The more scientists explore the natural world, the more they realize that they have so much more to learn. An octopus’ tentacles are equipped with more intriguing senses than researchers thought, as a new article from The New York Times suggests.
There are situations when an octopus cannot see the light with its eyes, and that’s another way the tentacles kick in. The eight arms of the magnificent marine creatures have a way of understanding the presence of light.
No bones and no joints
Dr. Nir Nesher, a member of the new study and also a senior lecturer in marine sciences from the Ruppin Academic Center in Israel, declared:
In the octopus, you have no bones and no joints, and every point in its arm can go to every direction that you can think about,
So even one arm, it’s something like endless degrees of freedom.
The ability to detect light with the tentacles could be helping the octopuses to keep their arms concealed from dangerous animals that may be up for a snack.
While light causes the ocopus’s skin to change colour, one of the study’s authors studied the phenomenon, and he first observed the light-detecting powers. The researchers later saw that the shinning light from an arm caused the marine animal to withdraw it.
Whether the scientists want to admit it or not, how exactly an octopus’s arm avoids light is a significant challenge. Dr. Nesher also added:
But it’s always like this in the octopus,
You see very weird or very interesting phenomena, and then you say, ‘Oh, nobody looked at this before.’
The new study was published in The Journal of Experimental Biology.
