Mystery of octopuses found crawling along Welsh beach

Up to 25 of the cephalopods end up on dry land, possibly confused or injured by the recent storms

Monday 30 October 2017 03.51 GMTLast modified on Monday 30 October 2017 22.00 GMT

Dozens of octopus have been spotted emerging from the ocean and crawling along the Welsh coast in a nightly pilgrimage that has perplexed people at a seaside town.

Up to 25 curled octopuses, which grow to a length of 50cm, were seen three nights in a row at New Quay beach in Ceredigion in west Wales. Some of the wayward cephalopods were later found dead, washed up on the beach.

Brett Jones, who runs SeaMôr dolphin-watching boat trips, said he first witnessed the phenomenon when he was returning from a sunset trip.

“It was a bit like an End Of Days scenario,” he told the BBC. “There were probably about 20 or 25 on the beach. I have never seen them out of the water like that.”

He said it was “really rare” for the creatures to end up on dry land, adding: “Maybe they are getting confused by the bright lights in New Quay harbour and maybe they are dying off after summer or getting knackered after the recent storms.”

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How can you tell deep-sea octopuses apart? Check their warts

New, old-school study shows that wart distribution can differentiate 2 species of octopus

 

Date: June 7, 2017

Source: Field Museum

It's usually pretty easy for dedicated scientists with years of experience to tell two species of their favorite organism apart, be it squirrels or birds. The scientists have seen a lot of the animal they specialize in, and the important traits that separate species have been well-documented for centuries. But when it comes to rarely-seen animals in the deep sea, those fundamental assessments are yet to be done.

A new study in Marine Biology Research tackles this issue by comparing the physical characteristics of two similar octopus species that live on the ocean floor, as deep as 9,500 feet (almost 2,900 m) below the water's surface. Both species are pink or purple, and pretty darn cute. The most obvious difference between them is that one lives in the Atlantic and one lives in the Pacific. But there's another difference: their warts. Both species have raised, bumpy warts on their mantles (the rounded part that looks kind of like a head) and on their arms, but the Pacific octopuses, it turns out, are wartier than their Atlantic cousins -- their bumps go further down their arms and mantles. That little piece of information could be a big help in ongoing deep-sea research.

"This study illustrates how little we really know about animals in the deep sea," says lead author Janet Voight, Associate Curator of Invertebrates at The Field Museum in Chicago. "Being able to tell different species apart is the basis for understanding those species. You can't really talk about a species if you can't separate it from others like it, or tell if a species is endangered, if you can't tell what the species is."

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Octopuses can edit their own brain genes, study finds

April 7, 2017


by John Hopton


Octopuses have a good change of being among the world's most interesting creatures, and newly published research adds weird evolutionary habits to their noteworthy features.

Evolutionary changes that benefit an organism tend to occur at the start of the molecular production process, with mutations in DNA being transcribed into RNA before being translated into an altered protein. For cephalopods, however, this is not the case. (We should mention that there are of course other cephalopods and not only octopuses - squid for example. They're interesting too. In a tasty sort of way).

In cephalopods, proteins can be altered without there previously having been any alteration of the basic sequence of the DNA blueprint.

The study, published in the journal Cell, also hints that squid and octopuses may be of greater evolutionary age than previously believed. 

 
Unusually stable DNA
The unusual process of changing proteins without changing DNA is referred to by the researchers as 'RNA editing'.

Scientific American explains that: RNA editing...involves enzymes swapping out one RNA base (or nitrogen-based “letter” in the RNA/DNA alphabet) for another, presumably in the interest of an organism adapting to its environment."

Such editing is found in other creatures, including humans, however, it is very rare. Only a few dozen sites among some 20,000 genes in humans can be identified as doing something like this.

In cephalopods, though, the process is very common and is used in part to respond to changes in the temperature of the ocean.

Squid have roughly the same number of genes as humans, yet more than half undergo RNA editing. The editing happens particularly in the nervous system of a cephalopod, including in gene coding for ion channels that assist in electrical communication between neurons.
Read more at

Squids and octopuses thrive as 'weeds of the sea' warm to hotter oceans

Squid, cuttlefish and their relatives appear to benefit from ‘live fast, die young’ mentality as study shows cephalopods have thrived over past 60 years

Alan Yuhas

Monday 23 May 201619.09 BSTLast modified on Monday 23 May 201622.43 BST

Octopuses, cuttlefish and squid have thrived in the world’s oceans over the last 60 years despite – or because of – human activity that has warmed oceans and reduced fish populations.

An international team compiled a database of cephalopod catch rates, and found that even though the creatures reproduce in diverse ways – some hatch and live near the sea floor, others are born and die moving up and down the water column – around the world, nearly all are steadily increasing.

“Cephalopods have this ‘live fast, die young’ life history strategy – the rock stars of the sea, if you like to call them that,” Bronwyn Gillanders, the project leader and a marine biologist at the University of Adelaide, told the Guardian.

Her colleague and the lead author of a study released on Monday, Zoe Doubleday, had a different analogy.

“Cephalopods are often called ‘weeds of the sea’,” she said, because their “rapid growth, short lifespans and flexible development” let them adapt to environmental changes more quickly than other marine animals.

This rapid life cycle, Gillanders said, means cephalopods can “proliferate quickly, perhaps with advantages over longer-lived organisms”.

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Octopus Foils Predators by Stealing Identities

Instead of blending in with the background, octopuses hide from predators by taking on the shape and color of specific objects in their environment, new research suggests.

"Octopuses are considered to be the master of camouflage. An octopus can change its color, pattern and texture of its skin in an instant," study researcher Noam Josef, of Ben-Gurion University in Israel, told LiveScience.

"By reproducing key features of well-chosen objects, the octopus can produce an effective camouflage that may fool a wide range of potential predators," Josef and colleagues write online today (May 23) in the journal PLoS ONE.

There are a few different ways that animals use camouflage to hide. Some adopt the color or texture of their surroundings, taking in the environment as a whole like, say, a mouse that evolves to have a lighter color because it lives on the beach.

Read on:  http://www.livescience.com/20539-octopus-successful-camouflage.html