Ankur Desai

And then once it finds the oviduct, both the male and the female freeze.

Right.

And just to be clear, the mantle is this sort of bulbous structure behind the eyes.

Yes, the head.

How does the male know when it sort of hit the right part, as it were?

And what have you discovered on that?

We discovered this kind of by accident.

So they don't mate often.

And octopuses actually don't interact often.

They're solitary.

When they do interact, they're very aggressive.

And so we wanted to observe mating in the lab.

And so our idea was to put two octopuses into one tank, but be mindful that they are aggressive together.

So we put a barrier between them.

And then we put little holes in that barrier so that they could sort of get used to one another and recognize that there is an octopus in the tank.

And then our plan was to remove the barrier so they could mate.

However, the male octopus was able to put this specialized mating arm through one of those holes, find the female and initiate mating.

So this told us already that they were able to mate without visual information because they were blocked by this barrier.

And they could do the same thing in complete darkness.

So the discovery, even at that point,