, it in fact originates as an error. Octopus is not a simple Latin word of
the second declension, but a Latinized form of the Greek word oktopous, and its 'correct' plural would
logically be octopodes."
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