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Coconut octopus — printable fact sheet
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Coconut octopus
Amphioctopus marginatus
Amphioctopus marginatus is a small, soft-bodied octopus of shallow Indo-Pacific sand and silt flats, habitats that offer almost no natural shelter. Its solution made it famous: it collects discarded coconut halves and bivalve shells, cleans them out, and carries them across open…
Did you know?
- The coconut octopus can assemble multiple shells or coconut halves into a fortified shelter, demonstrating advanced problem-solving skills.
- The stilt-walking gait it uses while hauling shells is one of the few examples of an invertebrate carrying its own armour rather than growing it. A pair of matched clam or coconut halves can be pulled shut around the animal like a clamshell door, leaving only a slit. Individuals have been filmed rejecting a shell, discarding it, and returning later to reclaim it — behaviour that implies a memory of where the object was left. Despite the "coconut" name, the habit long predates coconuts reaching the sea floor in numbers; the octopus was almost certainly using bivalve shells first.
What I learned
Draw the coconut octopus
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