Art Print - Argonaut Octopus

ARGONAUT OCTOPUS

The Argonaut Octopus is certainly one of the strangest animals alive today, thus doubling as easily the weirdest creature in the Cotton Crustacean lineup as well as the only extant species we've featured thus far.

The males of all Argonaut species are drastically smaller, and do not produce a shell, but have a modified arm that serves as a detachable "sexual organ" that breaks off during mating. The female Argonaut then secretes a shell-like egg-case out of the tips of its two modified dorsal tentacles, crawls inside with her man's detached package, and lays some eggs for said detachment to fertilize. Then the female swims to the surface and traps air within the shell, enabling her to maintain neutral buoyancy while cruising along just below the surface. All other species of Octopus crawl upon the dirty old ocean bottom, looking up at the Argonaut with great envy as she sails under water like the mythical Greek ship from which she is named after.

Whoa.

-Aaron John Gregory, Cotton Crustacean