Behaviour
An individual blue-ringed octopus tends to use its dermal chromatophore cells to camouflage itself until provoked, at which point it quickly changes colour, becoming bright yellow with blue rings or lines. The blue-ringed octopus spends much of its life hiding in crevices. Like all octopuses, it can change its shape easily, which helps it to squeeze into crevices much smaller than itself. This helps safeguard the octopus from predators and it may even pile up rocks outside the entrance to its lair. In common with other octopuses, the blue-ringed octopus swims by expelling water from its hyponome (funnel) in a form of jet propulsion. If the blue-ringed octopus loses an arm, it can regenerate it within six weeks.
Read more about this topic: Blue-ringed Octopus
Famous quotes containing the word behaviour:
“When we read of human beings behaving in certain ways, with the approval of the author, who gives his benediction to this behaviour by his attitude towards the result of the behaviour arranged by himself, we can be influenced towards behaving in the same way.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“The methodological advice to interpret in a way that optimizes agreement should not be conceived as resting on a charitable assumption about human intelligence that might turn out to be false. If we cannot find a way to interpret the utterances and other behaviour of a creature as revealing a set of beliefs largely consistent and true by our standards, we have no reason to count that creature as rational, as having beliefs, or as saying anything.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)
“... into the novel goes such taste as I have for rational behaviour and social portraiture. The short story, as I see it to be, allows for what is crazy about humanity: obstinacies, inordinate heroisms, “immortal longings.””
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)