NEW LIMBS FOR OLD ONES.
It is a not uncommon occurrence that when an octopus is caught, it
is found to have one or more of its arms shorter than the rest, and
showing marks of having been amputated, and of the formation of a
new growth from the old cicatrix. Several such specimens have been
brought to the Brighton Aquarium; one of which was particularly
interesting. Two of its arms had evidently been bitten off about
four inches from the base; and out from the end of each healed
stump (which, in proportion to the length of the limb, was as if
a man’s arm had been amputated half-way between the shoulder and
elbow) grew a slender little piece of newly-formed arm, about as
large as a lady’s stiletto, or a small button-hook—in fact, just the
equivalent of worthy Captain Cuttle’s iron hook, which did duty for
his lost hand. It was not a specimen of the remarkable _hectocotylus_
development of the arm of the male octopus which takes place during
the breeding season, but an illustrative example of the repair and
restoration of a mutilated limb.[17]
This reparative power is possessed by some other animals, of which
the starfishes and crustacea are the most familiar instances.
The lobster and the crab, if they find themselves in depressing
circumstances, are addicted to malingering. They do not go so far as
to commit suicide; but, stopping short of that, perpetrate a kind
of demi-semi-self-immolation. In a sudden passion of fear or anger,
they will sometimes fling off one or both of their large claws, and
that which they thus do impulsively and in haste, they repent and
repair at leisure—like the intemperate man we sometimes read of in
the police news, who goes home and smashes the crockery, and, when he
is able to reflect on his folly, is glad to make good the damage as
quickly and as quietly as he can.
The starfishes, too, as the common “five-finger” (_Uraster_), and
the brittle-star (_Ophiocoma_),—which by-the-by, is not half as
brittle as has been supposed—can throw off their limbs in a pet, and
grow them again. But in both of these the act is voluntary, and the
dismemberment complete. If the claw of a lobster or crab be severed,
or wounded in any part of its length, the animal will bleed, and
waste, and die of the consequent exhaustion. I have noticed that,
especially in the spiny lobster or sea cray-fish (_Palinurus_), the
blood flows freely many hours after death, and that when I have had
occasion to remove the abdominal and caudal leaf-like appendages of
a dead cray-fish for dissection and microscopical examination, the
blood and serum have poured from the part where the cut has been
made, and thickened on the stone slab in a firm, gelatinous sheet, of
the colour and consistency of guava jelly.
The only joint from which new growth can start in the crustacea is
that connected with the body. The whole limb must be got rid of. The
octopus, on the contrary, is incapable of voluntary dismemberment,
but has the faculty of reproducing, as an outgrowth from the old
stump, any portion of an arm (or leg) which may have been lost by
misadventure. I say “arm or leg,” for one hardly knows which these
eight appendages should be called. If they are legs, the octopus
can hold on with them as tightly as the “old man of the sea” gripped
Sinbad the Sailor, and use them as dexterously as the “armless girl,”
who cuts out with hers the pretty paper designs which she sells to
visitors. If they are arms, he can walk on them, head downwards,
under water, more cleverly than the most agile monkey or street arab.
So we may call them either or both.
Returning to our mutilated octopus;—we transfer him from the tank in
which he had been temporarily placed to the wet pavement, that we may
better observe his movements when crawling. He scrambles and shuffles
away, and makes the best use he can of the jury-rigging he has fitted
on to his old stumps. As he does so, his keen eyes, mounted on little
hillocks, peer furtively around him; and while he sidles off from
his too admiring persecutors, he casts a doubtful, half-frightened,
half-defiant glance behind him, like a schoolboy, timid in the dark,
who fancies a ghost is following him. His cousin the cuttle-fish
(_Sepia_) has an eye, round like that of an owl, which stares you
out of countenance, and puzzles you by its immobility; the pupil of
the eye of an octopus is like that of a tiger turned half round. The
perpendicularly-elongated pupil of the cat gleams with hot ferocity:
the calm, cunning gaze of the octopus from out the narrow horizontal
slit of its compressed eyelids freezes by its cold cruelty.
Now, let us try to conjecture the “_fons et origo mali_”—the source
of the injury of the two lopped arms.
There lingers still amongst the fishermen of the Mediterranean a very
ancient belief that the octopus when pushed by hunger will gnaw and
devour portions of its arms. Aristotle knew of it, and positively
contradicted it; but a fallacy once planted is hard to eradicate. You
may cut it down, and apparently destroy it, root and branch, but its
seeds are scattered abroad, and spring up elsewhere and in unexpected
places. Accordingly we find Oppian, more than five centuries later,
disseminating the same old notion, and comparing this habit of the
animal with that of the bear obtaining nutriment from his paws by
sucking them during his hibernation.
When wintry skies o’er the black ocean frown,
And clouds hang low with ripen’d storms o’er-grown,
Close in the shelter of some vaulted cave
The soft-skinn’d prekes their porous bodies save.
But forc’d by want, while rougher seas they dread,
On their own feet, necessitous, are fed.
But when returning spring serenes the skies,
Nature the growing parts anew supplies.
Again on breezy sands the roamers creep,
Twine to the rocks, or paddle in the deep.
