🌳 Ep. 204: Octopus – Top 6 Types Memory Mnemonic
👋 Intro
Hello and welcome to this episode of the podcast, "The Mnemonic Tree", where we add a single mnemonic leaf to our Tree of Knowledge.
I’m Jans, your Mnemonic Man, and today's episode we go back to the animal world to one of the most fascinating marine creatures in the world, the octopus.
When I say fascinating, I mean stupendous. Every time I do an episode on an animal I am continually amazed and astonished as to the features, adaptions and just how unique every animal on planet Earth is. Whether it be the sharks with their organ called the Ampullae of Lorenzini which helps them to sense electrical stimulation, the hippopotamus’s “blood sweat” which acts as a sunscreen, or the giraffe’s tongue that can be up to 20 inches long, they all prove that diversity is the spice of life.
Before I go on with the introduction, I have an announcement about the podcast and that is, there will be an additional segment towards the end called “Memory Tip.” This has come about after being asked many times if I could talk more about how the memory works and the various ways and techniques to improve. So, I have decided to just add a small memory tip at the end of each episode, which will be very brief, but give you a greater insight into the way our memory works and the various hacks and techniques to ameliorate it. So, I hope it will add more value to the show and help you on your learning journey.
Getting back to the octopus. They are a marine animal belonging to the class Cephalopoda, which also includes squids and cuttlefish. They are known for their intelligence, and possess eight highly flexible arms lined with suckers, which are used for locomotion, manipulating objects, capturing prey, and exploring their environment.
These invertebrates are soft bodied and are carnivorous, feeding mainly on crustaceans, fish, and molluscs. They possess several strategies to protect themselves against predators which include ejecting clouds of ink to obscure vision, rapidly changing the colour and texture of their skin for camouflage, and mimicking the shapes and movements of other sea creatures. They are also able to detach a limb to escape danger, which can later be regenerated.
They are highly intelligent animals that are capable of problem solving, tool use, and feats that require memory. Their love life however, is tragic and their life spans are way too short with most only living between one to two years.
Just to finish up the introduction I highly recommend for everyone to see (if they have not already) “My Octopus Teacher,” a stunning and very touching movie on Netflix.
Today’s mnemonic will be on the top six types of octopus.
So, with that being said, we will begin with a summary from Wikipedia.
📖 Wikipedia Summary
An octopus (pl.: octopuses or octopodes[a]) is a soft-bodied, eight-limbed mollusc of the order Octopoda (/ɒkˈtɒpədə/, ok-TOP-ə-də[3]). The order consists of some 300 species and is grouped within the class Cephalopoda with squids, cuttlefish, and nautiloids. Like other cephalopods, an octopus is bilaterally symmetric with two eyes and a beaked mouth at the centre point of the eight limbs.[b]
An octopus can radically deform its shape, enabling it to squeeze through small gaps. They trail their appendages behind them as they swim. The siphon is used for respiration and locomotion (by water jet propulsion). Octopuses have a complex nervous system and excellent sight, and are among the most intelligent and behaviourally diverse invertebrates.
Octopuses inhabit various ocean habitats, including coral reefs, pelagic waters, and the seabed; some live in the intertidal zone and others at abyssal depths. Most species grow quickly, mature early, and are short-lived. In most species, the male uses a specially-adapted arm to deliver sperm directly into the female's mantle cavity, after which he becomes senescent and dies, while the female deposits fertilised eggs in a den and cares for them until they hatch, after which she also dies.
They are predators and hunt crustaceans, bivalves, gastropods and fish. Strategies to defend themselves against their own predators include expelling ink, camouflage, and threat displays, the ability to jet quickly through the water and hide, and deceit. All octopuses are venomous, but only the blue-ringed octopuses are known to be deadly to humans.
Octopuses appear in mythology as sea monsters such as the kraken of Norway and the Akkorokamui of the Ainu, and possibly the Gorgon of ancient Greece. A battle with an octopus appears in Victor Hugo's book Toilers of the Sea. Octopuses appear in Japanese shunga erotic art. They are eaten and considered a delicacy by humans in many parts of the world, especially the Mediterranean and Asia.
Extracted from: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus]
🧠 Memory Mnemonic
Octopus – Top 6 Types Memory Mnemonic – CaGeD CoMB
(Picture a giant octopus reaching into his cage to grab his comb to look great one last time before his date!)
