Odd suckers: A weirdly romantic octopus species

The Associated PressWASHINGTON (AP) — The octopus already is an oddball of the ocean. Now biologists have rediscovered a species of that eight-arm sea creature that’s even stranger and shares some of our social and mating habits.

With their shifting shapes, mesmerizing eyes, and uncanny intelligence, octopuses “are one of the most mysterious and captivating species,” said Rich Ross, a senior biologist at the California Academy of Sciences.

For Ross and colleagues, it got stranger when they got a batch of octopuses from Central America to study. The critters just didn’t fit the loner denizen-of-the-deep profile that scientists had drawn for the rest of the 300 or so octopus species.

While most octopuses live alone, coming together for ever-so-brief and dangerous mating, couples of this species can live together to mate for a few days in the same cramped den or shell.

While other male octopuses mate from a distance to avoid being cannibalized, these octopuses mate entangled beak-to-beak. That style could almost be thought of as romantic, said Alvaro Roura, an octopus expert at La Trobe University in Australia, who wasn’t part of the study.

But it’s more than sex. These octopuses clean out food waste from their dens. And they quickly learn that people mean food: when someone enters the room, they leave their dens and head to the top of the tank.

The octopus, normally a dull chocolate brown, suddenly sports stripes and spots when it gets excited or upset, said Roy Caldwell of the University of California, Berkeley. He is the lead author of a paper on the octopus with Ross and others published last week in the journal PLOS One

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