Doubtless the God whose will commands the seas,
Whom liquid worlds and wat’ry natives please,
Has taught the fish by tedious wants opprest
Life to preserve and be himself the feast.
The fact is, that the larger predatory fishes regard an octopus as
very acceptable food, and there is no better bait for many of them
than a portion of one of its arms. Some of the cetacea also are very
fond of them, and whalers have often reported that when a “fish” (as
they call it) is struck it disgorges the contents of its stomach,
amongst which they have noticed parts of the arms of cuttle-fishes
which, judging from the size of their limbs, must have been very
large specimens. The food of the sperm whale consists largely of
the gregarious squids, and the presence in spermaceti of their
undigested beaks is accepted as a test of its being genuine. That old
fish-reptile, the Ichthyosaurus, also, preyed upon them; and portions
of the horny rings of their suckers were discovered in its coprolites
by Dean Buckland. Amongst the worst enemies of the octopus in British
home-waters is the conger. They are both rock-dwellers, and if the
voracious fish come upon his cephalopod neighbour unseen, he makes a
meal of him, or, failing to drag him from his hold, bites off as much
of one or two of his arms as he can conveniently obtain. The conger,
therefore, is generally the author of the injury which the octopus
has been unfairly accused of inflicting on itself.
The Curator of the Havre Aquarium describes an attack by congers on
an octopus which he had thrown into their tank. As soon as the latter
touched the bottom it examined every corner of the stone-work. The
moment it perceived a conger it seemed to feel instinctively the
danger which menaced it, and endeavoured to conceal its presence by
stretching itself along a rock, the colour of which it immediately
assumed. Finding this useless, and seeing that it was discovered, it
changed its tactics, and shot backward, in quick retreat, leaving
behind it a long black trail of turbid water, formed by the discharge
of its ink. Then it fixed itself to a rock, with all its arms
surrounding and protecting its body, and presenting on all exposed
sides a surface furnished with suckers. In this position it awaited
the attack of its enemies. A conger approached, searched with its
snout for a vulnerable place, and, having found one, seized with its
teeth a mouthful of the living flesh. Then, straightening itself out
in the water, it turned round and round with giddy rapidity, until
the arm was, with a violent wrench, torn away from the body of the
victim. Each bite of a conger cost the unfortunate creature a limb,
and, at length, nothing remained but its dismembered body, which was
finally devoured;—some dog-fishes, attracted by the fray, partaking
of the feast.
I have always refused to permit so shocking a scene to be repeated
at the Brighton Aquarium. The Havre experiment has taught us all
that is to be learned from it concerning the mode of attack of the
conger, and the octopod’s strategy of defence. That the flesh of the
latter is a favourite food of congers, I have repeatedly proved by
watching the eagerness with which they will rend limb from limb, and
devour the body of a dead octopus to which I sometimes treat them
after removing such portions as may be required for dissection and
preservation.
An octopus is sometimes, though rarely, severely injured in battle by
one of its own species. On one occasion when a newly-arrived specimen
was put in a tank with others which had dwelt there for some time,
these old habitués made a fierce onslaught on it, and the new-comer
had one of its arms torn away. It would certainly have been killed
if one of the attendants had not rescued and removed it. Aristotle
says that the octopus does not eat its congeners, and D’Orbigny
endorses his opinion. Nevertheless one instance of this cannibalism
has occurred in the Brighton Aquarium; and in that on the Boulevard
Montmartre, Paris, in 1867, two octopuses fought and the victor
devoured the vanquished.
Another reparation or renewal by the octopods of worn or injured
portions of their limbs is the frequent shedding of the outer skins
of their suckers, the epidermis of the flat surface of them, by which
they adhere, and travel from place to place. These cast-off skins may
generally be seen floating in the water in their tanks in the form of
very thin, filmy discs, with a hole in the centre. Seeking a reason
for this, it appears to me that these, their feet-coverings, become
worn by crawling and climbing over the rough rocks, and that it is a
provision of nature for the renewal of the holding surface of their
suckers, necessary for the production of a sufficient vacuum, and the
very best method by which the repairs of the soles of their boots
can be “neatly executed.” And, as their feet increase in size with
their general growth, it may also be that they outgrow their shoes as
quickly as children do theirs, and that, therefore, they cast them
periodically when they require larger ones, as the barnacles do their
plumes, the crustacea their shells, and snakes their skins.
Sometimes the whole shoe is thrown off; at others only the sole. When
the octopus desires to get rid of this worn skin it curls its arms
together close to its body in a peculiar manner, and rubs them one
against another with a rapid motion of coiling and uncoiling which
suggests the action of “Sir Jacob,” the father of Thomas Hood’s “Miss
Kilmansegg,” when he
“In the fulness of joy and hope,
Seemed washing his hands with invisible soap
In imperceptible water.”
It appears to delight in thus cleaning itself and giving itself a
good rubbing and scrubbing all over, as a strong man enjoys his
“matutinal tub” and a hearty rub with a rough towel afterwards; or
as a bird, with evident pleasure, preens its feathers, and bathes in
water or sand. This cleansing process has been erroneously supposed
to indicate sexual excitement.