Octopus

What if we told you the world has forests harboring creatures with three hearts and where the canopy can grow by a foot a day? What if we told you it was silently disappearing? What if we told you we now have the chance to bring it back?

Squids and octopuses are masters of camouflage, blending into their environment to evade predators or surprise prey. Some aspects of how these cephalopods become reversibly transparent are still "unclear," largely because researchers can't culture cephalopod skin cells in the lab. Today, however, researchers report that they have replicated the tunable transparency of some squid skin cells in mammalian cells, which can be cultured. The work could not only shed light on basic squid biology, but […]

In the end it was neither beauty, nor gymnastic mating rituals that won the public over.

Octopus is a popular ingredient in many cuisines, with some 420,000 metric tons of this mollusc being caught worldwide each year. The rising global popularity of octopus has been attributed to the increasingly adventurous tastes of younger consumers, its nutritional benefits and the decline of traditional fish stocks such as cod. This helps explain why the food processing corporation, Nueva Pescanova, aims to build the world's first indoor octopus farm in Gran Canaria: a thousand-tank facility […]

Will you choose beauty? The carnivorous Wavy Bubble Snail, perhaps, with its billowing skirts shimmering under UV light. Or will it be age? Like the venerable 500-year-old Methuselah oyster.