Cualquier hijo de vecino que no ponga en cuestión su orgullo personal, sabe ante un enemigo mayor, una retirada a tiempo puede ser una victoria. El pulpo es igual de elegante, y de algunas especies se han grabado imágenes con sus espectaculares retiradas, nada menos que "caminando" apoyándose en dos de sus tentáculos...
Emma Young
If you are using your limbs to disguise yourself, how do you flee danger without giving yourself away? The answer, when you have eight arms, is to use six arms for disguise and to walk across on the seafloor on the other two.
That is the extraordinary behaviour observed for the first time in two species of octopus by Christine Huffard's team from the University of California, Berkeley, US.
Defying the notion that bipedal motion requires muscles attached to a rigid skeleton, the octopuses used the strong, flexible muscles in their back arms to walk across the seabed when pursued by camera-wielding biologists.
The two species have slightly different strategies. Octopus marginatus from Indonesia wraps itself into a ball while walking, perhaps to imitate a coconut rolling with the current.
Tiny Octopus aculeatus of Australia holds up six of its arms to disguise itself as a clump of seaweed, while walking at up to 14 centimetres per second - faster than it can manage using more than two arms.
"This camouflage is so good, it's easy to lose sight of the animal," Huffard says. Many other octopus species have back arms that might be strong enough to allow walking, she says.
"I have never ever heard of any behaviour remotely similar to this," says Steve O'Shea, a cephalopod expert at the Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand. "This is yet another example of how little we know about these creatures."
Journal reference: Science (vol 307, p 1927)
If you are using your limbs to disguise yourself, how do you flee danger without giving yourself away? The answer, when you have eight arms, is to use six arms for disguise and to walk across on the seafloor on the other two.
That is the extraordinary behaviour observed for the first time in two species of octopus by Christine Huffard's team from the University of California, Berkeley, US.
Defying the notion that bipedal motion requires muscles attached to a rigid skeleton, the octopuses used the strong, flexible muscles in their back arms to walk across the seabed when pursued by camera-wielding biologists.
The two species have slightly different strategies. Octopus marginatus from Indonesia wraps itself into a ball while walking, perhaps to imitate a coconut rolling with the current.
Tiny Octopus aculeatus of Australia holds up six of its arms to disguise itself as a clump of seaweed, while walking at up to 14 centimetres per second - faster than it can manage using more than two arms.
"This camouflage is so good, it's easy to lose sight of the animal," Huffard says. Many other octopus species have back arms that might be strong enough to allow walking, she says.
"I have never ever heard of any behaviour remotely similar to this," says Steve O'Shea, a cephalopod expert at the Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand. "This is yet another example of how little we know about these creatures."
Journal reference: Science (vol 307, p 1927)
Labels: Características, Comportamiento
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