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"Bizarre" Octopuses Carry Coconuts as Instant Shelters
Scientists are blown away by octopuses discovered tip-toeing with coconut-shell halves suctioned to their undersides, then reassembling the halves and disappearing inside—a rare example of animal tool use, a new study says.
"We were blown away," said biologist Mark Norman of discovering the octopus behavior off Indonesia. "It was hard not to laugh underwater and flood your [scuba] mask."
The coconut-carrying behavior makes the veined octopus the newest member of the elite club of tool-using animals—and the first member without a backbone, researchers say. (Watch This Octopus Use Shells as a Shield).
A team led by biologist Julian Finn of Museum Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, was observing 20 veined octopuses (Amphioctopus marginatus) on a regular basis.
The researchers noticed that the animals were frequently using their approximately 6-inch-long (15-centimeter-long) tentacles to carry coconut shells bigger than their roughly 3-inch-wide (8-centimeter-wide) bodies.
An octopus would dig up the two halves of a coconut shell, then
