Aloha and welcome. We're happy you're joining us today for this webinar entitled Cephalopods
of Hawai'i. You are among 900 folks who have registered for this webinar and whether you
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Today's speaker is Dr Heather Ylatalo -Ward of the island of Kauai. Heather is
the aquatic biologist with the division of aquatic resources in the State of Hawai'i
Department of Land and Natural Resources. Heather welcome and we will turn the program over to you.
Thank you so much Jean. Okay here we go sharing my screen can everybody see that?
yep here good okay great all right so thanks Jean as Jean said I'm going to be talking about
Cephalopods in Hawai'i and beyond. so I'm just going to give you a little bit of background
about myself and how I got here. I'm was really lucky I got to grow up all around the world my
dad worked for the State department and we lived in the tropics and we lived in Costa Rica
and the first time I got in the water snorkeling in the Oso peninsula I just
fell in love with the ocean and thought I want to spend as much time as possible underwater
because it is an incredible world under there and so that sparked an interest in me and I went to
undergrad at Swarthmore where I studied biology and I went to Zanzibar to study abroad and there I
worked with the octopus fishermen which really got me involved in cephalopod research and I thought
oh these creatures are incredible. After that I was lucky enough to work in Woods Hole with
Roger Hanlin he's one of the pre-eminent cephalopod biologists on the planet so that was pretty cool
and then I went after that I got my PhD at the University of Hawaii where I studied cephalopods
and their mating behavior and now I am lucky enough to be here in Kauai working with the
Division of Aquatic Resources where now I monitor the coral reef and fish out here so now I'm kind
of more peripherally working with cephalopods not necessarily quite as directly with them.
So today I'm going to just talk about what are cephalopods just so everybody's on the
same page and knows what they are I'm going to talk about what species are in Hawai'i and
where you can find them and i'm mostly going to be talking about the shallow water species so
if you were to be snorkeling out here what species would you be seeing
and then why should we care about cephalopods their importance in the ecosystem to fisheries
and to science and then I'll talk a little bit about the research that I did for
for my PhD while in Hawai'i after that we'll have a little bit of time for questions.
Okay so what are cephalopods? Cephalopods are part of the Phylum Mollusca which is the second largest
phylum and they include snails, slugs, chitins, oysters, limpets among other things so everything
that you're seeing here on the left these are molluscs and molluscs have a broad muscular foot.
So if you think of like a snail or a slug you know that makes sense that foot but then with
cephalopods we know that they've got these arms or tentacles and that's their foot has been kind
of modified to that. They all have a radula which is this kind of raspy tongue it's got teeth on it
so imagine like a limpet or something on the rocks is scraping off algae and they've got that
toothed tongue and most or all molluscs they have a shell either internal or external
and then most of them have bilateral symmetry which means like if you cut them in half they'd
be the same on both sides but you know not all of them because imagine a snail
shell some of those you know you cut that in half not gonna be the same on both sides. okay
so now we know cephalopods are molluscs well what are the cephalopods specifically
we've got octopuses are cephalopods and they have eight arms not tentacles some people want to call
them tentacles but the difference between arms and tentacles is that arms have suckers that go
all the way up and tentacles only have suckers at the end there's also squid that are part of
the cephalopods and these guys do have tentacles they've got two feeding tentacles and eight arms
and then we've got cuttlefish who like the squid have those eight arms and the two
feeding tentacles and they usually keep them kind of they have a little pocket where they keep
them in their mouth and then we also have the nautilus which have these tentacles and then
they're so this is the groups of cephalopods that we have and they all have ink sacs they have
either arms or tentacles they have shells and so you can see what the nautilus clearly has
a shell with the cuttlefish it's an internal shell they have something called a cuttlebone
and with squid they have something we call it like an ink pen and basically it's a
little modified shell that's internal as well and then octopuses they've got we've got they've got
no shell inside they've got these tiny little things called stylets that are kind of behind
their eyes and that's kind of a vestigial shell and they all have beaks that they eat with they
like kind of like a parrot beak and they have three hearts and I wanted to show you this guy
this is an argonaut and sometimes it's called a paper nautilus but it's actually not a nautilus
this is an octopus species and it's really cool it floats in the open ocean in its shell
this is a female and so she keeps her eggs in there and the males are teeny teeny tiny and they
come around and they try and find the female so yeah I think those these guys are pretty awesome.
