The Counter-deception Blog

If the Dancing Faun has been the historical emblem of 20th Century deception efforts, the octopus could be its mascot. More cool stuff on these remarkable creatures.

Via cryptogram: Camouflage in Octopodes
Last month researchers released a video of an octopus camouflaging
itself with coral and shells, and then walking across the ocean floor.

I have a fondness for security countermeasures in the natural world. As
people, we try to figure out the most effective countermeasure for a
given attack. Evolution works differently. A species tries different
countermeasures at random, and stops at the first one that just barely
works. The result is that the natural world illustrates an amazing
variety of security countermeasures.

Camouflaged octopuses 'walk' on two tentacles
Emma Young
24 March 2005 NewScientist.com news service

IF YOU are using your arms to disguise yourself as a coconut, how do you
flee without being detected? The answer, when you have eight arms, is to use
six for camouflage and two to walk across on the sea floor.

This extraordinary behaviour has been spotted for the first time in two
species of octopus by Christine Huffard's team from the University of
California, Berkeley. Defying the notion that you need muscles attached to a
rigid skeleton for bipedal motion, the octopuses walked across the seabed
using the strong, flexible muscles in their back arms when pursued by
camera-wielding biologists. "Kinks" move down the arms involved in walking
as the animals move, and an analysis of their gait shows it qualifies as
true walking (Science, vol 307, p 1927).

Links:
Nature article
More remarkable videos
Still more videos
Christine Huffard, University of California