Author: Sabrina Imbler / Source: Atlas Obscura
Though the octopus in the video below may appear deep in sleep, its skin is wide awake. In a matter of seconds, it pulses from coconut white to muted gray to speckled brown, all while the cephalopod clings to a rock, its eyes shut tight.
LiveScience recently shared this dramatic video, originally taken by Rachel Otey in 2017, of a Caribbean two-spot octopus slumbering in a tank in the Butterfly Pavilion, a nonprofit invertebrate zoo in Colorado. The cephalopods are widely admired these days for their intelligence, but is this one … dreaming?A conscious octopus changes its color and patterning on a dime to fool prey or escape danger. According to Jennifer Mather, a psychologist at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, the color changes originate from a spontaneous, unconscious firing in the octopus’s optic lobe. A 2011 study suggests that many sleeping octopuses typically display a “half-and-half” skin pattern, with light areas and dark splotches, regardless of the color of their environment. While this seems…
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