The closer you look at an octopus, the more you see.
Consider its anatomy: the “head,” a sack resembling a human scrotum
that can shift through the entire color spectrum; the three hearts
pumping blood that contains copper rather than iron; the eyes so very
like human ones and yet radically more elegant in design. In a
celebrated poem Ogden Nash begs the octopus to tell him if its limbs are
arms or legs. Textbooks have a no-nonsense answer: they are arms, not
legs (and emphatically not tentacles). But super tongues would be at
least as good. Each octopus arm is a muscular hydrostat, like a human
tongue, and each of the tens or hundreds of suckers on it is lined with
tens of thousands of chemoreceptors—taste buds to you and me—and a
comparable number of nerve endings that provide an exquisite sense of
touch.''
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