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The animal kingdom
One octopus detaches an arm and sends it swimming
It swam off so convincingly that science named it as a parasite.
Photo:
James St. John
· CC BY 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons
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detachable arm, swims alone
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1 detachable arm, swims alone
The male argonaut is a fraction of the female's size. He fills a specialised arm, the hectocotylus, with sperm, detaches it, and it swims away under its own power to find her and deposit its contents. He does not go with it.
When 19th-century naturalists found these arms inside female argonauts, they assumed they were parasitic worms and gave them a genus name — Hectocotylus. Georges Cuvier named it in 1829. It took until the 1850s for anyone to work out that the worm was a male octopus's arm.
Did you know
Blanket octopus males take it further: they are up to 40,000 times lighter than the female, live only long enough to mate once, and die immediately afterwards. It is the most extreme size difference between sexes known in any animal that is not parasitic.
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