The Common Octopus (Octopus vulgaris)

In the great family of cephalopods, the octopus is the king. With eight tentacles, two hearts and a so powerful beak that it can destroy a crab shell, this amazing marine animal surprises by its high intelligence. Discrete and shy, it can imitate its environment to catch its prey. The octopus is a territorial animal. It doesn’t like to live with another one. At SEA LIFE to stimulate it, we try to organize games during its feeding: we hide pieces of shrimps in a bottle to let it open it, we shake objects to catch its attention, we interact a lot with it…. But we never forget that is a wild animal to protect.

At SEA LIFE Paris, our octopus has its own tank. Very shy, he build itself a small cave under a big stone to hide and watch visitors next to the glass. And you, will you succeed in finding it ?

Name: Peanut
Gender: female
Age: 6 months old.
Habits: likes playing with biologists’ fingers, trying to catch them with its tentacles
Feeding: loves to eat shrimps locked in a screw able pot. Takes less and less time to open it.
Favourite food: loves to fight with live crabs.

Cephalopods and molluscs like mussels belong to same family
For a common octopus: maximum life expectancy 2 years
The octopus is a genius! Training experiments have shown that it can distinguish the brightness, size, shape, and horizontal or vertical orientation of objects
It has 3 hearts and a blue blood
Any bones! The only hard part of its body is its powerful beak.
A female lays thousands of eggs and stop eating during a month to take care of them
For the male, after a month, one of the arms becomes a reproductive organ called hectocotylus with no sucker on it. (easy to recognize a male from a female)

Fishy facts 1 of 3