Of course there's nothing ordinary about an octopus. It's the animal that showed us spinelessness doesn't have to mean a lack of smarts. But when researchers brought some octopuses into the lab to study exactly how the animals move, their findings were bizarre—both predictably and unpredictably.
(Credit: Kevin Bryan/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/mentalblock/6968924997)
Scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem studied nine common octopuses (Octopus vulgaris) that fishers had scooped out of the ocean for them. Once the animals got comfortable in the lab, the scientists put them one at a time into a tank with a transparent floor. They used cameras underneath and next to the tank to meticulously track how the invertebrates crawled. The footage revealed three ways that octopuses are weird.
