Facts about Blanket Octopuses
Imagine what will happen if your spouce was 40,000 times heavier than you? Not only this, what if it was a hundered times larger than you also? This it what happens with blanket octopuses in reality where females are 40,000 times heavier and 100 times larger than the males. Female blanket octopuses grow up to 2 meters(6.6 feet) long. That is more than average height of a man. In contrast to females that grow 6.6 feet in length, the males only grow 0.9 inches in length. They mate in an interesting manner. Males spend their existence drifting along waiting to meet a female. If a male meets a female, he will fill his tentacles with sperm and tear it apart from his body. He then gives his sperm-filled tentacle to the female which she uses to fertilize her eggs. After this process, the female will leave the male who floats away and then dies ultimately. Here it is important to note that the male's small size allows him to reach sexual maturity much faster than the female which raises the chances that when a female meets him, he is ready to copulate. They are rarely seen. There is another interesting fact about them which might amaze you and this is about their unusual defense mechanism. They defend themselves by first tearing off the tentacles of passing Portuguese man-of-war jellyfish. They are themselves immune to the tentacle's painful sting. Upon the encounter with potential predators, the blanket octopuses waft the captured man-of-war tentacles in two pairs of its upper arms as an effective deterrent. This greatly increases their size. Also, they got their name blanket octopus because of this. |
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