It turns out octopuses don’t have a dominant arm, but they do tend to perform some tasks more often with their “front arms,” new research shows.
Scientists studied a series of short videos of wild octopuses crawling, swimming, standing, fetching, and groping — among other common activities — to analyze how each of the eight arms were moving.
Octopus limbs aren’t specialized as many mammal limbs are.
Octopus limbs are complex — used for mobility and sensing the environment.
If an arm is bitten off by a predator, as often happens in the wild, octopuses have multiple backups.
Woods Hole, Mass. People can be either left-handed or right-handed. Despite not having a dominant arm, octopuses do have a tendency to use their “front arms” more frequently for certain tasks, according to recent research.
Researchers examined a number of brief videos showing octopuses in the wild swimming, crawling, standing, fetching, and groping, among other typical behaviors, to examine the movements of each of the eight arms.
Co-author and marine biologist Roger Hanlon of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, said, “It’s truly amazing that all of the arms can do all of this stuff.”.
As opposed to many mammal limbs, octopuses’ limbs are not specialized. But the three octopus species in the study clearly preferred to use their four front arms, which they did roughly 60% of the time. In order to help the octopus move forward, it was more common to use its back arms for rolling and stilting.
Mike Vecchione, a zoologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History who did not participate in the study, stated that “the forward arms do most of the exploring; the rear arms are mostly for walking.”.
Video clips from the Atlantic and Caribbean Seas taken between 2007 and 2015 were examined by researchers. It was the first significant study to look at specific limb movements in the wild.
The new study revealed that octopuses did not exhibit a preference for either the left or right arm in their natural habitat, in contrast to earlier studies on octopus behavior in a lab setting.
The findings were released in Scientific Reports on Thursday.
The octopus biologist Janet Voight of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, who was not involved in the study, said, “I’m in awe that the researchers managed to do this.”.
An octopus is a timid and elusive animal. Filming the species under study required years of patience and persistence because they spend the majority of their time hidden in their dens.
Octopuses have intricate limbs that are used for both mobility and environmental sensing. Suckers are sophisticated sensory organs “equivalent to the human nose, lips, and tongue,” with 100 to 200 suckers per arm, according to Hanlon.
As is frequently the case in the wild, octopuses have several options in case a predator bites off an arm.
“There is a lot of redundancy when you have eight arms and they’re all capable,” commented Hanlon. “..”.
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