An octopus with nine arms was found in the Japanese province of Miyagi. AsiaOne reports.
An unusual clam was caught by 40-year-old Kazuya Sato, who is engaged in the cultivation of edible wakame seaweed in the village of Minamisanriku. In mid-November, he brought four octopuses from his own hand at Shizugawa Bay to his mother. The woman did not cook one of them when she noticed he had an extra limb.
Sato took the find to the Shizugawa Nature Center and showed it to specialists. Researcher Takuzo Abe suggested that the octopus lost one of its arms in the past. During regeneration in place of the damaged area, for some reason, not one, but two new limbs grew. This is confirmed by the fact that his ninth hand branches out from the middle of the third hand on the left.
Abe has alcoholized the nine-armed octopus and plans to show it to visitors to the Center. “I want to preserve it for posterity so that more people can learn about the richness of the nature of Shizugawa Bay,” he said.
In 1998, an octopus with 98 arms was caught in Matoya Bay in the Japanese province of Mie. He exhibited at the Sima Aquarium.
Arms are the limbs of octopuses and other cephalopods covered with rows of suckers or hooks. Squids, cuttlefish, sepiolis, and spirulids also have tentacles – paired hunting limbs. Octopuses have no tentacles.
Previously it was reported that rare deep-sea creatures were filmed off the coast of Australia – eight-meter Magnapinna squid. Researchers spotted these cephalopods while diving in the Great Australian Bight.