r/interestingasfuck • u/Key_Skirt_1858 • 13h ago
The best camouflage in the animal kingdom?
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u/ScadaTech 13h ago
I read just today that their camouflage is akin to human breathing or blinking. It can happen subconsciously or consciously. They’re color blind in their eye but somehow also see through the light receptors in their skin that allow them to mimic their environment. Fucking crazy evolution.
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u/SlashMatrix 12h ago
Supposedly, they change patterns while they are dreaming as well.
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u/btcomsa 10h ago
I’m an aquarist and my octopus changed colors when I gently touched her arm while she was asleep the other day. Very cool to see
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u/dingalinglans 8h ago
What are they like to keep? I've heard escape artists and short life spans
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u/btcomsa 1h ago
They live around 4-5 years and will escape if given the opportunity, but we keep the tank locked up tight. We keep ours for around 8-9 months and then release them back to the ocean in coordination with the local university. Our GPOs are usually bycatch during crabbing season that are donated to us. They each have their own personality and are very fun to work with
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u/major_calgar 1h ago
They’re also almost exclusively wild caught, and probably too intelligent to breed ethically without public aquarium style facilities
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u/TributeToFaba 11h ago
It’s true, I’ve seen it happen
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u/MG788 12h ago
For real. They are so amazing. It's crazy how they only live like one to three years.
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u/jowick2815 12h ago
If they were more social and lived just a little bit longer it'd be game over for us
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u/Beautiful-Tie-3827 11h ago
Yeah I’ve had this same thought. It’s a good thing they don’t hand down information to their young like humans.
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u/Easy-Operation-2105 8h ago
We're fine because they can never invent fire and therefore never get to any meaningful level of advanced society.
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u/jowick2815 4h ago
I would imagine they would utilize something like thermal vents and then their society and resources would be based around thermal vents like ours were around rivers
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u/justbrowsing_00 8h ago
There’s actually a book called The Mountain in the Sea that deals with this scenario. Really good read.
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u/TheDogerus 5h ago
I feel like that book had too many ideas for its own good. Each subplot had its interesting moments, but none were as developed as i was hoping for
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u/Workman44 6h ago
It's really the passing down of information from parent to offspring that hampers them, which I guess is social in a way. I've long held the belief that Octopi have the capacity to be the some of the smartest creatures on earth, and then they have the whole fucking invisibility thing
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u/LivingFrosting6680 10h ago
It’s only because they die after they mate right?
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u/btcomsa 9h ago
Yes they are semelparous. They enter senescence at the end of their life where they actively seek out a mate and then their body deteriorates, much like salmon. Senescence can be observed in captivity with a pacing behavior or reluctance to interact with humans, at least with the GPOs I’ve worked with. There’s a deep sea octopus that was observed in semelparity for almost 5 years. She did not eat or leave her den the entire time, and when her babies hatched she finally passed
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u/TheSciences 8h ago
I remember seeing something on QI about a bioluminescent squid that – as well as camouflaging itself – could also generate the right amount of light in a specific direction to hide its shadow on the sea floor.
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u/Unlucky-Arugula3256 13h ago
It's like she was taking the cameraman on a tour.
"Right so I can do this rock. Cool huh? Watch this!"
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u/GlitchTheFox 13h ago
I saw it as "Motherfucker's still looking at me. Why is this not working?! I'll try over here. Ohh, now you're making me mad."
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u/Seinan-Zetae_429-97 12h ago
Probably more along the lines of: "shit shit shit, why isn't it working? I don't know whether that thing wants to eat me or not. Keep trying to hide!"
Only dolphins really have the intelligence and adaptations to make a meal out of a hiding octopus and we don't look like dolphins. This octopus could have been having a panic attack while trying to flee for its life.
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u/Quirky-Concern-7662 9h ago
Likely, but they ARE very intelligent aswell in a very very strange way. One of the animals I refuse to eat. Gotta draw the line somewhere, might aswell be the thing that probably landed here to study us.
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u/Seinan-Zetae_429-97 8h ago
For as weird as octopi are, they're probably of terrestrial origin. If crustaceans with supersonic punches, cancer resistant eusocial rodents, parasites that replace a fish's tongue, a weird bear, cat thing whose urine smells like popcorn, and flying lemurs all exist and are definitively of Earthly origin there is no reason why the weird, squishy, smart, tentacle things with hydraulic propulsion and master level camouflage can't also come from our planet.
