Behaviour
An individual blue-ringed octopus tends to use its dermal chromatophore cells to camouflage itself until provoked, at which point it quickly changes colour, becoming bright yellow with blue rings or lines. The blue-ringed octopus spends much of its life hiding in crevices. Like all octopuses, it can change its shape easily, which helps it to squeeze into crevices much smaller than itself. This helps safeguard the octopus from predators and it may even pile up rocks outside the entrance to its lair. In common with other octopuses, the blue-ringed octopus swims by expelling water from its hyponome (funnel) in a form of jet propulsion. If the blue-ringed octopus loses an arm, it can regenerate it within six weeks.
Read more about this topic: Blue-ringed Octopus
Famous quotes containing the word behaviour:
“I cannot be much pleased without an appearance of truth; at least of possibility—I wish the history to be natural though the sentiments are refined; and the characters to be probable, though their behaviour is excelling.”
—Frances Burney (1752–1840)
“... into the novel goes such taste as I have for rational behaviour and social portraiture. The short story, as I see it to be, allows for what is crazy about humanity: obstinacies, inordinate heroisms, “immortal longings.””
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)
“The quality of moral behaviour varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)