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The Octopus is one of the world’s most alien creatures, but nothing puts that into perspective more than the physiological differences between them and the creatures we are most familiar with. Like it cockroaches and calamariOctopus neurology is controlled by several separate brains – nine in the case of this strange octopod. And a lot of their manipulation skills come down to the fact that they can use that brain to control eight different tentacles. But their circulation is just as unusual. The octopus has multiple hearts, and that fact can reveal secrets about their evolutionary history, while also giving us insight into how they manipulate their environment. Here are all the facts you need to know about octopus hearts.
How the heart works
Not every animal has a heart. sea anemones and starfish both manage without a special organ to pump blood, but the fact that the jellyfish is the largest animal without a heart is an indication of the need for a heart for animals that are physiologically advanced above a certain level. The idea of a circulatory system powered by a centralized pump that can deliver blood throughout the body arose about 600 million years ago and has been a staple of nearly all animal life ever since. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about a American Eagle, An tree frog, or a Bumblebee, the function is the same: to provide nutrients and oxygen to nourish the body tissues and to dispose of all the waste that is in circulation.
Most animals have one heart, but even those can differ significantly in design and functionality. the above-mentioned Bumblebee has an open circulatory system with a heart that runs throughout the body and simply drains blood across the organs. The extraordinarily long neck of Africa‘s giraffe requires these horses to have incredibly powerful hearts with thick heart walls capable of efficiently pumping blood all the way to their brains. The world’s fastest land mammal — the cheetah – also has an incredibly fast heart and one capable of exceptional acceleration. Scientific facts indicate that it can double its resting heart rate of about 120 BPM over the course of a few seconds.
Why some animals have multiple hearts
Tracing an evolutionary tree backwards can be difficult. Animals in a family tree will sometimes lose traits generally characteristic of their group – as is the case with dolphins lose their legs and retire to life as aquatic mammals. But the facts of the matter are that there is no known mammals, reptiles, amphibians or birds with multiple hearts. That suggests that the development of more than one heart pump occurred way back in the evolutionary tree. It also suggests that these extra hearts arose out of a need to survive in extreme or alien environments, otherwise it would likely return in more places. Understandably, most multi-hearted animals seem rather strange to humans.
One of the most primitive and ubiquitous multi-hearted creatures is the earthworm. This worm’s five hearts are more like prototypes of a heart than the real thing, as they are essentially just specialized blood vessels. On the basis of the known facts, there is an argument that cockroaches have 13 hearts – although some scientists claim it has a single heart with 13 chambers instead. In front of hagfish, the poor quality of the water they live in requires a circulatory system capable of filtration, and the result is a string of four hearts that can continue to work without oxygen for a day and a half. Both calamari and calamari have three hearts, an evolution they’ve also adapted to solve the unique problems of the aquatic ecosystems they inhabit.
How many hearts does an octopus have?
In fact, the circulatory systems of the squid and cuttlefish are functionally the same as the octopus — a revelation essentially that they are all related under the class Cephalopoda. Functionally, cephalopods share a similar anatomy to survive in similar environments. Cephalopoda actually translates to “head foot”, and they are all composed of a head that serves as an anchor point for eight or more arms and a foot that helps them navigate in the water. The number and nature of these arms can vary from animal to animal, but octopus species are particularly well developed. Their eight tentacles are highly sensitive and capable of incredibly fine motor skills, and octopuses have already developed nine brains. One central brain serves as the central routing for eight separate brains, each in charge of a different tentacle.
Likewise, octopuses and other cephalopods have evolved three hearts. All three of these hearts are located in the animal’s head, with the systematic heart serving as the primary circulatory pump and two branching hearts helping. This is functionally not so different from how the heart works in other beings, although it does divide the tasks. The two branched hearts take pure blood that is rich in oxygen and pump it through the gills of the octopus so that oxygen and nutrients can be distributed throughout the remote tissues in the body. Once this blood has completed its cycle, it returns to the systematic heart where it is pressurized and sent back through the cycle.
The size and volume of an octopus’s limbs help partly explain why these cephalopods need such a specialized circulatory system, but the large amounts of energy required to oxygenate nine separate brains may also be a serious contributing factor. . The nautilus is the only cephalopod not to have three hearts, and it is both physiologically less complex and significantly more sedentary than both the squid and octopus. But just because this unique three-pump design was developed out of evolutionary necessity doesn’t mean it’s perfectly efficient. Octopuses have two primary modes of navigation: crawling along the surface of the seafloor and using their tentacles and currents to propel themselves. Octopuses mainly rely on the former mode of navigation because their systematic heart actually stops working in the process. This inability to exert themselves for extended periods of time may have contributed to octopuses developing methods of ambush hunting and environmental camouflage as a primary defense mechanism.
Why do octopuses have blue blood?
The mystery behind an octopus’s blue blood is actually critical to understanding their need for three hearts. Human blood appears red when it leaves the body due to the presence of an iron-based protein called hemoglobin. Octopi instead uses a protein derived from copper known as hemocyanin. Hemocyanin is the heavier of the two, and its unique chemical structure makes their blood appear blue when spilled. Octopuses have proven to be very efficient at using all the oxygen their hearts are pumping through their bodies, but that may be less of a sign that they have efficient circulation and more of a consequence of necessity. Hemocyanin is only about a quarter as effective as hemoglobin at transporting oxygen, requiring three separate hearts, two specialized for circulation and one for processing.
Investigating a species of octopus found in frigid Antarctica could shed some light on why these animals developed such an apparently inefficient protein in their blood composition. This kind — the pearledone charcoti — shows significantly higher concentrations of hemocyanin in its blood: about 40% more than any other octopus species observed. This does not seem to be a coincidence. Researchers believe this physiological change is intended to help these octopuses adapt to colder conditions where oxygen exchange is much less efficient. At the same time, these octopuses were still able to adapt and even exceed their circulation efficiency when placed in warmer water.
There are more than 300 species of octopus on the planet, and they have managed to find a niche in practically any large body of saltwater. The octopus’s high adaptability has enabled it to survive in extreme temperatures and environments, and their strangely inefficient heart may be due to that. It may even help octopuses to get better again the climate change come.
Next one: What do dolphins eat?
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