5 Octopus Facts That Prove They're Floating Piles of Superpowers

When you have a near infinite supply of something, you’ll always end up abusing it. (Case in point: onanism.) A more relevant case in point: cephalopod arms. Octopuses not only have eight arms, they can also regrow them, so they honestly don’t care too much about losing limbs, which is just one reason why they never got that into The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. (The other reason was because they felt that Disney was a bunch of cowards for not making Bucky and Sam an official couple.)

Anyway, octopuses regularly rip off their arms for whatever reason. Some of these floating Cthulhu heads will literally disarm themselves to distract a predator so they can escape. Octopuses don’t even have to worry about nicking an artery, as they can apparently close it off to reduce blood loss. This tactic of giving your enemy a hand is often employed by Vampyroteuthis infernalis, the "Vampire Squid from Hell,” which is unhelpfully neither a squid nor a vampire or from hell. 

Octopuses usually sever their limbs by biting them off. Some, however, don’t spit it out later. When a cephalopod is bored or stressed out, like when you put them into an aquarium without enough cover, they will sometimes self-cannibalize their own arms, something that anyone trapped in a doctor’s office waiting room without good cell reception can more than relate to. Basically, some octopuses are swallowers and some are spitters, and since we went ahead with this untasteful joke, let’s go for broke and talk about how octopus mating is actually just a form of fingerbanging.

See, in octopuses, one of their tentacles is the penis, a fact that is surprising to anyone except cephalopod specialists and historians of Japanese art. They use that tentacle to deposit packets of sperm into a female, but the problem they run into is the fact that the female is often larger than them and might try to eat them, but not in the fun way. So some males don’t risk it and instead rip off their penis tentacle and give it to the female instead of flowers or whatever. Meaning that, in the world of octopuses, it’s not at all unseemly for a gentleman cephalopod to give a lady cephalopod a gift and tell her to go and screw herself.