Okay what about cephalopods in Hawai'i well cephalopods are important in Hawai'i because they
are part of the Kumulipo which is the Hawaiian creation chant Kanaloa is the god of the sea and
sea creatures and the way that he's described is when the emergence of gods and men
come in the creation chant ki'i who's man kane who's god and kanaloa they all arrive at the same time
and kanaloa is the hot striking octopus and then later he's described as the evil smelling squid
and that's from translation from Beckwith in 1951. so that's an interesting thing that
we already know it's part of culturally they're important they're also aumakua which are basically
like spirit animals or ancestral gods who are very important to culturally and for families out here
and of course they're very important for food a lot of people eat them out here in tako poke
and tako is the Japanese word for octopus but it's used interchangeably out here the Hawaiian
word for octopus is he'e. So here is a species of squid that you will find in Hawai'i this is the
Big fin reef squid and usually you find them in shallow water up to about a hundred feet depth
and these guys are really interesting because in their mating behavior the males will show
one display to a female on one side and then on the other side if another male comes up
it can show this kind of like a different display to say hey back off and they you
know seamlessly can change that and it's really interesting behavior and I've seen them mostly
around harbor areas when I see them and usually I'll see them in pairs.
Okay this is the bobtail squid of Hawai'i and these guys are really interesting they only
this particular species Euprymna scolopes only lives in Hawaii so that means that they are
endemic to this area and they are super cool they have this amazing thing where they have
a symbiotic relationship with bacteria they do something called counter shading
and what that is is imagine that you're swimming and there's a bright moon above you and there's a
shark underneath you it's gonna see your shadow right it's going to look up and the shadow from
the moon coming down you look like there you are well these guys they have this thing with that
bacteria that's in their gut they can glow to the same extent that the moon is shining
so the predator underneath can't see anything it's like they're invisible so these guys
pretty fascinating species out here and these ones you'll find kind of buried in the sand sometimes.
Okay what about octopuses well we've got the day octopus and this is the one that you'll probably
see the most out here it's also the one that people fish for the most and eat and as their
name suggests they are active during the day they they can be found kind of shallow areas
but also down to around 150 feet and you'll usually find them in sort of coral rubble
areas so that because they like to hide and they make little dens in that. Then we have the night
octopus and just like its name suggests these ones are more active at night and they're also really
interesting because they do this thing called autotomy where they kind of just drop their arm
off if something comes and startles it you know if you try and catch it in a net it'll just it's
arms just falling off of its body and it's doing that as a defense mechanism it's like here take
my arms you know leave me be and people sometimes say that they're a little bit more aggressive than
the day octopus and like the fishers out here will say that they they like to bite a little bit more
then there's also this one called the short armed sand octopus this is another species
that is endemic to Hawai'i which means that it only lives here and these guys again with their names
really great names because they kind of tell us where we can find them these ones like to live
in sandy areas and they a similar kind of depth they'll be in shallow areas to about 150 feet.
Okay and this one I'm a little bit biased because this is the species that I studied I think these
ones are pretty fascinating these ones are called octopus oliveri or he'e pali which means rock tako
so they come out or rock tako which is they live on the rocks which is why they're called that
they come out of the water at night to feed on crabs they come up into the intertidal zone so
here in this picture you can see this is me hunting for them at night this is kind of the
area that they are they like that high wave action where you're getting slammed against the rocks
and here you can see them in the wild look how clear that is right here let me help you out there
they are living on those rocks outside of the water hunting for crabs. Okay time for a pop quiz
All right everyone so I am going to launch the first poll
of Heather's webinar so what makes a cephalopod a cephalopod so there's four different answers
so everyone get your votes in is it mollusc they have a radula arms tentacles three hearts and an
ink sac crustacean radula arms tentacles ink sac mollusc have a radula arms and tentacles
two hearts and an ink sac so it looks like you have around 40 percent of the attendees voted so
let's try and get up to around 70 to 80 percent of all attendees voted
and currently we have about 498 folks attending this webinar so it's very interesting stuff.