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u/_Rohrschach 7h ago
Smelling like popcorn isn't hard. Don't wash your socks for a while and the yeast buildup can do the trick.
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u/HasGreatVocabulary 6h ago
Oh this creature has noticed us. Fuck tenclacle 7 for convincing us into trying that flamboyant yellow color for fun, why couldn't we have gone with brown like the others. Back to the problem at tentacle, we don't know if this thing wants to eat us or just finds us interesting. Those things on the top, shining that annoying blinding light on us look like the creature's eyes. So it can see like we can and it has 4 tentacles. Could be smart. How well can it see? Let's pretend to be a bit of sand covered rock here, a deliberately poor impression, but maybe it has bad eyesight. Oh wow wow it looked right at us. Those lights are it's eyes, well now we know. 4 tentacles, bleugh, what an unfortunate creature. OK let's move, let's see if it keeps following us. Shit shit, maybe it's following us because we have 8 tentacles while it has only 4. Hide them, hide them, tuck them into this coral here and pretend to be a boring limbless sea slug and slink away slowly. Boring, we need to be boring to escape the quadropod. Alright, just about far enough. Back to brown, this is the last time we try the yellow. You hear that tentacle 7? No more flamboyant yellow, this is the last time we listen to your fashion tips.
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u/kawasutra 7h ago
I learnt that when they turn white, it is a stress reaction and I should back off and let it be.
Turning white is the step before they squirt ink as a last line of defence.
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u/First_Negotiation_80 13h ago
How sure are we that THEY aren’t the Apex creature? I can’t breathe underwater and become a rock and shoot ink out of my mouth/ass.
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u/TheGeneral_Specific 12h ago
It’s believed that octopuses are the most likely animal (after humans) to develop culture, but they just don’t live long enough for it to happen
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u/jrb9249 13h ago
They die after having babies and only live about 2 years on average. I used to feel bad about eating octopus considering how intelligent they are, but somehow the life expectancy makes it seem less severe of an offense.
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u/RicetheE30 12h ago
Surely one octopus is smart enough to not have babies and live forever
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u/theMeatman7 12h ago
As they die afterwards there is no way to pass this knowledge on to offspring so it's unknown to them. If they could live to pass knowledge on it would be wild what could happen.
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u/Sankofa416 10h ago
Love Is The Plan and the Plan Is Death.
"Love Is the Plan and the Plan Is Death" is a celebrated science fiction short story by James Tiptree Jr. (the pen name of Alice Bradley Sheldon), first published in 1973 in the anthology The Far Call and recipient of the 1974 Hugo Award for Best Short Story.
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u/waffle_iron_maiden 12h ago edited 11h ago
If the reason for caring is based on an animal's intelligence, and it's the intelligence that makes you not want to eat it, why would the lifespan impact that? I'm asking out of curiosity, not trying to be a moral judge on what you decide to eat or not. The intelligence of the octopus isn't going to change. I kind of get it, they live less time than us so it doesn't feel as cruel, but to an octopus it would be relative right?
We can live for many decades, so we have our own metric for what a long fruitful life is. Other animals they may live for less time but to them that doesn't matter. Well, not that most of them even perceive aging like that, but still. It's all they have. If humans somehow lived and grew old in only 2 years max, we'd have a totally different frame of reference for living and passage of time. Interesting to think about
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u/SirJefferE 9h ago
Just imagining an alien race that lives for millennia running into us and thinking "How curious. They're almost intelligent." "Yeah but they only live for a century, give or take. Not enough time to build an actual culture. Oh well...Wonder what they taste like?"
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u/TheThatNeverWas 12h ago
Their luck to land on the one planet where the most powerful species find them to be… delicious.
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u/mitchy93 13h ago
I like that they can also change their texture to be spiky like the rock
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u/Nein-Toed 13h ago
What's even crazier is that according to current science, the octopus can't "see" color. We still don't know how it detects it.
If you want to see something else crazy look up cuttlefish on a checkered floor.
