Ever wonder how octopus eat? (Read text in Description!)
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If you’re looking for the gourmet chefs of the sea, look no further than the octopus!

🐙 While they only prepare meals for themselves— inside their mouth are all the tools they need to prepare the perfect dinner.

🍴 Let’s take a look at their chef’s tool kit to see how they prepare their food...

🔪 Just as knives are meant to dice and cut, an octopus beak, much like a parrot beak, is responsible for cutting food and busting open clams that are too thick to pull open with their arms.

The next tool they use is the radula! The radula is a ribbon-like tongue covered with tiny rows of teeth used to shred the meat into tiny pieces and slurp clams and mussels out of their shells once they are broken open.

🦀 For crabs, a favorite meal, the octopus uses its radula to shred and remove crab meat out of the crab's hard outer covering/exoskeleton.

If they catch a clam with a thick shell or an animal with sharp claws (like a crab!), no problem— they’ll use this next natural accessory…the salivary papilla!

🦷 The salivary papilla is a tooth covered organ that the octopus uses to drill into thick shells they can’t manage to crack open with their beaks or pull apart with their arms.

☠️ Into that drilled hole they can release a toxic cocktail of venom that immediately goes to work loosening prey muscle from the shell or skeleton, and paralyzing the prey.

🤩 Can you believe octopuses have all these epic tools behind their beaks?!

💭 Why do octopus go through all this trouble to make sure that their food is smushed, crushed, and relaxed before they eat it?

🍩 Their food travels down the esophagus, which passes through their donut shaped brain, before getting to the stomach- that's not a lot of room for large pieces of food!

Luckily, this seeming octopus design flaw was course-corrected with an impressive set of mouth tools to make sure anything that enters their body is a well prepared meal

💋 Bon appétit, mon ami!

⚠️ Read this far? What impressed you the most about Chef Octo?

#Octopus #Animals #MyOctopusTeacher

Clips Via:
Ben Trayner:   / benmantagilit  
Andy Wheatcroft:   / wheatophotos