Octopus Colors Predict the Winners of Fights

There's not much of a betting market for octopus fights. But if you wanted to wager on the outcome of a face-off between octopuses, you could get some insider information by looking at their colors. Octopuses, like their relatives the squid and cuttlefish, are famously adept at changing the colors and patterns on their skin. Most of the time, researchers have interpreted octopus color-shifting as a way to hide, says Alaska Pacific University marine biologist David Scheel. By adjusting their colors to their backgrounds, octopuses can stay camouflaged and live to jet another day. Yet by poring over 53 hours of video footage of octopuses off the coast of Australia, Scheel and his colleagues found something quite different. The researchers were studying Octopus tetricus, a shallow-water species also called the common Sydney octopus (or, more poetically, the gloomy octopus). The octopuses are territorial and like to sit alone in their ...