Why does an octopus have 3 hearts? The real number of hearts an octopus has
Octopuses are one of the most mysterious sea creatures. Many people wonder how many hearts an octopus has.
Octopuses are one of the most mysterious sea creatures
No place on Earth contains as many diverse and strange creatures as the seas and oceans. Many inhabitants of the seabed are the oldest representatives of the planet, much older than humans and all animals. One of these creatures is the octopus, a cephalopod whose size can reach 7-8 m.
Octopuses can be different. Thus, their size varies from a few centimeters to 8 m. The weight of the largest octopus was more than 200 kg, although it usually still does not exceed 15-20 kg.
No place on Earth contains as many diverse and strange creatures as the seas and oceans
The question of its color can be perplexing: this mollusk comes in different colors, and they are also capable of changing their appearance almost instantly. Therefore, very different descriptions can be applied to an octopus.
They have a soft oval body, similar to a ball, dressed in something resembling a mantle - a skin-muscular sac that can be smooth or pimply, depending on the type of mollusk. There are 8 tentacles on the body that surround the octopus's mouth.
The mollusk catches prey thanks to special suction cups located on the inside of the tentacles. There are a lot of these suckers - several hundred on one “hand”.
Tentacles are needed not only to grab prey: they also have visual analyzers that allow them to assess the surrounding environment.
Many inhabitants of the seabed are the oldest representatives of the planet, much older than humans and all animals
The mollusk has prominent eyes. They are huge and occupy about 10% of the entire body; the size of the eyeball can reach 40 cm. In terms of the anatomical structure, octopuses’ eyes are similar to human ones, but they still have a slightly different scheme for perceiving the world.
The only solid part of the octopus's body is its beak, which is similar to a bird's beak. It is this that can become a limitation for the mollusk in trying to crawl into any hole, since the rest of its body is so soft that it can penetrate any crevice.
The internal structure of the octopus has always aroused interest among people, since many people know the fact that it has several hearts. Therefore, a common question is how many hearts does an octopus have? This mollusk has 3 cardiac muscles.
This feature is explained by the fact that they have a very strong blood resistance, which the heart simply could not cope with. Thus, this mollusk is the only representative of the animal world that has as many as 3 hearts.
Octopus Volcano (video)
Features of the cardiac system
One of the octopus's 3 hearts is the main one - it pumps blood throughout the body. It is larger in size than the others and consists of two atria and a small ventricle. This heart bears the main burden of ensuring the vital functions of the body.
The other two cardiac organs can be called accessory - they are smaller in size, located near the two gills and are muscular extensions of blood vessels. They help the main organ move blood throughout the body. Because of the peculiarity of their work, they are also called “gills”. They distill venous blood, which is enriched with oxygen in the gills and then enters the atria of the main organ.
Thus, we can distinguish the types of heart organs in octopuses:
- The main thing;
- auxiliary.
However, different work does not affect the frequency of their beating - the octopus has three hearts that beat in the same rhythm. This cannot but cause admiration - 3 hearts of a huge mollusk beating in one beat. The frequency of the beat depends on the temperature of the water: the colder the water, the slower the heart beats. On average, the frequency is reduced to 40 times per minute.
The octopus also has unique blood, which has an amazing blue color, as well as high intelligence, proven by many studies. So 3 hearts distill not just blood, but a blue liquid.
It is worth mentioning the octopuses' special weapon - the ink bomb. The mollusk has a special organ in its body - an ink sac filled with liquid, which the octopus throws out in case of danger. As a result, an ink curtain is formed, allowing you to hide from any enemy that might attack the octopus.
Giant octopus (video)
Attention, TODAY only!
How many hearts does an octopus have? At first glance, this question seems more than strange, because all living creatures have 1 heart, so why should something be different for a deep-sea inhabitant? But if you study the octopus in more detail, it becomes clear that the octopus has 3 hearts. And this makes him one of the most unique creatures on the entire planet.
