[Octopus]: Maya - O. hummelincki

It is a sad thing -- these creatures are so very fascinating, and possessed of so much personality -- and live such short lives.

Poor Maya here really did have an odd-looking arms; as you suggested, it looks like a mammalian circulatory problem. I've read that the tissues forming the brachial hearts are rather more capable of surviving certain low-oxygen stresses than the central heart.
http://jeb.biologists.org/cgi/reprint/117/1/471.pdf

This suggests to me that failure at different times might be fairly commonplace -- and may be part of what afflicted poor Maya at the end.

Best wishes.
 
I have observed actions that a lay person (ie me) would think of as stroke or possibly the loss of a brachial heart in my mercatoris' life ending days. In two cases a complete side could no longer function while the uneffected side appeared more or less normal (for a day or two before death). Neither of the animals swelled like Maya though and I did not examine the animal closely enough to try to determine if the brachial heart had stopped. Stroke in a section of the brain could also have stopped the heart though so that observation would not really help much in guessing what was happening. Additionally, like people, heart failure could be a property of an individual animal or a genetic trait (the observations were on related animals) so it would not negate the gill hearts being more resiliant. Interestingly, none of my other senescent animals seemed to have exhibited this type of failure. Maya was the first where bloat was extremely and rapidly obvious but all of my senescent octopuses seemed to have appeared to retain water in the end. There are refrences to senescent males swimming into fresh/brackish water at river mouths and that in combination with your prior statements about processing saltwater through the body have me wondering about failure to eliminate water rather than dehydration as their bodies shut down.
 
Now that school is out, Garrett has some time to experiment with his preserved octopuses and recorded final measurements (I forgot to measure her before sending):

Maya's mantle was 4.57 cm and the leg that is leg #5 if you start at the front right eye and go clockwise was 13.64 cm.
 

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