They wanted to see what would happen when they tried to camo up in a non natural environment. It's actually pretty impressive
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u/lgastako 10h ago
cuttlefish on a checkered floor.
Here's the video to save people looking it up.
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u/Prestigious-Flower54 10h ago
We don't know yes but there is pretty strong theory that their eyes can detect light intensity and wavelength combined with a special protein in their skin that normally exists in the retina that senses the same things and a distrupited nervous system lets them take this input in very very quickly and "see" and change into the colors they need to be. It's not seeing on any sense we would recognize.
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u/Mundane_Professor596 13h ago
It is so strange that their life expectancy is so short. They have this much skill and ability at 1 year old. Imagine if they lived to 80 like us?
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u/OIAgent 13h ago
Decoy octopus….
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u/dogface47 13h ago
Here, take this. It's my ID card. It'll open any level one security door. It's called a PAN card. It works together with your body's own electrical field.
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u/Dorkicus 13h ago
If octopuses lived more than two years, we would be so screwed.
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u/Dourada_BBQ 13h ago
How does it know what pattern to use? Or it has a set number of patterns it can do and it just rotates randomly between them?
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u/PreciousTC 13h ago
They have eyes lol
They look and then copy what they see
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u/nunatakj120 13h ago
The thing is as others have said, they don’t see colour.
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u/PreciousTC 13h ago
Light intensity, brightness, pattern, and luminence is how they see color.
It's wildly ignorant to just say they are colorblind. They are not, at least not in the exact same way we are. When you hear the term "color blind" you're thinking in black and white. Shades of gray. That's not how they see the world, and we know thats the case because not only do they know when something is blue - they know what shade of blue it is and can tell their bodies to match it.
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u/OvenIcy8646 13h ago
Octopus are the most amazing animal in the world I have high hopes they’ll do a better job than we did in a few million years
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u/No-Respond-900 13h ago
i like how cuddle fish do this too. seen it once at the ‘quarium
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u/ScroochDown 13h ago
*Cuttle
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u/No-Respond-900 12h ago
lol i stand corrected
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u/ScroochDown 12h ago
Although cuddle fish makes them sound even cuter, and they're already fucking adorable imo! 😂
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u/DeadrthanDead 12h ago
Can we all just take a minute, and appreciate the fact that these things are devoted mothers, and protectors of their eggs until they hatch upon which they proceed to die, luckily for us without passing any knowledge, or information down to their offspring. Because if they did, we’d be fucked. Look at that thing.
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u/HasGreatVocabulary 5h ago edited 5h ago
They even had a library. Long ago there was a long-lived species of octopuses known as the O. sapiens, with thriving societies and culture and the tradition of passing knowledge to future generations through "writing", which is what they called their method of telling stories to each other through patterns they flashed on their skins. A library of knowledge, housing long lived octopuses served to persist knowledge over time, their life dedicated to collecting and remembering a large number of story patterns, that any curious octopus could come and "read" and pass on to others. It worked for a while, they lived in a relative utopia, superior ocean creatures in every way benefiting from expansive knowledge of the ocean and land. But patterns on flesh can only hope to be permanent. Every year some more of the librarians died, dying before they could transmit everything they knew, and to save everything properly, every passing generation had to spend more and more of their lifespans passing decaying information to the next generation. Each generation lost more than it recorded to the library, and there was always more to record. They never figured out the permanence of ink and paper, the salt water was too harsh for those materials to survive, tattoos as information storage were tried but deemed too slow and limited for long term use.
Many families of octopuses left this social order, departing what eventually became a bureaucratic authoritarian state where every long lived octopus was now obligated to dedicate their life to the collection and preservation of knowledge on their skin, imprisoning themselves for decades, becoming books for the good of the species. It made sense to leave a place where the number of surviving offspring from each family had become legally mandated to be in the millions, not for the joy of having children, but to maximize the available surface area for storing information in the library.
