Sex gland removal? [retitled from "Something interesting"]

[mazio]

I was watching the discovery science channel the other day and it said that if your octo has its sex glands removed then it will live a long full life. Has anyone else heard anything about this if so how can one be purchased.

 

[monty]

to TONMO, mazio.

I was wondering why there was a resurgence in interest on this. Do you know the name of the show? I must have missed that one.

The short answer is that removing the sex organs doesn't do it, only removing the "optic gland," which is a gland on the optic lobe of the brain. This is rather major surgery; I've only seen it in a histology slide of a vulgaris brain and it was pretty small; trying to find it doing surgery on a living animal, particularly the smaller octos people keep as pets, seems like a needle-in-a-haystack surgery.

It sounds like Roy has some direct experience with this from what he's said in other posts, but I bet it's the kind of surgery that less than ten people in the world know how to do.

I don't know how surgery is done on a living octopus-- are there known anesthetics and tranquilizers and such?

Anyway, here are some related threads, collected here so we can refer folks to this post since this seems to be coming up a lot lately:

http://www.tonmo.com/community/inde...w.tonmo.com/community/index.php?threads/7619/

http://www.tonmo.com/forums/showthread.php?p=87455#post87455

http://www.tonmo.com/community/index.php?threads/6727/

http://www.tonmo.com/community/index.php?threads/4562/

 

[DrBatty]

As monty said, there has been a lot of interest in this, and it does seem logical for octos to have a longer life if they were "spayed/neutered", as procreation tends to mark the senescence of octopus.....but this has been a debatable theory for quite awhile.
On the other hand, it does seem extremely difficult to remove any part of an octo's insides - they can be quite small and I imagine not only would the procedure be highly intrusive but also very costly. I can't imagine the general anaesthesia would be the same for octos as other living things i.e. humans, dogs, cats - because their blood and the way it's supplied to their bodies is quite different from mammals. It would be interesting to hear if anyone has any experience with this.

 

[hallucigenia]

You know, this just got covered in my Comparative Neural Anatomy class last Friday. I'll e-mail Dr. Allman and ask if he knows, or at least if he can give me any references on the topic.