Octopuses are cephalopods
Appearance
A lot of organisms live in the depths of the sea. One of the most unusual are octopuses. These are ancient creatures, because octopuses appeared on the planet much earlier than the human race.
Octopuses are cephalopods. Their habitat is not limited by territorial factors or climatic conditions. You can find octopuses all over the planet: both off the coast of Africa and in the Arctic. The main thing for them is salt water.
The average size of a mollusk is 1.5-2 m. However, in nature there are both octopuses only a couple of centimeters long and individuals reaching 8 m. The size of the tentacles of especially large octopuses exceeds 2.5 m. The largest mollusk was found off the coast of western Canada, his weight was almost 250 kg.
You can find octopuses all over the planet
If you think about it, the legend of a huge octopus that destroyed many ships no longer seems so fantastic. Perhaps the famous Kraken really existed.
Many people know what an octopus looks like - no description of its appearance is required. However, it is worth clarifying: what people are accustomed to calling the head is actually the body of the octopus. And the tentacles are the arms and legs located around the mouth. Of the 8 tentacles, 2 are used to move along the bottom; they can roughly be called legs. The remaining “paws” are needed to assess the environment and capture prey - these are the animal’s arms.
There are about 300 species of octopuses in total and they are all truly amazing creatures. They live in subtropical and tropical seas and oceans, from shallow waters to a depth of 200 m. They prefer rocky shores and are considered the most intelligent among all invertebrates. The more scientists learn about octopuses, the more they admire them.
1. An octopus's brain is donut-shaped.
2. The octopus does not have a single bone, this allows it to penetrate into a hole that is 4 times smaller than its own size.
3. Due to the large amount of copper, octopus blood is blue.
4. The tentacles contain more than 10,000 taste buds.
5. Octopuses have three hearts. One of them drives blue blood throughout the body, and the other two carry it through the gills.
6. In case of danger, octopuses, like lizards, are able to throw away their tentacles, breaking them on their own.
7. Octopuses camouflage themselves with their environment by changing their color. When calm they are brown, when frightened they turn white, and when angry they acquire a reddish tint.
8. To hide from enemies, octopuses emit a cloud of ink; it not only reduces visibility, but also masks odors.
9. Octopuses breathe through gills, but can also spend quite a long time out of water.
10. Octopuses have rectangular pupils.
11. Octopuses always keep their home clean; they “sweep” it with a stream of water from their funnel, and put the remaining food in a specially designated place nearby.
12. Octopuses are intelligent invertebrates that can be trained, remember their owners, recognize shapes and have an amazing ability to unscrew jars.
13. Speaking about the unsurpassed intelligence of octopuses, we can recall the world-famous octopus-oracle Paul, who guessed the outcome of matches involving the German football team. Actually, he lived in the Oberhausen Aquarium. Paul died, as oceanologists suggest, of natural causes. There was even a monument erected to him at the entrance to the aquarium.
14. The personal life of sea creatures is not very happy. Males often become victims of females, and they, in turn, rarely survive after childbirth and doom their offspring to an orphaned life.
15. There is only one species of octopus - the Pacific striped one, which, unlike its fellows, is an exemplary family man. He lives in a couple for several months and throughout this time he performs something very similar to a kiss, touching his mouth with his other half. After the birth of the offspring, the mother spends more than one month with the children, taking care of them and raising them.
16. This same Pacific striped fish boasts an unusual hunting style. Before the attack, he lightly pats his victim “on the shoulder,” as if warning, but this does not increase his chances of survival, so the purpose of the habit still remains a mystery.
17. During reproduction, males use their tentacles to remove spermatophores “from behind the sinus” and carefully place them in the mantle cavity of the female.
18. On average, octopuses live 1-2 years; those who live up to 4 years are long-livers.
19. The smallest octopuses grow up to only 1 centimeter, and the largest up to 4 meters. The largest octopus was caught off the coast of the United States in 1945, its weight was 180 kg and its length was as much as 8 meters.
