Here they come, the legions of cephalopods. Massive aggregations of brooding octopuses were found near Monterey Bay.
That’s not all. The University of Georgia had a single octopus in their aquarium, Octavius, presumed male, until they discovered a surprise one morning.
“I noticed this cloud of moving dots and I realised, ‘Oh my God, she had babies. There are babies. There are babies everywhere.’ And a sort of panic ensued,” aquarium curator Devin Dumont told Mary Landers at Savannah Now.
“I immediately started scooping them out and putting them in buckets and there were just buckets and buckets and buckets full of tiny octopi.”
Finding a tank full of baby octopuses (or octopodes for language pedants) would certainly be enough to shock anybody into mixing up their Greek and Latin word roots.
I, for one, welcome our breeding swarms of transgender octopuses, and will greet them as saviors when they emerge to release humanity from its misery.
So was the octomom misidentified as male, or did she change genders and somehow fertilize herself?
Misidentified, most likely. The curator doesn’t seem to be much of a cephalopod expert.
Sorry doc ,but the mad scientist side of your better nature is starting to show again.
And another thing ,why haven’t you shown us film of the rarely seen Dumbo Octopus seen near Monterey ?
All my silly joking aside ,i look forward to Friday Cephalopod ,long may it/you /them continue .
“The Children of Rlyeh are multiplying! Raise your voices in praise to Great Cthulhu! IA! IA!”
In my home, all the (plushy, we have no living) octopodes are named with a color for a last name – a color that comes close to the color of their plushy exteriors – and then a familiar and alliterative human name for a first name. “Tabitha Taupe”, that sort of thing.
But after Penelope Purple (our first), the next octopus acquired was Octavia Aqua. Now I hear that she’s moonlighting at the University of Georgia? Those octopodes and their tendency to slip out of their enclosures when you’re not looking … and board an international flight and hail a cab, for what? Some free food?
This seems almost fishy…
We forget 1955’s It Came from Beneath the Sea at our peril…
It DOES exist!
https://youtu.be/De1LCQvbqV4
@6 Or The Kraken awakes ,by John Wyndham.
Link to text of news article:
“Male” Octopus Gives Surprise Birth to Thousands of Babies in a US Aquarium
PZ—as Kent Brockman before him, is an early collaborator with the sub-terrestrial occupying swarm.
neither is correct, as you should well know by now.
since all the babies are of course of the same species, the plural is the same as the singular: octopus.
if they were mixed from different species, THEN it would be octopuses.
this is standard scientific nomenclature; just like fish/fishes.