SDOP 62
© Gill McDonald © 123RF / Chatchadaporn Kittisaratham
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FLAMBOYANT CUTTLEFISH Out mostly during the day, these colourful beauties walk along sandy bottoms on their lower arms in their camouflage colours hunting for small fish and crustaceans. The wildly flamboyant colours are displayed in defence, warning potential predators to stay away. Their muscle toxins have the same fatal outcome as their cousin, the blue-ringed octopus. In fact, they are the only poisonous cuttlefish, and all this in a sevencentimetre-long package.
10 WONDERPUS OCTOPUS
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BLUE-RINGED OCTOPUS These tiny guys, about five centimetres long as an adult, are among the deadliest animals in the sea. An adult weighing just 25 grams possesses enough venom in its saliva to fatally paralyse 10 large humans. Blue rings only appear when the creature is agitated. They hide in shells, bottles or tins.
Often confused with the larger, similarly coloured mimic octopus, this creature tends to emerge very slowly from dens in the sand at dusk and dawn and hunts in dim light. They have well-defined white spots on the mantle with white bars on the arms. There is no white border at the base of the suckers, which distinguishes them from the mimic. The white spots are unique for each animal, just like a fingerprint, and can facilitate monitoring in the wild.
© Gill McDonald
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CHAMBERED NAUTILUS Like the ancient coelacanth fish, nautilus has remained unchanged for over 400 million years. During prehistoric times there were about 10,000 different species, but only a small handful are known to survive today. Like most cephalopods, it can use jet propulsion to attain speeds of over two knots. A small tube near the animal’ s tentacles, known as a siphon, expels water under pressure, which propels it in the opposite direction at high speeds. Its life cycle is largely a mystery as most of its time is spent in deep water. The shell is comprised of many individual chambers, each individually sealed, containing an amount of gas providing the animal with buoyancy. SDOP
© 123RF / Visarute Angkatavanich