Ankur Desai

is that the specialized arm for mating is actually a sensor of the female.

And that led to the rest of the study, which is to define how it serves as a sensory organ, which was unknown.

Your research, and I'm not in any way sort of downplaying it, but essentially it's all about sort of trying to work out how the male responds to stimuli and is satisfied and decides where he's going to stick his third tentacle.

Is there any suggestion or interest in how female octopuses decide that they're going to allow a male to mate with them?

Yeah, definitely.

This is a really interesting part of the system.

So there's two things that the female does that contributes to selection of a mate.

One is the behavioral aspect that we watched with this barrier where she will accept or not accept the male to find her with the hectocolis and initiate mating so she can swim away if she doesn't like that particular male.

And then the other part that's really interesting to me is that

She also can select which sperm she uses to fertilize the eggs.

So even from wild-caught females can look in the oviduct, find different sperm from different octopuses of the same species.

Also, even some octopuses of different species will try to cross mate.

And she can save the sperm for a really long time.

and then decide not only when to fertilize the eggs but which sperm to select.

Professor Nicholas Bellono.

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