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DOES OCTO SMELL?

Joined
Mar 21, 2007
Messages
55
IM JUST CURIOUS BECAUSE I THREW A FIDDLER IN THE TANK AND MY OCTOPUS WENT RIGHT PAST HIM, I MEAN AN INCH AWAY AND THESE FIDDLERS ARE BIG! HES GOT HIS HUNTING COLORS FLASHING LIKE HE KNOWS SOMETHINGS AROUND BUT HE CANT PIN POINT IT. ITS DONE THIS A FEW TIMES AND IM JUST CURIOUS IF THEY REPLY MORE ON SEEING THAN SMELLING THE PREY?
 
Caps lock is an annoyance

Octos have well developed senses of sight and smell/taste
 
keyboard4.jpg

Seven sixteenths of one inch, that's the distance you'd have to move your pinky.
 
How old and/or big is your octopus? As they near the end of their lives, their eyesight seems to diminish. The other possibility is that the fiddler was too close to the octopus. My cuttles have to be a certain distance away from a shrimp in order to catch it. If the shrimp is too close, they have to back up in order to take aim. It would depend on how your octopus hunts.
 
aximbigfan;95882 said:
TURN THE CAPS LOCK OFF ITS REALLY EASY!!!!!!!!!

chris

irony: an all caps message with a missing apostrophe and 9 exclamation marks joining in to complain about someone's overzealous use of capital letters.

Although I found the original message is somewhat annoying to read, I wasn't terribly impressed with the style in all of the responses, either... and I'd prefer not to make people with legitimate octopus questions feel attacked too much around here. It's worth noting that there are punctuation, spelling, or grammar errors in every post in the thread except for nickcoletti's second post (and maybe this one, if I'm lucky.)
(edit: and Cuttlegirl's post, who snuck in as I was typing this one.)

To address the original question: octopuses hunt both visually and by using a their suckers to taste, smell, and touch. They certainly recognize prey visually when it's in sight, but they often reach into nooks and crannies seeking food, even if they can't see it. I'm not sure if many studies have been done about long-distance chemical sensing like smell... Hanlon & Messenger suggest that the research that has been done shows that smell is an important factor in finding food for octopuses in particular. Octopus suckers have about 100 times as many smell/taste sensing cells as squids and cuttles, who hunt mostly visually. Cephs also have olfactory organs near their eyes, but very little is known about their use relative to the suckers' sense of smell.

I don't know why your octo would be ignoring the crab, though... usually, they're very good at being aware of their prey by both smell and sight, and if it was showing hunting patterning, it seems likely it was aware of where the crab was. Maybe it's either "playing cat and mouse" with the crab, or it wants to eat the crab but thinks it's too big to handle?
 
It's worth noting that there are punctuation, spelling, or grammar errors in every post in the thread except for nickcoletti's second post (and maybe this one, if I'm lucky.)
I thought proper usage was to have the period outside the parens, unless the entire statement was in parens, in which case it should be inside.

Example:

I went to the park (the one with all the ferocious octopuses).

vs.

I went to the park. (I hate that park.)

But that might just be a rule in my own head...

:nofeet:
 
ok, so I'm not lucky (:oops:).

yeesh. I've been doing that wrong since high school, I guess. I was taught that parentheses had the same weird typographic-aesthetic rule as quotes for including the punctuation inside, unless the expression is very short. Since my point was that s/he who is without linguistic sin should cast the first stone, though, that just rules out me out along with everyone but Cuttlegirl and Tony from complaining harshly....

Can we get back to talking about octopuses now?
 
just for the principle im going to finish in CAPS, FROM WHAT I KNOW MY OCTO IS ONLY ABOUT 6-7 MONTHS, AND NO ITS NOT THAT ITS TO CONTINUES TO LOOK ALL NIGHT. ITS NOT EVERY TIME I FEED JUST ONCE IN A WHILE. I CAN TELL HE HAS NO CLUE THAT ITS THERE AND THE CRABS I FEED ARE BIG. MAYBE BEING CAPTIVE RAISED HAS SOMTHING TO DO WITH IT BECAUSE WHEN I FIRST GOT IT IT HAD NO HUNTING SKILLS WHAT SO EVER IT SEEMED. thanks for the "real help" cuttle girl and monty! OPCN, THANKS ALSO FOR YOUR HELPFULL $.02!!
 

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