Two legs good, eight legs best: five reasons to love octopuses

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/03/eight-legs-best-five-reasons-to-love-octopuses

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“I have always loved octopuses. No sci-fi alien is so startlingly strange,” says naturalist and author Sy Montgomery. Her new book, The Soul of an Octopus (out 21 May, Simon & Schuster £12.99), explores the “emotional and physical world of the octopus – and the remarkable connections this astonishingly complex, spirited creature makes with humans”. Here she gives five compelling reasons for diving in and taking a tentacle.

1 An octopus can recognise you

Keepers have known this for years, but now it’s official. Experiments at Seattle aquarium prove that octopuses can tell individual humans apart – even when the people are dressed identically – just by looking up at them through the water.

Researchers asked one set of people always to feed a group of octopuses when they saw them, and another set of people to only touch each octopus with a bristly stick. Soon, the octopuses learned to approach the feeders and avoid the irritators. Sometimes they’d even squirt water at those people they didn’t like, shooting cold salt water at their faces with their jets. When I would visit my octopus friend, Octavia, at New England aquarium, usually she would look me in the face, flow right over to see me, and flush red with emotion when she took my arms in hers. Often when I’d stroke her she’d turn white beneath my touch, the colour of a relaxed octopus.

2 An octopus can take your photograph

At the Sea Life aquarium in Auckland, New Zealand, Sony technicians working with the aquarium’s animal trainers taught Rambo, a female octopus, to press the shutter on a special camera and take pictures of the visiting public (each photo sells for $NZ2 to support the aquarium’s conservation programmes). It only took Rambo three tries to figure it out – faster than it took me to learn Twitter.

3 Octopuses possess the talents of superheroes

They can fell enemies with venom or escape from them by squirting ink. They can change colour and shape. And even a 45kg octopus can pour its baggy, boneless bodies through an opening the size of an orange.

4 Can’t open that child-proof cap? Hand it to an octopus

Thanks to clever brains and dextrous suckers, they can also open locks, unscrew jars and even untie surgical sutures. Unfortunately, this sometimes gets them into trouble. Octopuses are Houdini-like in their ability to escape their tanks and are known to end up in adjacent tanks where they eat the rightful inhabitants.

5 With eight arms, an octopus can not only give you one heck of a hug, but also 1,600 kisses at the same time

Yes, I know: not everyone would like this. (Naturalist William Beebe admitted the touch of the octopus gave him the creeps.) But I did. To get to know someone so different from myself as an octopus, and to know that the individual recognised me and even enjoyed my company, was an enormous privilege. The octopuses I came to know were strong but gentle and the suction of their suckers tasting my skin pulled me like an alien’s kiss.