New Video of Kashmir 'walking'

joefish84 said:
even if it is bumbing or whatever he did stand up erect on 2 legs many times and one time he did it and waved at me.


That's neat and I wish he was alive so we could have seen it. Im not sure if bi-pedal locomotion is only used for one purpose because according to the news about them doing this behavior, it was just seen and only used to escape danger like a frozen rock drifting away. Im guessing it depends under the situations..if its motivated enough to do the exact behaviors.

However, catching prey and bringing it back to its lair doesn't seem like the motivation to do a precise bi-pedal locomotion. But im not saying im right cuz you never know. Im just saying that so far, it just looks natural and ordinary and done by most octo's simply walking along the seafloor.
 
i just know that almost every large meal that was too big for him to swim with back to the den would be carried while walking... im sure that if you try to feed your octos a fairly larger meal than the octo itself that it will do the same thing because mine did it all the time. kash had a mantle of about 4 inches and i would often feed him live blue crabs with shells about 4-6 inches wide without problems and he would walk back to his den with them instead of swimming like he would with smaller food such as fiddlers or shrimp. i think that the fact that the food weighed more than he did and that it wasnt able to be concealed easily into his arms while swimming had alot to do with it so instead he just "walked" and carried the food back.
 
The video shows Kash using two left arms and two right arms (pairs 3 and 4, total of four arms) so he was crawling rather than walking bipedally. As you have brought up, he did this when carrying prey, and we have video of O. marginatus and A. aculeatus doing the same. Large prey probably prevents the octos from using a sprawling posture while crawling, so the arms are more stilt-like. A. aculeatus can also walk bipedally while carrying prey, but it doesn't look easy! As for motivation- our initial bipedal videos were made by following the octopuses closely, so we interpreted the behavior as a form of escape (defense). This summer I went back for a closer look at the behavior and they also walked to cover open spaces.

Don't worry that you haven't found anything about "bumping" - this seems to be a term that was made up for the TV program, and as far as I know is absent from the literature.
 

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