Awesome Octopus

It’s common knowledge that octopi are intelligent creatures. After he purchased an octopus from a pet store, engineer Mark Rober wanted to release the animal back into the ocean. Before he could do that, he built a challenging maze to confirm that Sashimi would be able to hunt for food after being hand-fed for most of her life.

This sculptural octopus art can hold headphones, hats, purses, or small accessories. Its head and eight tentacles offer multiple hanging positions and come with hanging hardware. It’s one of the many fun 3D-printed headphone holders you can find in the M3is3D Etsy shop.

While diving in Lempeh, Indonesia, Pall Sigurdsson came across a tiny coconut octopus wearing a plastic cup. Realizing it needed a sturdier survival shelter, he stayed patiently on the seafloor with the little guy while his fellow divers collected shells. After checking out a few options, the octopus settled into its new and improved home.

If we learned anything from playing Octodad, it’s that octopus tentacles can grab all sorts of things. This elegant bronze cephalopod from Coppertist Wu stands at the ready to hold onto your phone, tablet, or a pen while keeping watch over your desktop. It measures 3.5″ L x 1.9″ W x 1.9″ H and weighs 7.4 oz.

We’re so used to seeing octopi swimming, we sometimes forget that they can use their tentacles to walk too. Though in the case of this extraordinary cephalapod, he’s in a hurry and chooses to run to his destination. We just want to put this video on a loop and use it as our wallpaper.

Artist Blake McFarland previously showed off his sculpting skills by making a lion and a tiger out of tires. This time, he created an awesome-looking octopus by creating a steel, foam, and fiberglass form, then wrapping it in old bike tires. The glass eyes by artist Becca Barnet help bring it to life.

Octopi thrive on shellfish and other small sea creatures. But when an octopus thinks it can gobble down a mantis shrimp, it gets quite the surprise from the powerful crustacean. Nat Geo WILD captured this amazing footage of the terrifying shrimp as it protects itself and delivers blow after blow on its eight-legged foe.

WorksByaHurst asks his followers to send in random items for him to build things from. When he received a box full of old bicycle parts, the idea that struck him was to turn the chains into the tentacles and body of an octopus. While he was working on it, all we could think of was those creepy Sentinels from The Matrix.

In the world of Spider-Man, Dr. Otto Octavius (better known as Doc Ock) has been augmented with a set of mechanical tentacles he uses for nefarious purposes. JLaservideo teamed up with a few internet friends to design and build a working tentacle backpack, and then gave it mind-control capabilities.

Swiss-Danish watchmaker Linde Werdelin teamed up with James Thompson of Black Badger to create this stunning limited-edition automatic dive watch. It features a lightweight aerospace-grade ALW case, and a multi-layer glowing blue dial that gets more saturated as your environment gets darker. It’s waterproof to 300 meters.

Bern, Switzerland illustrator Jared Muralt created this wondrous image of a mythical giant octopus for The New York Times’ Kids Edition. Now you can hang a copy of the artwork on your wall. The offset print measures 836mm x 483mm (~32.9″ x 19.0″) and would look fantastic in any nautically-themed space.

We already know that octopi are incredibly smart creatures. What we don’t know is if their big brains dream like ours. In this fascinating footage from Nature on PBS, we witness a octopus changing colors as she sleeps, while the narrator imagines what she might be dreaming about.

Hundreds of millions of years ago, the earliest ancestors of cephalopods like squids rose up from the ocean floor, donning a hard shell. PBS Eons explores the evolutionary adaptations that caused the squid to shed its protective outer covering to improve its mobility.

Artists FilthyLuker and Pedro Estrellas of Designs In Air bring old buildings to life by filling them with monsters. Their latest installation features an inflatable sea creature with 20 tentacles sticking out of Building 611 at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. See it in person through 11/16/18.

Puppeteer and performance artist Tim Davies shows off his latest creation – a gigantic inflatable octopus puppet with articulated tentacles. It measures more than 13 feet high and 22 feet wide, yet has soft and smooth movements despite its size. More here.

Robotics company Festo developed this incredible appendage that mimics the movements and suction abilities of an octopus tentacle. It can grab and hold onto objects that might challenge other robots. It attaches to the end of their bendy Bionic Motion Robot.

“It’s like some little kid dropped their toy.” A team of oceanic researchers on the E/V Nautilus came across this unusual sea creature while on a mission, but rather getting all serious and sciency, they spent their time poking fun at the little guy’s looks.

This bronze-finished iron and aluminum centerpiece has our favorite cephalopod keeping the place lit up with a set of three lanterns dangling from his tentacles. Just put a 3 pc. suit on him and nobody will suspect a thing. Measures 18″L x 13-1/2″W x 14-3/4″H.

Polymer clay artist Stephanie K. PetitPlat builds an intricate sculpture of an octopus protecting a coral reef in this two-part time-lapse. The texturing on the body is fantastic, and those teensy suckers are amazing. The finished sculpture is available in her shop.

Footage of one of the most epic kites we’ve ever seen take to the skies – Facebooker Erich Chew posted this clip of a fantastic flying octopus near Singapore’s Marina Barrage dam. The way it moves kind of reminds us of those Sentinel robots from The Matrix.

Whether or not you’re familiar with Australian electro funk musician Opiuo, you can appreciate the awesome octopus tentacle embroidery on this fitted ballcap, designed to promote his album Meraki. We dig the cool geometric pattern wrapped around the entire cap.

Artist Courtney Brown envisions a fantastic typewriter that can type for itself, courtesy of its eight tentacles. Titled “Self Organization,” the sculpture was made from a 1938 Underwood and intricately shaped bronze, and took top prize at the 2015 California Sculpture SLAM.

Hey man, what’s Kraken? This awesome t-shirt, that’s what. Derek Brennan designed this fantastic all-over image of the deadly sea beast as it descends on an approaching fleet. Each dye-sublimated shirt is hand-crafted to order.