When the tiny male blanket octopus finds a female it tears off it’s hectocotyus arm and hands it over to the female who keeps it in their mantle cavity until later. One of their 8 arms is a hectocotylus, a sperm delivery arm. Male octopuses of all kinds do not have penises, sorry about that guys. The female weighs around 10,000 times more then a male, the largest sexual dimorphism among any large animal. In blanket octopuses, the female reaches 6 feet in length while the male never surpasses one inch. It is meant to scare off predators and can also be detached to misguide the predator’s attack.Īnd yeah, about male and females. The blanket, the colorful web that gives them their name, is attached to two arms of the female and can be rolled up or unfurled at will. Watch the psychedelic display in the video below and tell me they are not one of most miraculously beautiful animals.
Blanket octopus predators archive#
“But it's no George Clooney, that's for sure.”īrowse the full Absurd Creature of the Week archive here.The blanket octopus or tremoctopus. “So it's not the world's worst male,” says Tregenza. Having fulfilled his purpose, he perishes as the female trucks on, flashing that majestic cape and from time to time taking more lovers. Sadly, things don’t turn out so rosy for the male. "The female blanket octopus will have the male's arm inside her," Tregenza says, "and when she comes to need to fertilize her eggs, she can pull that arm out and squirt the sperm over her eggs like squirting soy sauce onto fried rice." Thus concludes the greatest analogy in the history of science. The male then jets away, though the female isn’t necessarily fertilized just yet. “The arm then breaks off and crawls into the female's mantle cavity.” There, it may even find company: Females can retain the arms of multiple males simultaneously. “The blanket octopus male puts all the sperm its got into a modified arm,” says Tregenza. He’ll be lucky to find a female, but once he does, he leaves his mate something special to remember him by-like, uh, a limb. So the tiny male blanket octopus finds himself floating out there all alone in the vast ocean. Finding females is just so difficult for these males that they evolved to do pretty much nothing but mate, so there’s no need for them to be any bigger than they have to be. The eensy-weensy male bites onto the female and permanently fuses his face to her flesh, releasing sperm whenever she demands it for perhaps decades.
The deep-sea anglerfish has similarly famous sex antics.
Another species of octopus, the argonaut, has tiny males who fertilize giant females (which build a beautiful shell out of calcite to house their young). Interestingly, the blanket octopus’ radical brand of sexual dimorphism is actually more common than you'd think in the open ocean. These are invaluable defenses because unlike their cousins, blanket octopuses don’t ever spend time on the seafloor, and thus don’t have the luxury of crevices to squeeze into for protection. Stretched between the cephalopod’s highly elongated arms are vast sheets of flesh, and when the octopus feels threatened, it splays out its arms to deploy a stunning cloak that maybe, just maybe, will convince an encroaching predator to piss off.Įven if that doesn’t do the trick, the octopus’ arms will break off in its enemy’s mouth, like a lizard losing its tail, hopefully allowing the erstwhile prey to beat a retreat. Bear because I was apparently a painfully uncreative child, my sister had one named Beary because she was a little bit more creative, and Linus from Peanuts had his famous blanket.īut roaming the open oceans is a creature that sports a true security blanket: the so-called blanket octopus. Odds are that as a kid you had what is known as a “security object,” perhaps a stuffed animal or toy that you carried everywhere with you.
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