1. Common octopus
2. Giant Pacific octopus
3. Dumbo octopus
4. Caribbean reef octopus
5. Mimic octopus
6. Blue-ringed octopus
🔎 Five Fun Facts
1. Octopuses are the masters of disguise and can instantly change the colour and texture of their skin using special pigment cells called chromatophores. This allows them to blend seamlessly into their environment, whether it be rocks, coral, sand, or even other animals.
2. An octopus, along with squids and cuttlefish, has three hearts. Two of these hearts pump blood through the gills, while the third one pumps it through to the rest of the body. Interestingly, the heart that pumps to the body stops beating when the octopus swims. These hearts pump blue blood, which is due to the copper-based hemocyanin rather than the iron-based haemoglobin that humans possess.
3. The third fact is a little depressing, especially for octopuses. But most octopuses only live for one to two years, with the exception of the giant Pacific octopus which can live up to five. This short life cycle is solely due to their reproduction where they can only reproduce once after which they die. This is called semelparous, with salmon sharing the same fate. Males become senescent after mating, while females become senescent after they lay the eggs, but hang on to after their eggs hatch.
4. Octopuses are known for their intelligence and problem-solving skills. They can navigate mazes, open jars, and even unscrew lids to get to the food inside. Amazingly, in aquariums, some have been caught sneaking into other tanks to steal fish and then returning to their own tank undetected.
5. The octopus has axolotl qualities, where if it loses an arm, it can grow a new one back completely. The regrown arm is just as functional, with the same powerful suckers and flexibility as the original. Further to this each arm can even act semi-independently, exploring and reacting, without direct input from the brain.
🎓 Three-Question Quiz
Q.1. An octopus has more neurons in its arms than in its brain. Is that True or False?
Q.2. What is the only hard part of an octopus’s body that limits the size of spaces it can squeeze through?
Q.3. What is the largest species of octopus in the world?
Bonus Q. What extra effect does octopus ink have besides blocking a predator’s vision? Options are it dulls the predator’s sense of smell and taste or it lightly paralyses the predator
Bonus Q. What do you call two octopuses that look exactly the same?
🧠 Memory Mnemonic Recap
Octopus – Top 6 Types Memory Mnemonic – CaGeD CoMB
(Picture a giant octopus reaching into his cage to grab his comb to look great one last time before his date!)
1. Common octopus
2. Giant Pacific octopus
3. Dumbo octopus
4. Caribbean reef octopus
5. Mimic octopus
6. Blue-ringed octopus
🎓 Three-Question Quiz Answers
Q.1. An octopus has more neurons in its arms than in its brain. Is that True or False?
A. True - most of their neurons are in their arms, giving each arm semi-independent control.
Q.2. What is the only hard part of an octopus’s body that limits the size of spaces it can squeeze through?
A. Its beak
Q.3. What is the largest species of octopus in the world?
A. The giant Pacific octopus
Bonus Q. What extra effect does octopus ink have besides blocking a predator’s vision? Options are it dulls the predator’s sense of smell and taste or it lightly paralyses the predator
A. It dulls the predator’s sense of smell and taste
Bonus Q. What do you call two octopuses that look exactly the same?
A. Itenticle! Apparently, they even had the same identical blush when they saw the bottom of the ocean!
🔤 Word of the Week
Carrack
[ kar-uhk ]
noun
a merchant vessel having various rigs
Example
Legends tell of a giant octopus that once dragged a carrack beneath the waves, never to be seen again.
Extracted from: [https://www.dictionary.com/]
💡 Memory Tip
For our first memory tip today, we will start to go through the various types of mnemonics, and the first one of this very long list is acronyms, which is an abbreviation formed from the initial letter of other words which is pronounced as a word.
A good example of this one is the mnemonic for the Great Lakes of North America, which we did back in episode 31, for which the acronym is HOMES, for Lake Huron, Lake Ontario, Lake Michigan, Lake Erie, and Lake Superior.
Acronyms like this help reduce the cognitive load and make recall much faster. So, test yourself on two pretty well-known acronyms, NASA and NATO. See you next week.
👉 Free Memory Mnemonics at:
https://www.themnemonictreepodcast.com
🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts:
https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-mnemonic-tree-podcast/id1591795132
🎧 Listen on Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/show/3T0LdIJ9PBQMXM3cdKd42Q?si=fqmaN2TNS8qqc7jOEVa-Cw
🔗 References
Word of the Day - carrack | Dictionary.com
https://chatgpt.com/c/68b1859e-92e0-8325-886b-86ef9ef6f000
https://www.sheddaquarium.org/stories/eight-strange-and-wonderful-facts-about-octopuses
https://www.natgeokids.com/au/discover/animals/sea-life/octopus-facts/