Originally published at: Watch an octopus disguise itself as a rock - Boing Boing
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Contributed by Popkin!
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The octopus is such a master of disguise that it has even made the video invisible.
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No link to video in text and all I see is this:
What fascinates me most about this is not that they can do it, but how they do it. Is it automatic? Do they decide to camouflage or not, and if it is an active decision, when to do it, then what is the mechanism that matches the background? Is that active or passive? Octopodes are intriguingly weird.
And a sip of the brown bubbly stuff to @GagHalfrunt
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Ditto on the video.
And ditto on agreeing how fucking amazing and automatic it is. Also, how as long as they can get their mouth parts through, they can slip through a tiny hole!
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Yeah, no video for me either for some reason. The actual video is at YouTube according to the HTML.
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Thanks for the link. That’s amazing.
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yes, but also:
octopdes are cool!
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… or, that is, it looks like an octopus, and we’ve been trained to believe “aliens” have tentacles
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Psst…they change texture too.
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I remember reading somewhere that octopuses and cuttlefish are colour blind, if that’s true how do they go about matching colours?
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The octopus has such good camoflauge it was able to disguise the video of it as empty content.
Here’s the actual link:
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By the rules of this BBS you owe me a refreshing beverage.
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The thing about octopus camouflage is they can not only match not just the color but also the texture of the thing they’re sitting on, but they also do full-on impersonations. E.g. they’ve been spotted altering their color and texture to match distant clusters of seaweed while sitting on white sand, and then moving their bodies to mimic the way the seaweed sways in the current; they’ve also been seen mimicking the color, pattern, body shape and movement of various fish and venomous animals like jellyfish and sea snakes as they move about in open water. So on some level it’s an active decision, but I’ve also read that octopuses lack the required color vision to do the color matching they accomplish, which suggests there’s some sort of passive element as well, it seems. (Though given how decentralized the octopus nervous system is, I expect the frameworks that we use to describe vertebrate behaviors probably don’t apply.)
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They’re not color blind, but they match colors both within and outside of the spectrum they can discriminate, and no one has a hypothesis on how[1]. A few good labs are currently working on it, though. They also can only see a tiny part of themselves, and don’t get direct feedback from their skin to know what patterns their creating, so completely unknown how they do the pattern matching
Truly wonderful, alien creates
their visual processing is completely different from other animals with no clear spatial or color organization in the optic lobe, so it is also possible that everyone’s still way off on what they can see ↩︎
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Are you sure? However their visual processing works, what I’ve seen says they have just one rhodopsin pigment. They might be able to get some color differentiation by chromatic aberration but that still wouldn’t give them color vision in a normal sense. And color changes don’t have to involve the eyes anyway – it’s apparently been shown to be triggered directly by photoreceptors in the skin. Right now there’s only one rhodopsin known there too, so it doesn’t explain anything, but in theory it could mean that they could match colors without being able to see them at all.
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Almost all cephalopods have a a single opsin, and I don’t know of any published papers showing color selectivity in neurons. This summer I saw a series of talks on cephalopod vision (and my notes are at work so I might be misremembering) but my memory is that in addition to being able to discriminate based luminance and polarization, there were also color-selective neural responses.
You can get color vision from having hue selective filters over photoreceptors with the same opsin (many jumping spiders lack opsins to see their own colors, but can see them using color filters over subsets of the retina). The skin cromatophores could be perfect for color vision through filtering
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