The OctoPost: Shark Riders and Venomous Love
As I said recently on Bluesky, I've been on the octopus beat for more than thirty years and I will never leave it, because they still have the power to make me yell EXCUSE ME WHAT. For example…
Cephalopod News
The male blue-lined octopus has a clever trick to avoid being cannibalized by his large and hungry mate: paralyze her with venom.
Though nearly all male octopuses have to worry about being eaten by females, most evolved a different solution. They mate at a distance, using an extra-long or even detachable mating arm. For them, sex is a ranged engagement that avoids melee encounters with a female beak. But blue-lined octopus arms are short, so they’ve evolved a habit of preemptive biting.
Blue-lined octopuses belong to the most venomous group of octopuses, whose potent paralytic tetrodoxin has caused numerous human fatalities. And yet, "None of the females died during copulation, and they fed normally the following day, suggesting resistance to tetrodotoxin." (Blue-lined octopuses live in Australia, so let’s pretend I made a witty reference here to Wesley’s immunity to iocane powder in The Princess Bride.)
A couple of weeks ago, everyone was sending me this footage of a shark-riding octopus (and I loved it—always send me cephalopod stuff, please and thank you). The ocean was not kidding around with this encounter; it’s one of the world’s biggest octopuses (Maori) mounted on one of the world’s fastest sharks (mako).
Hat tip to biology student Yoerick, who wondered about a connection to jelly-riding octopuses and thereby inspired me to draw a comic:
Okay, but really, why did the octopus ride the shark? Aside from setting up a new joke genre*, my best guess is failed predation. Similar to a scene in the documentary My Octopus Teacher, the shark may have tried to eat the octopus, who escaped to the one place the shark’s teeth can’t reach.
From toxin resistance to shark wrangling, octopuses are in it to win it, and I’m not surprised that an octopus won Mollusk of the Year.
My News
While participating in the Seattle Aquaruium’s “Lightning Talks: Ocean Ancients,” I got so enthused arguing that cephalopods are the new dinosaurs I had to be ushered off-screen by a lightning bolt. Watch the recording to see if I made my case, as well as to learn about fossil kelp holdfasts, baby horseshoe crabs, coral reefs, and immortal jellies!
May 7, 3:45pm PT/6:45pm ET: I’ll be talking about "The Hidden World of Baby Animals" with Smithsonian Associates (online, tickets here)
My beloved local bookstore, Books Inc., could use some help as they’re filing Chapter 11 and reorganizing. I’ve been honored to launch numerous books at their Campbell location, and hope to launch many more! You can support them by shopping online for books and gift cards, including signed copies of any of my books.
Funny Pages
My nine-year-old loves red, white, and blue rocket pops. We got to talking about how funny it is that both red and blue are colors of blood. Humans, worms, and a number of other animals have red hemoglobin, while squid, crabs, and many other animals use blue hemocyanin. Then I told him about crocodile icefish, a.k.a. whiteblooded fish. Then I made art.
*Possible answers I’ve come up with so far: “to get to the other tide” and “to sea what it could sea.” Can you think of anything better?