Common Octopus

• It lives only 12 to 15 months, breeding just once in its lifetime.
• A female can lay between 100,000 and 500,000 eggs in a single clutch.
• It can solve complex problems and use tools, a rarity among invertebrates.
• anatomíaIt has three hearts and blue blood, because it carries oxygen with copper-based haemocyanin rather than iron-based haemoglobin.
• inteligenciaIt can solve mazes and open screw-top jars from the inside to reach food, behaviours used to study its intelligence.
• comportamientoIt builds small shelters on the seabed from stones and shells piled at the mouth of its den, sometimes reusing litter such as bottle caps or flowerpots.
• inteligenciaIt can unscrew jar lids by turning them from the inside to reach the food within, a skill routinely used in cognitive enrichment studies in aquariums.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - no internal or external skeleton, soft body supported by a hydrostatic musculature

Habitat & environment

Rocky and sandy bottoms of the Mediterranean, the eastern Atlantic and the coasts of Japan, between 1 and 200 metres deep

Size at birth

Eggs the size of a grain of rice; the newly hatched paralarvae are microscopic and planktonic

Sexual maturity

Reaches sexual maturity within a few months, inside its single year of reproductive life

Gestation / incubation

Embryonic development of 23-25 days at 25 °C (which can stretch to 4 months in water below 13 °C)

Litter / clutch size

100,000 to 500,000 eggs per clutch

Lifespan in captivity

Up to ~25 months documented in the laboratory

Sources consulted: MarineBio; ScienceDirect (Octopus vulgaris chapter); The Cephalopod Page; OctoNation; Vedantu Biology