[...] Eventually the day's class ends. Shania has played with a chartreuse hamster ball, has plucked the mustache from Mr. Potato Head's face and is still holding on to his Bozo nose.It's as if we had the same childhood.
Read The Rest Scale: 3.5 out of 5 for eight-armed goodness.
The Vancouver aquarium used to keep a number of giant pacific octopi in their back rooms so the could rotate them through the exhibit (the one on public display gets stressed, so they're only on duty for a period before returning to the back tanks). I used to play with the ones in the back, and I can confirm that they are intelligent and have interesting personalities. One of them would always greet me in the same way, by sliding the thin end of its tentacle out and very gently feeling around my fingers while flashing different colours.
ReplyDeleteThey were pretty bored back there, and the aquarium's policy was to return them to the ocean after a few months.
I had kinda thought I had blogged a somewhat similar article to this on octopi some months ago, but apparently I didn't; I thought I might find it in my "to blog" file, but that's now so idiotically long, with some 500+ entries, going back through 2005 (though I'm sporadically trying to go through and at least delete stuff that obviously is no longer newsworthy or timely or rlevant), that either I can't find it just now, or I merely read the article, and didn't make a note at all for some reason.
ReplyDeleteOh, well. But it was the same sort of thing, only slightly longer, about the intelligence of octopi in an acquarium, how they played, etc.