The octopus. Any educated person would expect to find eight vaginas, naturally, upon coming face to face with this mythical beast in the sweet coastal waters of western Mexico. Boy was I mistaken. Either this was a male octopus or the Greek’s were to busy philosopherizering on unimportant things like life and the universe and did not forsee the confusion that would ensue when they combined the terms meaning “eight” (okto) and “footed” (pous).
Even if female octopuses only have one gonopore (science word for an octopus’s vertical smile) they are really really g-dang neat. In this edition of Neat Animal of the Week we focus on the nervous system of the octopus which will guaranteed give you a neatness stroke. We’ll leave the fact that octomuffs can stand tall on their arms, squeeze through a hole little bigger than one of its eyes and become a streamlined rocket or fold itself to fit into a jar behind and focus on neurons and shit like that.
First, in order to gain perspective on the mind of this fetish filled eight footed freak, it’s prudent to point out that the most recent common ancestor between humans and the octopus is nearly three-times as old as the most ancient dinosaur and was most likely a worm-like creature with eye spots and a foreskin that lived nearly 750 million years ago (it would be another 749,998,000 years until the first mohel). Octobearded clams have nearly half a billion neurons close to the order of dogs (vs humans with 100 billion) and significantly more than plus the largest brain to body mass ratio of any vertebrate. Yet, as Donald Trump’s hands and penis would tell you: size isn’t everything! Despite the distance between humans and octovajayjays they have developed sophisticated behaviors including complex problem solving, task-dependent conditional discrimination, and observational learning more commonly found in mammals. Octobeavers also have been found to have forms of short- and long-term memory, versions of sleep, and the capacities to recognize individual people and explore objects through play.
Also indubitably neat is the distribution of those neurons in their bodies. While most vertebrate’s neurons are concentrated in the brain, the majority of the neurons in octofannies are in their arms. Their arms have the ability to sense touch and taste and even an arm that has been hacked off by a psycho ex-girlfriend can still perform independent functions such as reaching and grasping. Holy great balls of I’m so scared right now. When an octocoochie reaches to grab something 2 waves of muscle activation occur: inward from the tip and one outward from the base. Also, the neurons in each arm have loops (recurrent connections) which may give the arm a simple decentralized form of short term memory. If you didn’t already have a neatness induced transient ischemic attack (Ni-TIA) then listen to this neat fact: researchers believe that opsins (proteins that make up photoreceptor cells) in the skin can sense different wavelengths of light and help octohoohas camouflage themselves. The neatness is all-becoming.
