The Mimic Octopus
“King of Mimicry”
Kingdom:
Animalia
Phylum
: Mollusca
Class
:Cephalopoda
Order
: Octopoda
Family
: Octopodidae
Sub
family : Octopodinae
Genus
: Thaumoctopus
Species
: T. mimicus
The
term mimic refers to imitate or impersonate of voice and action of others. Thaumoctopus mimicus, is an octopus that
mimics other marine organisms. The distribution is restricted to Indo-Malay archipelago;
it was first explored at off coast of Sulawesi in Indonesia on 1998. The
average size of Mimic Octopus is 60 cm and their arms can extend up to 25 cm.
Mimic Octopus is characterized by brown color with white strips. Like other
octopus it has 8 arms with 2 rows of suckers and a mantle containing 3 hearts.
The suckers have touch sensors and chemo receptors, that helps them to sense
and taste the food before eating. These
creatures prefer muddy bottom in the sea and moves over bottom by jet
propulsion using siphon. It is the only known marine species that can
impersonate several animals. Since, the body of octopi are made of nutritionally
fleshy muscle; devoid of spines it makes them the most susceptible prey for
predators such as sharks, damsels and barracuda. They mimic the marine animals
basically for two reasons first, to escape from its predator and secondly to
catch its prey by mimicking as a mate of its prey organism example, it mimics as
mate of crab.
Behaviour
These
intelligent creatures can mimic like the following marine animals
Lion fish:Spreading its arms wide
and keeping the head in horizontal position, imitates a poisonous lion fish.
Flat
fish: Pulling its all arm backward and moving forward imitates a poisonous
striped flat fish.
Sting ray: Moving forward by
Pulling its all arm backward with one arm left behind impersonates sting ray
with its deadly tail.
Sea
snakes: burrowing in sediment by leaving 2 arms outside the sediment bottom
mimics banded sea snake.
Jelly fish: It puffs its head and siphon to
imitate deadly jelly fish, then it moves to the surface and sinks down like
jelly fish.
Acknowledgement
The pictures were collected from following links
http://artsonearth.com/tag/mimic-octopus
No comments:
Post a Comment