Video: Sexy Octopus French Film

Ok, maybe the title was a bit misleading, but not too far off the mark. The video below is a scene from "Going Beneath the Surface Yo La Tengo: The Sounds of Science" by French filmmaker/inventor/scientist, Jean Painleve. Painleve narrates the video (which is in French) in a way that sounds, well, sexy. Go ahead and watch. You'll see what I mean...

Sexual Cannibalism Documented Among Cyanea Octopuses

From: Informaworld.com, March 2008

Written By: Roger T. Hanlon and John W. Forsythe

Sexual cannibalism is rare in the animal kingdom. Although cannibalism is not uncommon in cephalopods, here we report the first documented case of sexual cannibalism. A large female Octopus cyanea was observed continuously for 2.5 days in Palau, Micronesia, when she was out of her den. On the second day, a small male followed and mated her 13 times during 3.5 hours while she continued to forage over 70 m distance. After the 12th mating, she aggressively chased a different small octopus that barely escaped by jetting, inking and swimming upwards. Shortly thereafter, the original small male mated her a 13th time, but subsequently she attacked and suffocated him and spent 2 days cannibalizing him in her den. This sort of intraspecific aggression helps to explain several reports of octopuses mating out in the open, a behaviour that may serve to allow the smaller mate to escape cannibalism.

Talk about a "maneater"!

Species: Cyanea Octopus, Part II

Here are more fascinating facts about the Cyanea Octopus:

• Unlike most octopuses, the Cyanea Octopus feeds during daylight hours. Its prey includes fish, crabs, shrimp and bivalve mollusks such as clams, oysters, and scallops.
  
  
• Camouflage is not only a handy tool for the Cyanea Octopus, it is also a necessary survival tool, as this octopus is preyed upon by sharks, moray eels, and Hawaiian monk seals.
  
  
• Courtship behavior of the Day octopus begins as the male displays coloring of dark brown with white spots and slowly approaches the female, who is typically in full camouflage. Males have a long modified third right arm that they hold in an upright coiled position and wave toward the female. If the female is receptive to the signaling male, he inserts his arm into the female's oviducts to pass spermatophores from arm's length.
  
  
• The male may keep his distance to avoid the risk of being eaten by the female, a behavior that has been observed in the wild after mating.
  
  
• Female Cyanea Otopuses lay their eggs strategically in a hard-to-reach space within their lairs. Once the eggs hatch into planktonic juveniles, they feed on zooplankton during the early stages of development.
  
  

Octopus Sex More Sophisticated Than Arm-Wrestling, Part II

From Berkeley.edu

Written by Yasmin Anwar

Caldwell said most of what we know about octopuses comes from laboratory observations of just a few species that are summarized in books such as "Cephalopod Behavior" by Roger Hanlon and John Messenger (Cambridge University Press, 1996).

Because they are such bashful sea creatures, octopuses' mating rituals have been hard to get a handle on. "They're obsessively secretive, solitary and pretty spooky," Caldwell said. "If you watch them, they watch you back. It's hard to study them."

So, when UC Berkeley graduate Christine Huffard, now a postdoctoral fellow at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in Moss Landing, Calif., discovered a thriving community of Abdopus aculeatus while doing her Ph.D. fieldwork in Sulawesi, she was overjoyed.

(Above) A male octopus's hectocotylus, or mating arm, (with pink lining) is inserted into the female's mantle.

"Each day in the water, we learned something new about octopus behavior, probably like what ornithologists must have gone through after the invention of binoculars," said Huffard, the study's lead author. "We quickly realized that Abdopus aculeatus broke all the 'rules' — doing the near opposite of every hypothesis we'd formed based on aquarium studies."

There are nearly 300 species of octopus in the world, ranging from the giant octopus in the Pacific Ocean to the tiny Octopus wolfi in the tropics. Mating is literally an octopus's life's work and can take place several times a day once the animal reaches sexual maturity. It usually begins with the male octopus poking the female with his long, flexible, hectocotylus arm and then slipping it into her mantle cavity.

Once the sperm packet has been deposited, the female retires to her den and lays tens of thousands of eggs, which she weaves into strings and attaches to the roof of her underwater dwelling. She keeps the eggs clean by blowing jets of water on them and is unable to leave her den to forage for food during this time. After about a month, the eggs hatch and the weakened mother octopus dies. The father also dies within a few months of mating, leaving the newborns to fend for themselves.

"It's not the sex that leads to death, Huffard said. It's just that octopuses produce offspring once during a very short lifespan of a year. And as the research team discovered, that once-in-a-lifetime lovemaking session is much more than just arm wrestling.

"This is the first study to show a level of sophistication not previously known in the sexual behavior of an octopus," Caldwell said. "We got it wrong before, and what this tells us is that we need to do a lot more fieldwork."

Octopus Sex More Sophisticated Than Arm-Wrestling, Part I

From Berkeley.edu

Written by Yasmin Anwar

For decades, scientists have viewed octopuses as unromantic loners, with mating habits nearly devoid of complex behavior. But new research from the University of California, Berkeley, has found that at least one species of octopus engages in such sophisticated lovemaking tactics as flirting, passionate handholding and keeping rivals at arms' length.

(Above) A grey male octopus mates with a female.

For the UC Berkeley study, recently published in the journalMarine Biology, biologists witnessed an array of complex mating behaviors as they snorkeled two meters or less above the shallow reefs of northern Sulawesi in Indonesia. For several weeks, they trackedOctopus Abdopus aculeatus, a diurnal species of cephalopod that typically sports a spiky tan body the size of a small orange and 8-to-10-inch-long sucker-lined arms.

"This is not a unique species of octopus, which suggests others behave this way," said Roy Caldwell, a professor of integrative biology at UC Berkeley and co-author of the study.

In the wild, researchers observed macho octopuses that didn't just mate with the first female that crossed their path. Many picked out a specific sex partner and jealously guarded her den for several days, warding off rivals to the point of strangling them if they got too close. When flirting or fighting, they would signal their manliness by displaying striped body patterns.

Researchers also saw small "sneaker" males that moved in on unsuspecting conquests by masquerading as females. They did this by swimming low to the ground in feminine fashion and not displaying their "male" brown stripe. Plus, for the males, size really mattered: "If you're going to spend time guarding a female, you want to go for the biggest female you can find because she's going to produce more eggs," Caldwell said. "It's basically an investment strategy."