Watch the octopus crawl through a maze of plexiglas tubes—it makes a fellow wish he could get rid of his bones. Hydraulic skeletons rule!
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When I first met Hans Thewissen, he spending an afternoon standing on a table, pointing a camera at a fossil between his feet. He asked me to hold a clip light to get rid of some shadows. I felt like I was at a paleontological fashion shoot.
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Simply said, an octopus is a liquid animal.
Gives streaming a whole new meaning.
Has anyone figured out a way to make those work in Opera?
When the overlords come I want to sign up for their yoga classes.
I've been looking for that video for years!
I saw it online about four years ago, and had never found it since. I think it's the same one; it was part of a longer special about cephalopods, and featured several of those mazes just for the coolness of it. Thanks!
Does anyone know which show exactly it came from, and if it can be purchased?
I always wonder what happens to their brains. Do they ever find something they can just barely manage to get through but that gives them a big headache?
Has anyone figured out a way to make those work in Opera?"
It works fine for me in Opera 9.10 - there are no extensions or additional plug-ins that I'm aware of, just vanilla Opera.
That made me claustrophobic just watching it.
Has anyone figured out a way to make those work in Opera?
Lower Sydney Opera House by a few metres?
That's awesome! I love cephalopods.
Is there a technical name for the suckers? I've been wondering that for *years*.
In what sense do octopuses have "hydraulic skeletons"? I think of them as having no particular "skeleton" at all, just lots of squishy muscle and collagen. Unlike, say, an earthworm, the body of which is supported by internal fluid pressure.
There are about 100 billion neurons in a human brain (though there are estimates as low as 10 billion). An octopus has about 300 million. So that's probably a teaspoon, and not exactly a heaping teaspoon.
This is why humans can't do what this octopus does, I assume...
Fer fucks sake, is there a YouTube version or something that doesn't have a fucking ad at the start, which freezes halfway through and doesn't even show the video?
The video clip is from, unless I'm badly mistaken, a PBS episode of Nature called "The Octopus Show". You can buy it on VHS, but it hasn't been made available in DVD yet. The same episode also has the Seattle Aquarium octopus-eating-a-shark footage.
Beautiful. So, stupid question time: why can't it squeeze through an even smaller hole? What's the limit? Is there some organ that can't be squashed/deformed without causing major problems? I'm guessing the eye...
I'd always heard the beak was the limiting factor.
Incredibly neat animal, incredibly moronic voice-over.
It didn't work for me either, Magnum; it just froze up right after the ad. Not cool, National Geographic!
Having tried again, it worked in an IE tab within Firefox, but not when viewing the page in Firefox itself. Strange.
Why did the octopus cross the road...?
Bob
ROTFL Moggie, thanks for that!!
The video reminds me of my bus ride to work yesterday. Thankfully the snow is melting and I'm back on my bike today...
And I thought my ball python was good at getting through small holes! Octopi rule.
What do octopuses do with this flexibility in their natural environment? Squeeze through rocks and coral?
That's what makes octopi so devilishly hard to keep in their aquaria, or so say the various aquarium-keepers I've chatted with over the years. The critters can find the teeniest, tiniest opening and use it to escape.