All right we're going to give you guys a few more seconds and then we're going to show the results
and so far it looks like there is two top answers but one leading in a landslide.
All right we are going to close the first poll
and now we shall share it. Alright Heather so looks like everyone got it 80 percent of the audience
has got the question correct that what makes a cephalopod a cephalopod they are molluscs
they have a radula arms tentacles and three hearts and an ink sack so some folks are on 13 percent
but it was the other answer with mollusc regular but it had two hearts so they actually have the
three hearts so great job everyone and now back to Heather yeah fantastic job well done good
thing you're listening at least you really heard that they're definitely molluscs so that's good.
Okay why should we care about cephalopods well they're very important parts of the
ecosystem they're predators so they will eat crustaceans they'll eat
molluscs they'll eat fish they'll even eat other octopuses so they ca they are cannibals
and they are you know an important part of the ecosystem creating balance.
Another thing is they are eaten by lots of things they're eaten by sharks we've got a monk seal here
predatory fish we've got an eel they're also sometimes eaten by birds whales so imagine
this perfect nutrient package especially considering something like an octopus that doesn't
have any bones like that sounds great right the only hard part is that beak so that's a perfect
yummy thing that you can get right away and you don't have to worry about dealing with the bones
getting stuck in your throat so they're definitely an important protein source for a lot of animals.
Okay how about fisheries well they're an important fishery in the world they account for about
five percent of total capture and of that five percent most of the fishery is squid
about eighty percent is squid and then 10 of that is octopus and 10 of that is cuttlefish
and there's been a real steady increase in the amount of cephalopods that have been caught over
the years from about 180 tons in about in 1980 it's basically just been steadily increasing
and then it fully doubled by the time it got to 2014. So it's still on that sort of trajectory
where people are eating more and more and there's higher and higher demand for them.
Okay so this map I'm just kind of trying to show you how trends have changed around the world
and and this was in 2019 it says 2020 next to it but it's 2019 and it's showing how
in some areas the number of species or number of individuals caught went down and
in other areas it went up and I yeah I'm showing that to you to let you know that
it's kind of an unpredictable fishery one of the interesting things I recently read
actually is that during COVID 19 there has been a decrease in the amount of
demand for cephalopods and especially in the western world where people don't really catch
these species and eat them at home it's more of something that people eat in restaurants so I
thought that was interesting so you know maybe that there's been less pressure on the fishery
maybe there's you know time to recuperate. But why are they an unpredictable fishery well
these species have kind of a boom and bust life cycle and what that means is that they live fast
have lots of babies and they die young and so if there's one season where there's not too many but
enough females get through they have thousands of eggs and so maybe the next year the oceanic
conditions are better and you have a lot more individuals surviving into the fishery so it
really depends and it can be a great year one year and not so great the next year however if there is
too much fishing pressure and too many of them are caught then it will cause a steady decline because
you won't have enough females in the population providing the eggs for the next generation.
In Hawai'i I was telling you before that there are very
important species out here to be caught the octopuses people like to eat their tako poke and
you can see that sort of trend this data is the commercial fishing data so that means
that people would be selling it and you can see that trend it's kind of going up until about 2014,
2013 and then it's kind of declines and I'm not exactly sure why there's a decline in
octopus fishing in the commercial catch but one of the interesting things in Hawai'i is that
we don't have a recreational fishing license and so what that means is that people aren't required
to say what they're catching recreationally so and it's a very popular recreationally fished species
so it's very likely that there's a lot more catch that's happening it's just not reported.
Oh time for your next pop quiz that one came up fast.
All right everyone we're gonna launch our second poll
so hopefully hopefully you folks are listening
all right so how much of the world's fisheries are cephalopods so Heather did mention this
not that long ago all right we're going to get folks to around 80 percent of attendees voted right
now we're around halfway and it does look like there's one answer that's leading over the rest
so get your votes in and continue asking some awesome questions we are getting a lot
of them we probably won't have enough time to answer all the questions but we will save them
and send them over to Heather and we will email the questions plus answers out to
all the emails you folks registered with so we have around 75 percent voted in the audience so
we're going to give it a few more seconds and I will close the poll and launch the answers.
