{"id":219280,"date":"2025-09-11T22:29:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-11T22:29:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/219280\/"},"modified":"2025-09-11T22:29:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-11T22:29:10","slug":"how-to-use-8-arms-octopuses-tend-to-explore-with-their-front-limbs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/219280\/","title":{"rendered":"How to use 8 arms? Octopuses tend to explore with their front limbs"},"content":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON — Humans may be right-handed or left-handed. It turns out octopuses<\/a> don’t have a dominant arm, but they do tend to perform some tasks more often with their front arms, new research shows. <\/p>\n

Scientists studied a series of short videos of wild octopuses<\/a> crawling, swimming, standing, fetching, and groping — among other common activities — to analyze how each of the eight arms were moving.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll of the arms can do all of this stuff \u2013 that\u2019s really amazing,\u201d said co-author and marine biologist Roger Hanlon of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. <\/p>\n

Octopus limbs<\/a> aren\u2019t specialized as many mammal limbs are. However, the three octopus species in the study showed a clear preference for using their four front arms, which they did about 60% of the time. The back arms were used more frequently for stilting and rolling that help move the octopus forward.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe forward arms do most of the exploring, the rear arms are mostly for walking,\u201d said Mike Vecchione, a Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History zoologist who was not involved in the study.<\/p>\n

Researchers analyzed video clips taken between 2007 and 2015 in the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea. It was the first large study to examine precise limb actions in the wild. <\/p>\n

Unlike previous research of octopus behavior in a laboratory setting, the new work showed that octopuses did not show a preference for right or left arms in their natural environment. <\/p>\n

Results were published Thursday in Scientific Reports<\/a>. <\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m in awe that the researchers managed to do this,\u201d said Janet Voight, an octopus biologist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, who had no role in the study. <\/p>\n

Octopuses are shy and elusive creatures. The species studied spend most of their time hidden in dens \u2014 meaning that filming them required patience and perseverance over many years.<\/p>\n

Octopus limbs are complex \u2014 used for mobility and sensing the environment. Each arm contains between 100 and 200 suckers \u2013 complex sensory organs \u201cequivalent to the human nose, lips, and tongue,\u201d said Hanlon.<\/p>\n

If an arm is bitten off by a predator, as often happens in the wild, octopuses have multiple backups. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you’ve got eight arms and they’re all capable,\u201d Hanlon said, \u201cthere’s a lot of redundancy.\u201d <\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute\u2019s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WASHINGTON — Humans may be right-handed or left-handed. It turns out octopuses don’t have a dominant arm, but…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":219281,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[119566,3425,347,119565,15228,159,74119,67,132,68,837],"class_list":{"0":"post-219280","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-119566","9":"tag-animals","10":"tag-article","11":"tag-octopuses","12":"tag-oddities","13":"tag-science","14":"tag-shellfish","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-unitedstates","17":"tag-us","18":"tag-wildlife"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115188030938643763","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=219280"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219280\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/219281"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=219280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=219280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=219280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}