Skin color changes reveal octopus drama

Researchers observed 50 Octopuses engaging in fights, mating and using color signals to reveal their mood. “They’ll continue to study these octopuses and to explore how their social lives might influence the size of the population”.

The contrasting patterns were most frequently observed when octopuses were attempting to return to their den after they had been forced out, or in the presence of an aggressive individual. This made their social skills wildly unknown to us until now. The researchers followed up from there, ultimately witnessing 186 octopus interactions and more than 500 actions. Through the underwater footage, they were able to make some new discoveries about their behavioral patterns.

But these new observations of apparent signaling in one kind of octopus widen the understanding of these complex invertebrates, so far removed from our own vertebrate lineage. And the third octopus turns dark and doesn’t crouch down.

They have previously been hard to study, because often when they are placed in a tank together they kill and eat each other. The octopuses can display more emotions through their ability to alter the colors of their skins than just gloom, with the color black reportedly indicating that they are feeling like they are being intimidated by a rival, and black-and-white stripes displayed by males a sign that they are either looking for love, if a female is nearby, or a fight, with a rival male octopus, according to Maine News. As for their color-changing habits, they were thought to help them hide from those creatures that hunted them in the depths of the oceans. The researchers determined that the octopus may signal that it doesn’t want to fight in order to avoid one altogether, which would be quite helpful to its survival.

Peter Godfrey-Smith is a professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Sydney, and a co-author of the research. Aggressive males would stretch their bodies to appear larger and that the octopuses changed colour to signal dominance. The authors of the study were Godfrey Smith and David Scheel, who works at the Alaska Pacific University.

Keeping track of dozens of octopuses swimming around is no easy task when they’re constantly changing shape and color. When the octopuses change their color to a dark one and stand taller, they show aggression. This ability was generally thought to be a camouflage tactic, but now researchers are observing octopuses using appearance-altering skills as a way to either incite or back down from confrontation.

Scheel along with colleagues at the University of Sydney noticed some intriguing patterns: when an octopus with a dark body color approached another dark octopus, the interaction was more likely to escalate to grappling. Reaching was the most common interaction the scientists saw, making up 72 percent of all the physical interplay; the octopuses touched each other very infrequently, the scientists recorded. “The dark color and some of the behaviors that go with it are associated with aggression, or at least approach”, he added.