• Question: Could you please tell me how octopuses can change their color?

    Asked by to Dre, Charli, Heather, Oliver, Becky on 16 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Rebecca Williams

      Rebecca Williams answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      This is a really good question! I didn’t know the answer, so I had to go and look it up.

      Octopuses change their colour so they can hide from other animals that might eat them, and so they can’t be seen by animals they might want to eat!

      Just below the surface of their skin, octopus have special colour changing cells called chromatophores. The centre of these special cells contains a little sac of pigment or ink. Imagine it is like a small balloon with paint in it! The octopus can squeeze these sac to make them bigger or smaller which makes the colour in them easier or harder to see. When the sac gets bigger, the colour gets easier to see. The sacs can be coloured black, brown, orange, red or yellow.

    • Photo: Charlotte Flavell

      Charlotte Flavell answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      I think octopuses are really cool – they are really clever and can squeeze through incredibly tight spaces because they have no bones. Their ability to change colour is very useful to them as it helps them hide from things that want to eat them.
      They change colour because their bodies are covered in millions of tiny cells called chromatophores. These are like bags of coloured dyes. When they want to change colour the bags are squeezed to the top of the skin’s surface, making that colour more visible and making the octopus appear a different colour.

      here is a link to a video:
      http://ocean.si.edu/ocean-news/how-octopuses-and-squids-change-color

Comments