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

/. needs a bio section.

[Anonymous Coward]

Those video clips are the cutest things I've seen.

/., please add a bio category - a lot of interesting stuff happens in this category.

Re:I saw this on the news.

[Nos.]

The point is not to blend in with their surrondings, but to like something uninteresting to whatever they are trying to hide from. A predator that would feast on an octopus would not like pay attention to a piece of seaweed floating by or a coconut bouncing along the sea floor. Speaking of which, if I hadn't read the article, I would not have guessed that those were octopi.

Re:We're not speaking Greek

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, now you're just being a smartass. If you look in a good dictionary, like the Oxford English Dictionary, you see octopodes. Octopi is incorrect, but common, and dictionaries are usually descriptive. Being common doesn't mean it's correct, and here it isn't. End of story.

The original article used "octopuses," which is fine, but then the submitted changed it to "octopi" to make himself look erudite. That is what pisses people like me off - it's not that the Greek is being forgotten, it's that pompous assholes try to show off with fancy classical conjugations but they are completely wrong.

It's almost as irritating as sitting in a class at a 2nd-rate university with a professor who thinks he's an expert but makes mistakes every five minutes during lecture.