What does the octopus eat?

It would seem designed to become a cartoon character and instead it is a real animal with such strange features that it makes you wonder what the octopus eats ? It is not at all easy to imagine it while it feeds, with those tentacles in motion, to understand how it organizes itself and how it moves but these are all questions to which there are answers thanks to researchers who study these animals in their natural environment. In this way it is possible to discover not only their characteristics and habits but also their evolution over time because many of them have to get used to living in a changing environment, the sea, increasingly warm but also more polluted.

What does the octopus eat?

Before getting to know it in depth, let’s find out what the octopus eats to understand how it stays alive and absorbs energy, the energy it needs to move in its rather original way. Some would imagine it to be a peaceful and calm animal, but instead it is a predator and also quite active, its main prey are certainly mussels and clams but it also eats other types of bivalves that it captures with a particular tactic, approaching its prey and agility inserting a stone between the two valves to prevent them from closing and then eating them. A clever strategy, refined over the centuries.

As an alternative to bivalves, the answer to what the octopus eats are also gastropods . In this last class of molluscs, for those who do not know much about the sea and its inhabitants, we find many species, even riverine ones, but we focus on marine ones, which are all equipped with univalve shells of very variable shape and ornamentation, characterized by a more or less evident spiral winding and a torsion of viscera. Examples of octopus prey in this category are snails, slugs and limpets.

Physical characteristics of the octopus

Now that we have solved the mystery of what the octopus eats, we can get to know it better in its entirety, in its physical aspect that many of us are familiar with, and in its more behavioral aspect.

This sea animal is characterized by an oval-shaped body in which the head is not distinguishable, which seems to be fused with the rest of the body, forming a single structure that we call the mantle precisely because when it “flits” in the water it looks a lot like us. Known to all are the 8 protuberances that represent the arms and are called tentacles.

Anyone who has had the opportunity to approach an octopus will have noticed its very smooth skin that has the ability to change color, not by chance but like many other animals adapting to the environments in which it is found, to their colors. Few people know that the octopus is one of the fastest animals to camouflage itself by assuming the color of the environmental background in which it is found.

All these are aspects that we can somehow more or less see if we observe the octopus carefully, and imagine a little, but there are others that scientists and linguists can tell us. The latter suggest that it is a cephalopod, a word that comes from the Greek and means head and feet, while marine science experts reveal that octopuses have two thirds of their brain in their tentacles and that inside their limbs they have about 50,000 million neurons. There are other curiosities to know such as the fact that the third part of the brain is in the head and we can imagine it with the strange shape of a donut.

What does the octopus with tentacles eat?

It is worth returning to the octopus’s tentacles again because they are very important for this animal not only from the aesthetic and recognizability point of view but also from the “nutritional” point of view. Each of them is equipped with two sets of suckers that can be more or less developed depending on whether it is a male or female specimen. In both cases, at the center of each tentacle we find the mouth that must necessarily be equipped with a horny beak since it is necessary to be able to break the shells of the shells.

What we think are just ordinary arms are actually real organs with extraordinary characteristics and functions, not all the same. We can divide them into categories, the posterior ones and the anterior ones. The former are used by the octopus to move on the seabed while the remaining six are used to hunt the prey we listed before and in general to grab food and bring it to the mouth. In a certain sense we can say that these animals have two legs and six arms, all of which are notably flexible because they allow the octopus to transform into a sphere and roll on the seabed or to become thin and slip into any opening, or even to widen and embrace ledges and rocks.

The curiosities about the octopus tentacles continue. Think that they have a life of their own and if one of them is cut it continues to move independently remaining “alive” for several weeks

Male and female octopus

It is complex to understand if we are dealing with a male or female octopus but there are certainly differences between specimens of different sexes. First of all, males have a special tentacle where the sperm resides and which is inserted into the female’s head during mating. It can happen that this tentacle, called hectocotylus, comes off during intercourse. Nothing serious because it grows back. The female waits for the young, gives birth to them and then moves away and dies, so there is no weaning or training phase, we cannot speak of parents among octopuses.

The Intelligence of Octopuses

Another very important aspect to underline in addition to what the octopus eats , is its remarkable intelligence. It is not irony but the truth because studying octopuses it has been noted that they are animals capable of carefully observing objects until they understand how they work. In some laboratory studies it has been noted that they can learn to open a jar to take the food stored inside. You see extraordinary things watching these animals, for example if they find a coconut, they use it as protection or to move, curling up inside and rolling on the seabed.