All right I am closing the poll and we will share the results all right
so it looks like the audience was listening we have around 50 percent of attendees voted for 5 percent of the
world's fisheries are cephalopods which is correct so you folks were listening some other folks
20 percent of the audience said 24 percent or 24 percent of the audience said 20 percent and then 7 percent of the audience said 80 percent
and 21 percent of the audience said 10 percent but it looks like everyone was listening Heather back to you.
Great great sounds good yeah 80 percent would be a lot I mean that would mean we weren't eating very much
fish it would just be mostly cephalopods so maybe in the future but right now just five percent.
Okay now here's the part that I love the most why should we care about cephalopods science
so octopuses and squid and cuttlefish have these really interesting neurons and especially squid
they have something called the giant axon and so many of the seminal studies of neurobiology
have been done using these giant axons because basically it's about 1000 times the diameter of a
human neuron so you know imagine you're trying to study how these things work and teeny tiny human
neuron or big squid neuron this is like helping us understand how these functions are happening
and there's been a lot of really great research done about Alzheimer's and Huntington's disease
through the use of these these axons. And in octopuses they have two-thirds of their brain
is in their body and not just in their head and so that means that they can control each of their
arms kind of individually in this picture you can see with the squid that the brain is
is kind of located right between the eyes and it's wrapped around the esophagus.
Okay so one of the things that everybody knows about cephalopods is their incredible ability
to camouflage especially octopuses so I'm gonna show you this little video and you may have seen
it before this is by Roger Hanlin I mentioned him earlier he's an incredible scientist who
studies octopus camouflage and so here or actually cephalopod camouflage he also studies cuttlefish.
Here we've got a beautiful piece of algae and we're coming closer to it and oh my goodness
look it has changed into an octopus and there it goes it's inking it's going away from the predator
and it's swimming and now it's changed color again it's made itself look really big and scary
and here it says this dynamic threat display is designed to fool the predator into thinking
the octopus is larger than it really is in many cases it's the animal's second defense mechanism.
So first it's inking and now it's looking like oh my goodness I'm so big and scary
and so now he's gonna show us a little bit how in slow motion what's happening here with this
incredible camouflage ability and how quickly it's happening so we've got it's white it's got
some brown around its eyes you know very clearly an octopus and then as it's moving we're seeing
changes in the texture of the skin they have these things called papillae that they can raise to make
themselves look textured like the algae and they have these chromatophores which are these color
cells in their skin that is that helps them change colors so here we go we're going to look at
these chromatophores in action. You can see in this video these little sort of cells filled with color
they are the muscles sort of contract to expand the cells to make them bigger and we've got these
reds and browns and yellows and that's how they're able to change their color of their skin and why
do they do that well like I was telling you before everything likes to eat them right this is a yummy
thing in the ocean that everything wants to eat so they have this incredible capability of
changing color and texture they need to have that defense in order to save themselves from predators
and then they also have that ink that they can squirt to get predators to go away or they use
that dimetic display that he was talking about that shows them looking bigger than they are.
Okay the other thing that cephalopods are studied a lot
for is their learning capabilities I'm sure you have seen a lot of the articles about how
smart they are and the little things floating in the water here that you're seeing are actually
suckers so they will shed suckers just like we shed our skin so here we've got an
octopus that's being put in a jar and we're gonna see if he can get out or he or she and
they the interesting thing about octopuses especially is that they can learn, they use tools
they can learn from watching other octopuses solve a puzzle and then they can solve it themselves
or even if they watch a human solve a puzzle they can solve it themselves so they have this
really fascinating capability of being able to see something and then mimic it and get themselves out
of a jam like this guy about to open the top off of this jar and get them self out of being stuck
in here so we'll just give it one more second and he's gonna figure it out. It's pretty incredible
how the the capability so a lot of scientists kind of study this behavior and try and figure out
the extent to which they're able to solve these puzzles there he goes he's out okay.