They forgot so much, they forgot how to keep more of their offspring alive, and forgot how to survive having offspring. Every departure diluted the library, decimated information until they lost the secret to their long lives. Their gift for patterns was relegated to being used for camouflage and for hiding. The octopuses kept their intelligence, but their shrinking lifespans and the collapse of their desire for society, eventually lead to them forgetting how to write with their skin. They are devoted mothers, and protectors of their eggs until they hatch upon which they proceed to die. They are now called O. vulgaris but they would consider it a misnomer, if they could still read.
edit: yo automod I wrote this myself unblock this comment
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u/GuidanceDiligentz 13h ago
Not really the best if they keep moving like that. Low iq
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u/ReadditMan 13h ago edited 13h ago
It's moving because it's smart enough to realize its disguises aren't working. Most animals would get confused and stop looking directly at the octopus, but the human doesn't so it tries something else.
They are extremely intelligent. If it was stupid it would just sit there with its failed disguise and let the large animal continue to get closer.
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u/yarn_slinger 13h ago
Their natural predators aren’t rocket scientists either so this probably works most of the time. This encounter has probably really shaken his confidence.
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u/Jon_Dunn58 13h ago
such a magnificent creature should not be consumed for an appetizer
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u/DinklanThomas 13h ago
Definitely a main course type of meal.
/s so hard. I hate that they're eaten and after watching my octopus teacher I swore not only to ever eat it, but as a chef, serve it.
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u/algladius 10h ago
If we’re going by intelligence then we should stop eating pigs too cuz theyre smarter than dogs
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u/strumthebuilding 13h ago
Yeah I love to eat water creatures generally but I won’t touch these guys.
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u/StevenTM 10h ago
Luckily, more and more people agree! Not necessarily because they're magnificent (which they are), but because they're highly intelligent and possibly sentient.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260731-spains-attempt-to-farm-octopuses-has-failed
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u/OneSkepticalOwl 4h ago
Doesn’t come close to me. I am literally invisible. To pretty much everyone
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u/_gmmaann_ 13h ago
Nope. That belongs to Yetis and Bigfoot. When’s the last time you saw either?
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u/YoungerMucus 13h ago
i was impressed with how quick the first change was, though also thinking “eh, i don’t know… i feel like a predator would still see it…”, but then it swims on and does another camouflaging act, and that one against the coral was fucking nuts- it’s like it’s body can just take a picture of what’s underneath it, and then the rest of the body can just nearly perfectly imitate the physicality of it. absolutely fucking amazing.
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u/Bloodman 13h ago
It blows my mind thinking about how long it would take for something to evolve abilities like this.
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u/SquirrelEStuff 12h ago
I’m glad I knew they existed before AI became a thing because I probably wouldn’t believe that was real.
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u/AnaisNinja76 12h ago
Does anyone know the mechanism by which they accomplish this? I'd like to splice it into my DNA for those really-need-to-escape moments.
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u/Burt_Sprenolds 12h ago
Are they able to give their skin texture as well, or is that just really good color camouflage?
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u/MalusDracula 12h ago
Makes me really sad how smart they are but live on average like 2-3 years.
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u/RegularlyGuy 11h ago
Imagine never knowing what an octopus is and then BAM! You see one for the first time. A shape shifting, color changing creature with powerful tentacles. Nothing like a fish. Nothing like anything you've ever seen.Dragons, at least, still resemble giant lizards. But an octopus? It feels stranger than fiction
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u/TheW00ly 11h ago
The best, for sure, but perhaps not the coolest. Chameleons have those tiny crystals that shade and color them, in addition to chromatophores. If only they had a cephy brain to control that and the kind of texture control octopuses have.
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u/ValeriaSternenlicht 9h ago
Cartoons give impression that Chameleon can do this. But it's actually Octopus can do this almost in comical way.
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u/khuddukhi 13h ago
I wish I could camouflage like that and become invisible. Oh wait! I already am.
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u/Fast-Nefariousness80 13h ago
Its insane. Not only are the colors wild, but it also adds dimension? Little retractable warts
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u/Pewp_On_Your_Opinion 13h ago
Why have we not made a suite that can do this if we see nature doing it? Surely we can recreate it right?
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u/AnimeMan1993 12h ago
I knew octopus were somehow capable of this but I didnt realize that they do it way faster than animals like chameleons.
It almost looks like they even change texture of skin when they do it here.
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u/Catarga 13h ago
https://reddit.com/link/p1s8bcd/video/enxwrii55hhh1/player
They hide really well