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Monday, April 20, 2009

Octopus with 96 Tentacles!

The better to hold you with, my dear...

This is old news, but fascinating nonetheless. The octopus pictured below has 88 additional tentacles, a rarity, even for a creature as strange as the octopus.


This strange specimen is on permanent display at the Shima Marineland Aquarium in Japan. The octopus actually has 8 arms attached to its body, and the additional 84 tentacles are all extensions of those 8.

The 96-tentacled Common Octopus (Octopus vulgaris) was captured in 1998 in nearby Matoya Bay. It weighed 3.3 kilograms (about 7 lbs) and measured 90 centimeters (3 ft) long. Before dying 5 months after being placed in captivity, the creature laid eggs, making it the first known extra-tentacled octopus to do so in captivity. All the baby octopuses hatched with the normal number of tentacles, but unfortunately they only survived a month.

Currently there is no theory that fully explains the surplus tentacles, although speculation maintains the oddity to be the result of abnormal regeneration that occurred after the octopus suffered some sort of injury.

In the above photo, the 96-tentacled female octopus can be seen laying eggs.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

wow those things can only be founded in a place like this, I mean you have all the information about actopus, tell me something, according to Viagra Online biological center, the size of one those could reach one meter, but there some specimens that excced this size, what is the maximum size until now marked by one of this animals?

Anonymous said...

I was thinking about this the last week and I saw an article in the magazine Buy Viagra symproxis that this could be the result of some kind of mutation because of the contaminated waters in the sea.

Anonymous said...

this is a place for octopuses, not viagra boys.