“I like other marine animals, but octopuses — they’re aliens on our planet. They're the closest thing we're going to get to that.”
So says Richard Ross, a senior biologist at the Steinhart Aquarium in the California Academy of Sciences. “They have eight arms, they have suckers all over the place, they have great eyesight, they can make ink, they can swim, they have jet propulsion…The more we learn, the more interesting they become,” Ross says.
Now, Ross has discovered, in the larger Pacific striped octopus, some new and unexpected practices.