20. Scientists managed to decipher the octopus genome. In the future, this will help to establish how they managed to evolve into such an intelligent creature and understand the origin of amazing cognitive abilities. It is currently known that the length of the octopus genome is 2.7 billion base pairs, which is almost equal to the length of the human genome, which has 3 billion base pairs.
Domain: Eukaryotes
Kingdom: Animals
Type: Shellfish
Class: Cephalopods
A majestic inhabitant of the sea, small and large, the octopus is still a mystery to people. A spherical body, long tentacled arms, a beak nose and the highest intelligence combined in one animal and turned it into a hero of Hollywood thrillers. However, meaningful behavior and a menacing appearance are not yet a reason to classify an octopus as a monster.
Description of the octopus
Everything about the structure of an octopus is unusual, and the answer to the question of how many hearts an octopus has will surprise many: it has three. On Earth, only a few animals have such an unusual supply of hearts. The earthworm and the mexina fish even outdid the mollusk and acquired five and four hearts.
The order of octopuses includes all species, from the smallest to the giants, living in all subtropical and tropical seas and oceans of the planet.
Structure
What the common man thinks is the head is actually the body of the mollusk. It is soft, oval-shaped, and quite short relative to its tentacles. Where the octopus's "arms" meet, there is a mouth, which is armed with two beak-shaped jaws. The animal's throat resembles a grater, with which it grinds food. Powerful jaws and a strong grater with rows of small teeth split the shell of mollusks and allow them to get to the most tender meat.
Tentacle arms, 8 in number, help the mollusk move and grab food. They are connected to each other by membranes. On their inner surface there are suction cups responsible for holding prey. One individual can have up to 2,000 such suckers. The animal’s taste buds are also located on the tentacles, telling it whether the prey it has caught is edible.
Interesting! An octopus has 6 arms and 2 legs. Two tentacles are adapted to walk along the bottom, which it does successfully at great depths.
The eyes of a cephalopod are equipped with a lens, and are very similar to human ones, only its pupil is rectangular, and not round, like in humans. That is why his gaze seems to us to be intelligent and wise in an alien way.
The octopus does not have a hearing organ, but breathes through gills. As for hearts, he really has three of them. The main one is responsible for driving blue blood throughout the body of the mollusk, the other two are located under the gills, and push blood through them.
Color
In a calm state, the animal is colored brown. However, the skin cells contain pigments that help the mollusk quickly change color. If an octopus is frightened of something, it turns white, and when it is very angry, its body turns crimson. During a hunt, an octopus, like a chameleon, can reproduce on its skin the pattern of the surface behind which it is hiding.
Size
The standard length for males is 1.3 meters, for females - 1.2 meters. It is measured taking into account the tentacles, but the body of the mollusk can be from 30 to 50 cm long. Weight reaches 10 kg, but most specimens weigh from 5 to 7 kg. As you can see, there is no air of impressiveness here. Legends about giant octopuses were written in ancient times, when people did not have the opportunity to take a closer look at this harmless creature.
Interesting! The largest octopus is the rock octopus. A mollusk with a tentacle length of 3.5 meters and a weight of 58 kg is officially registered in the Guinness Book.
Habitat
Living permanently in tropical and subtropical waters, the octopus prefers water salinity of at least 30%. Some species live in shallow water, others like to climb deeper, 100-150 meters from the surface.
For a quiet life, he needs rocky shores, where he can take refuge in one of the natural caves. Having no skeleton, the mollusk easily fits into any hollow niches and crevices, hiding from predators and resting in them during the day. He goes hunting at night. If there are no rocks, the octopus does an excellent job of building a real fortress from scrap materials or digs a deep hole in the ground, equipping its nest.
Behavior
The mollusk loves its home and keeps it perfectly clean, sweeping away all debris using a stream of water from a funnel. He stores the leftovers outside the shelter.
When arranging a house, the octopus makes it wide inside, leaving a narrow passage to protect itself from enemies.
The octopus loves to drag into the house everything that is lying badly on the seabed. Boxes, plastic bottles, rubber boots, tires can become his home, but he will definitely drag something there too.
