A tight squeeze

July 30, 2014 • 5:35 am

by Matthew Cobb

After Jerry posted a Russian cat squeezing under a cupboard, here’s a pretty amazing video showing the squeezability of an octopus, which had unfortunately been landed on a boat:

Here’s another example, which looks a bit less painful, as the cephalopod is squeezing through a bottleneck rather than some nasty bits of metal:

Octopuses (not ‘octopi’) are molluscs, like slugs and snails. Most molluscs have a shell – in both octopuses and slugs the shell has been lost, and this is what allows the beast to squeeze through those small gaps. (And in the case of slugs, to squeeze under the kitchen door and all over your floor during the night ugh.)

Other Cephalopods are squid, where the shell is reduced to a structure called the gladius, and the cuttlefish, where the shell has become the cuttlefish ‘bone’. Both these had internal structures would mean that a squid or a cuttlefish would find it harder to squeeze through a small space. The main limiting factor for an octopus is its only hard structure, which is its ‘beak’ – the modified radula that it uses for eating.

24 thoughts on “A tight squeeze”

    1. I wish you officials would make up your minds on this! Last I heard octopi was definitely not on, but both octopuses and octopodes were fine.

      1. I vote for octopodes since the word octopus is said to come from Greek.

        1. I like it too, but it’s as well to know how to pronounce it. I actually heard a marine biologist use it in a radio interview, so know that it rhymes with “antipodes” : oc-TOP-uh-dees /äkˈtipədēz/. (I think!)

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  2. Hmmm, I thought the limiting factor on octopuses going through small openings was the size of their eye(s), not their beak.

  3. Being so squishy and funny they look like they could give a lovely hug. Would an octopus be into that?

    1. No. But handling a live octopus is an experience that I can recommend. There is nothing like the feeling of all those suckers.

  4. I saw a nature doc once that put octopuses (I’ve been saying it wrong this whole time) in problem solving situations and the octopuses fared remarkably well. Not bad for a foot-head.

    1. I had read that among these studies was one done by an Italian group that found that individual octopuses varied in how well they could figure out a problem. Some were invertebrate geniuses, and others just never got it. Similar to people, I suppose.

  5. cephalopod videos? You know someone is going to respond by posting anti-cat videos.

  6. I’m reminded of an old story I heard about an aquarium that had a row of tanks with a Pacific giant octopus on one end and several dungeoness crabs on the other, with various Pacific Northwest sea life occupying the tanks in between.

    They were having a problem with crabs disappearing from their tank but couldn’t figure out what was the cause. Finally, someone stayed at the aquarium overnight to observe it. He ended up seeing the octopus slip out of its tank, enter the next tank, then the next, until it was in the crab tank. It proceeded to grab a crab, then slipped back from tank to tank until it arrived at its tank and ate the crab.

      1. No idea, and fact that they weren’t finding discarded crab exoskeletons in the tank does speak to its UL status as JohnnieCanuck points out below.

    2. Practically an urban legend, that one. I’ve heard several variations.

      I tried snopes.com and found quite a bit of discussion in their fora,(!) but nothing definitive. The Seattle aquarium is one of the places people remember hearing the story about.

      One person claimed that the stories have been around for awhile. Apparently Pliny wrote of such a creature that crawled ashore to get fish drying in the sun.

      1. I was maybe six when I first heard the story and it was at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport, Oregon. No idea whether it was supposed to have occurred there or at another facility.

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