By Sarah B. Puschmann, Staff
Writer | August 18, 2017 11:44am ET
In 2014, one of Roy Caldwell's
octopuses went missing.
Caldwell, a professor of
integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, had kept the
reef octopuses (Abdopus aculeatus) he and his team collected on Lizard
Island in Australia in separate, sealed tanks. Puzzled, he peered into the
female octopus's tank and found spermatophores, the capsules that contain
octopus sperm, floating in the water. He looked closer and found the male
there, too, buried in the gravel.
The only way the male octopus
could have made it into the female's tank, Caldwell said, is for the male to
have wriggled through the pipe that fed water into both octopuses' tanks, an
act some might deem proof of a calculated nighttime tryst.
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