Monday, October 31, 2011

Octopus's Garden

This is the most interesting article I've ever read about the octopus.

An excerpt:

Three-fifths of an octopus’s neurons are not in the brain; they’re in its arms.
“It is as if each arm has a mind of its own,” says Peter Godfrey-Smith, a diver, professor of philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and an admirer of octopuses. For example, researchers who cut off an octopus’s arm (which the octopus can regrow) discovered that not only does the arm crawl away on its own, but if the arm meets a food item, it seizes it—and tries to pass it to where the mouth would be if the arm were still connected to its body.

2 comments:

HYDRIOTAPHIA said...

They are fascinating creatures which can squeeze through the smallest of spaces, express emotion through colour and also have 3 hearts. Wasn't 'Octopus's Garden' sung by Ringo of 'Abbey Road'?

Nick said...

That's right, it's on Abbey Road. Ringo even wrote that song, one of just two he wrote for the Beatles.