And then another thing that cephalopods kind of inspire is technology there was a soft-bodied
robot that was made where they're kind of trying to use rather than these rigid sort of
inflexible materials they're using soft bodies and they're inspired by cephalopods to try
and figure out how to grab different objects using you know different softer materials and
so this kind of has implications for you know flexibility maybe biomedicine, wearable tech.
Okay so now I'm just going to talk to you a little bit about the research that I did in grad school
and I studied that species that I told you about earlier the rock tako, octopus oliveri, it
had previously been dis described from the Kermadec Islands but that was in the
1914 and since then not very much information had been learned about it so I wanted to learn about
this particular species and their life history so again here here's me on the rocks hunting for them
at night collecting them and one of the first things I did was talking about life
history I wanted to see okay well how do they develop in their eggs and you can see here it's
about you know a little bit over a month is how long it takes for these eggs to develop
and you can see them all kind of like little grains of rice on these strands the females
will lay thousands of eggs and on these little strands these pearls and then she sits with them
she doesn't eat she just sits for this time and she cleans them and she makes sure that
no parasites or algae or anything grows on them you can see about midway through they start to
develop those eye spots and then there's like a little bit of a yolk that they're
having inside the egg and that gets smaller and smaller and they get larger and larger
until day 39 when they just pop out of that egg and this is what they look like when they pop
out they're teeny tiny little guys and so they go out into the ocean they float around
they're called paralarvae that's what they're called when they float around in the ocean
and they're zooplankton and so here again is like a little description of what they look like
and if you want any more information I think there's a link to that paper in the chat if you're
wanting to read a little bit more about it. Okay so another thing that I was interested
in because I was talking about life history is kind of how does their mating behavior work
a lot of the studies into reproduction biology a lot of the preliminary ones were done in birds
and some of the interesting things that they saw was okay we're looking at this behavior
and we're seeing monogamy we're seeing that these birds are monogamous but then with the advent of
new technology and genetics works people tested the eggs and saw suddenly oh actually these are
not monogamous and so I was curious to kind of do a similar thing but in a different system
looking at octopuses and see okay if we follow the behavior and then do the genetic study what
are we seeing what story are we being told and so first let me kind of give you a little bit of
a description of the mating behavior of octopuses in general just so that we're all on the same page
here we've got the female on the left and the male on the right and the females will mate with
several males before they lay their eggs and they have these two oviducts so I'm not sure if you
can see my mouse but on the left here with the female they've got these two places where they
can store sperm and in other animals sometimes when there's multiple oviducts it means that
the female has the capability of saying hey no thanks to this sperm and yes please to this one
and so that's called female cryptic choice so I was curious okay I know she's mating with multiple
males but is she actually using the sperm from all the males so here we go and then yeah here we go
so the males have this arm the specialized arm it's called the hectocotylus and at the very
end of it it's got this thing called the legula which is a little spoon-like thing
and they have that hectocotylus and that's what they use to pass the sperm packet to the female.
They have these things called spermatophores this is the sperm packet where there's sperm
inside there's an ejaculatory organ and then there's the cap thread and so what happens is
the male has his spermatophore it passes down through the hectocotylus and up to the female
then the cap thread comes off and the sperm mass goes into the oviduct
and then the way that this mating is happening the male is either going to
he's going to mount the female or he'll he'll stretch out the hectocotylus from a distance
or very rarely sometimes you'll see face-to-face mating but remember how I told you that sometimes
cannibalism happens in these species so face to face is kind of a scary situation to be in
because you know the male could be eaten and it does happen sexual cannibalism does happen because
remember I was telling you that the females they don't eat when they have their eggs so
having that big nutrient package right before they lay their eggs is a good idea.
Okay time for the next pop quiz.
All right everyone we're going on our third poll so let me launch it.
All right so what is the name of the specialized arm the male uses to transfer sperm so hopefully
folks who are listening we'll give you a few moments to answer the poll so the
potential answers are a sperm transfer arm the hectocotylus, ligula and radula
and I apologize if i did not say some of those answers correctly but all right you haven't
pronounced it perfectly oh perfect we have around 75 percent of the audience voted and it looks like
there is a major landslide winner all right so I am going to close the poll and share the results
all right so 89 percent of attendees have voted the hectocotylst as the specialized arm the
male uses to transfer sperm with the small percentages around four or three percent
guessing the other answers so great job everyone and yeah well well done good listening
yeah that hectocotylus I feel like once you hear that you never forget that that's that special arm.
