Wily Octopi Walk on Two Arms

lousyd writes "Offering hope for new forms of ambulatory robots, biologist Christine L. Huffard, at UC Berkeley, has caught individual octopi sneaking away from predators by using two of their arms as legs. They use the other six arms to make themselves look like coconuts or algae. The research is being done as part of a project on robotics. This reminds me of the Far Side cartoon where the cows drop to all fours when humans come around, but resume standing on two legs otherwise." And I for one welcome our new mollusk overlords.

Comments

Re:I saw this on the news.

[BWJones]

Mind you, a large clump of reddish flesh walking along a sandy seabed with greenish water as a background is not what I would call camoflauged.

Ah, but you need to understand the properties of color in sea water. There is considerable color filtering of light as it passes down through the column of water rendering red objects as dark olive or dark colored objects. Blue light penetrates very well as do certain wavelengths of green (why the Navy is so keen on blue and blue/green lasers). Most of the pictures you see of organisms in the ocean are with artificial light rendering them as they would appear to our eyes on the surface.

One other point: Our eyes are fairly poor at discriminating colors compared with most fish. We only have three color channels with which to process color, whereas many fish have four, five, six or more channels to see a much richer world than we could ever appreciate.

This link actually works!

[Frodo Crockett]

Obligatory Far Side cartoon