For the winter, the mollusk goes to the depths of the ocean, and in the summer it prefers to hunt in shallow water.
Nutrition
The animal's main diet consists of crayfish, crabs and other shellfish. However, he can eat anything that moves if he can handle it. Its menu includes fish, plankton, and snails. To get food, the octopus has learned to camouflage itself well. Seeing a potential victim, he blends in with the surroundings. When the prey approaches within throwing distance, the octopus pounces on it and releases poison, paralyzing the game. The poison is formed in the salivary glands of the animal and enters the victim through a wound made by the beak.
Enemies
Whales, killer whales, dolphins, moray eels, seals, sea lions, sharks and large seabirds are all natural enemies of octopuses. Man also hunts him. Who among us has not tried a seafood cocktail with small octopuses or treated ourselves to canned octopus meat?
Reproduction
For reproduction in males, one tentacle was modified to serve as a copulatory organ. The mating dance of animals resembles friendly shaking of tentacles. The male holds the female by them, fertilizing her. A week passes, and the female octopus goes to lay eggs. For laying, she selects a well-covered place, and the clutch itself looks like a large bunch of grapes.
Mother octopuses are very caring and fearless. They desperately protect their offspring, care for them, providing future octopuses with an influx of fresh water and constantly cleaning the eggs from dirt and debris. The rate of development of the offspring depends on the water temperature. The usual incubation period is 4 - 6 weeks.
Interesting! The lifespan of octopuses is 4 years, but females live less, on average about two years. Sexual maturity in females occurs at a weight of 1 kg, and males are ready for mating at a weight of 100 g.
On the days when the octopus chooses a bride, it becomes aggressive and forgets about caution. An encounter with a large individual at such a moment can result in serious injuries for a person.
Of course, the photo of a large octopus inspires respect and a bit of fear, but the myths dispelled by science about the animal’s bloodthirstiness brought it to the pages of children’s books and cartoons. In them he is funny and cheerful.
Adults trusted Paul the octopus to predict the results of matches at the 2010 FIFA World Cup. And he did not let them down; 80% of his predictions turned out to be correct. Unfortunately, the age of the octopus is short-lived, and we will have to look for another oracle.
How much do you know about octopuses? Besides the fact that they have eight legs? For example, do you know how many hearts an octopus has? Yes, yes, the question was asked absolutely correctly. After all, an octopus has not one heart, but several! Or what are these creatures capable of?
Let's figure it out. And not only how many hearts an octopus has, but in general what kind of animal it is and where it can be found.
Huge clam
The octopus (photo below) is a cephalopod. These creatures live in the seas of the entire globe, from the Arctic to Antarctica. But still, octopuses cannot tolerate fresh water; give them a salinity of at least 30 percent.
Their sizes are also very different: from a few centimeters to 6-7 meters. But still, “average height” for them is 1.5-2 meters. The largest octopuses live off the coast of Colombia: some weigh 15-20 kg, and the length of their tentacles varies from 2 to 2.5 meters, and sometimes more!
The largest octopus was discovered in Western Canada. weighed 242 kilograms, and the length of its tentacles reached 10 meters! It must be a terrible sight. Now all the stories of sailors about krakens capable of sinking ships no longer seem like just stupid fairy tales.
External structure of an octopus
Octopuses have a soft oval body covered in a mantle (skin-muscle sac). The mantle can be smooth, with pimples, or wrinkled (depending on the type of octopus). Inside, underneath, there are organs.
The mantle also serves as water storage. Since the octopus is a sea creature, it cannot exist without water. In order to crawl onto land, it requires liquid reserves. This reserve is enough for four hours. However, cases have been recorded when octopuses remained on land for more than a day.
The octopus has large eyes on its head, like most representatives of deep-sea creatures, with square-shaped pupils.
The octopus's mouth is small, with a pair of strong jaws. Outwardly, it somewhat resembles the beak of a parrot. That is why it is called “beak”. There is a lingual outgrowth (“odontophora”) located in the mouth. On both sides of the body there are gills, which are responsible for extracting oxygen from the water.
