Octopuses
Discover the incredible abilities of these eight-limbed wonders of the natural world
Octopuses are sort of like the superheroes of the animal kingdom, with so many amazing abilities and adaptations that they begin to look greedy. They can solve mazes, open screw-top jars and use tools. They can walk, they can swim and they can even propel themselves at high speed. They can change colour, imitate other animals, squirt ink, inject poison and jettison their own arms. When you can do all of that, who cares if you can predict the future or not?
Octopus anatomy
Although they are molluscs, octopuses don’t have a shell or bones. The only hard part of their body is a small beak, made of keratin. This allows them to squeeze through extremely small gaps - an octopus a metre across can pass through a tube the size of a 50 pence coin. Octopuses mainly eat crabs and small fish that they pull out of crevices in rocks and coral reefs, but they can also tackle small sharks by enveloping the sharks’ gill openings and suffocating them.