Eli5: How are octopuses (octopi? I don’t know) able to change their skin color and texture to camouflage themselves?
In: 9
Just under their skin they’ve got these sacs that contain all different coloured pigments. These are surrounded by very small and accurate muscles that can change the size, shape and location relative to the skin of these sacs making different colours and intensities of colour visible through the outermost layer of skin cells.
As for texture, to my knowledge it’s mostly achieved through little tiny bumps all over their skin not too dissimilar to the bumps we can see on our tongues. But again, they’ve got small and accurate collections of muscles that can stretch, compress, lift or lower these bumps in various ways to create pointy spikes, rounded bumps or relatively smooth skin at will.
As for the word itself, both are often accepted but “octopuses” is more correct than “octopi” given that it has it’s origin in ancient Greek, not Latin. If you get to googling, you may also come across “Octopodes” which is technically the most true-to-origin anglicisation of the word, but it’s really not common and that combined with it’s different pronunciation of the stem (Instead of OC – toe – podes it’s more like oc – TOP – uh – deez) will make it just confusing to most people. Tl;dr, both are in dictionaries but go with “octopuses” if you want to be as correct as possible while still speaking English.
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