Tentacle hands
Eight tentacle arms extend from the head and surround the mouth. On the inside of each tentacle there are suction cups, with the help of which the octopus is able to hold prey or stick to underwater objects. There can be up to 220 suction cups on one “hand”! An interesting fact is that the suction cups have So octopuses are truly unique: they are able to see with their limbs!
Octopus tentacles are the most often targeted by enemies. Therefore, nature endowed octopuses with the ability to tear off their limbs in order to escape. The enemy will only have the trophy. This property in science is called autotomy. The tentacle muscles begin to contract so strongly that they rupture. Literally within a day, the wound begins to heal, and the limb grows back. Like a lizard, you might say. But, no. A lizard can only drop its tail in a certain place, no more, no less. And the octopus can tear off its “arm” wherever it wants.
Internal structure of an octopus
Octopuses have a huge brain, which is protected by a cartilaginous capsule (skull). The brain consists of 64 lobes and even has the rudiments of a cortex. Biologists compare the intelligence of an octopus to that of a domestic cat. Octopuses are capable of emotions and are very smart. They have a good memory and are even able to distinguish geometric shapes.
Like other creatures, octopuses have a liver, stomach, glands, and intestinal tract. Thus, the esophagus penetrates the liver and brain on its way to the stomach. The esophagus is very thin, therefore, before swallowing food, the octopus crushes it well with its “beak”. Then, already in the stomach, it digests food with the help of digestive juice, which is produced by the liver and pancreas. In the stomach of the octopus there is a process - the caecum, which is responsible for the absorption of useful substances. The octopus liver is a large, brown, oval-shaped organ. It performs several functions at once: absorbs amino acids, produces enzymes and stores nutrients.
In the occipital part of the skull there are organs of balance - statocysts. These are bubbles containing liquid and calcareous stones (statolites). When the octopus's body changes position in space, the pebbles move and come into contact with the walls of the vesicles covered with sensitive cells, which greatly irritates the octopus. This is how he can navigate in space even without light.
In a special extension of the rectum, the octopus stores a supply of poisonous ink, which serves as an excellent means of protection. The skin (more precisely, the mantle of an octopus) contains specific cells: chromotophores and iridiocysts, which are responsible for the ability to change color. The former contain black, red, brown, yellow and orange pigments. The latter allow the octopuses to turn purple, green, blue or metallic.
Octopuses have highly developed muscles and skin in many places with capillaries, which serve to transition arteries into veins.
How many hearts does an octopus have?
So, we come to this question that worries many. It is already clear that these creatures have more than one heart. But then how much? Probably everyone will be surprised now. After all, an octopus has 3 hearts. Three! None of the representatives of mammals, amphibians or birds have such a phenomenon. Yes, there are four-chambered hearts, like those of mammals, three-chambered ones, like those of amphibians, or generally single-chambered ones. But everyone has one heart!
Then why does an octopus have 3 hearts? Let us recall that the heart is a muscle that, contracting at a certain speed, pumps blood in a living organism. So, which includes the octopus, they do not have very “successful” gills: they create a strong Therefore, one heart simply could not cope with it.
How do they work?
So, in an octopus, One is the main thing, which drives blood throughout the octopus’s entire body. This heart consists of two atria and a small ventricle. And one more heart near each gill (the octopus has two of them). These hearts are smaller. They help the main muscle push blood through the gills, from where it, already filled with oxygen, returns to the atrium of the large heart. That's why they are called "gills".
No matter how many hearts an octopus has, they all beat the same way. The frequency of their contractions depends on the temperature of the water in which the creature is located. So, the colder the water, the slower the hearts beat. For example, at a temperature of 20-22 degrees, muscles contract about 40-50 times per minute.
By the way, the octopus’s heart, or rather the heart, is far from the only feature of the mollusk. His blood is also very peculiar. Just imagine, she is blue! The thing is that it contains the enzyme hemocyanin, which contains copper oxides.