Okay so my questions for the behavioral portion of this experiment I wanted to just as a
reminder I was looking at behavior and then genetics to kind of explain what's happening
in this in the story of mating for this species so because there hadn't really been
anything described about them I'm curious okay well does this species fall into the general
description of what we know about octopus mating do they also mate in a similar way
are some males more successful than others in mating with size class and precedence so
because of the females mate with several males are some of them spending a longer time are they
able to get more you know time with the female is it the larger males who have more time or the
first or second male and that's what I'm what I mean when I say precedence and then
I'm also curious is there behavioral evidence for sperm competition or female choice so with that
there was a study in the 90s where a scientist saw an octopus mating where the second male
spent a little bit more time before he passed that sperm packet and so his hypothesis was
oh maybe the male is removing the sperm from the previous male so that would be evidence for sperm
competition and then also is there female choice is does it look like she's saying no thank you
to these males so the way that i did that uh was to have several males mate with several females
and the males were of different size classes and of in different orders that's the the point
of this slide is to just show you that it was mating in different orders and different sizes
so I recorded the male and female weight, the mating duration so and the numbers of arches
and pumps remember I was telling you about how they pass that sperm packet they do this thing
called an arch and pump I'll show you in a video in a second where the males it almost
looks like they kind of inhale and then exhale and pass that sperm packet and so it's you know
stands to reason that every time that happens they're passing one of those spermatophores.
And then also I wanted to see the time from the start of the first arch and pump
so and that would be like that other scientists saw where it took a little bit longer for the
second male to start and so he thought oh maybe they're removing something so I wanted to look
at that also whether there's fighting and how long that happened and then resting and how long
that happened and then whether or not I could see any evidence of the female removing a sperm packet
so here we go here's a video of the arch and pump you saw that real big sort of inhale and then the
exhale the males on the right here I apologies for the quality of the video all of these experiments
happen at night because this species is nocturnal so this is the video from that research
okay and then here's what fighting kind of looked like and you can see does not look like things are
going well there mating is not happening no one is really interested in mating in
that little video and then resting is you know they're not touching each other they could be
moving around the tank but they're just kind of like not really interested in things happening.
Okay so what I found was that I was able to do a mating a description of the mating behavior and
for the most part it seemed very similar to other octopus species what we know I did see mounting
I saw reaching and I saw the face to face which remember I was telling you is very rare because of
sexual cannibalism so that was really interesting to see that in this species there was face-to-face
meeting and that's what that mating sorry and that's what that fuzzy picture is right there
on the right and there was a nice conspicuous arch and pump which made it easier to kind of
see how how many sperm packets were sent to the female okay so that question are some
males more successful than others in mating the large ones the first ones the second one well
I actually didn't see any sort of indication of any significant it didn't look as if there was
any sort of significant difference in the sizes or the precedence so short answer know how about
behavioral evidence for sperm competition well the time between the start of mating to the first art
and pump did not change between mating so between the first and second it didn't look like there was
a difference which meant that probably the males aren't removing sperm from previous males and then
I also found that the number of times the arch and pump happened didn't relate to the size or
the mate order however the number of times a male arch and pump was related to the size of
the female and that makes sense okay because think about like the larger female she's probably ready
to have eggs so the male's gonna spend as much time as he can to get as many sperm packets to her
and then was there behavioral evidence for female choice yes I saw some really interesting
what appeared to be removal of the sperm packet so here we're going to see the female on the bottom
and you'll see she kind of like wiggles her arm and something comes out and so that is
kind of like oh did she just remove a sperm packet from the male that she was mating with
and then here we have another video where it looks like here she's on the top and something
just squirted out was that a sperm packet that she just removed and it didn't appear that male
order or size seemed to determine whether the female would remove the sperm packet so there
wasn't like a clear pattern there either so now just talking about the behavioral stuff it what
I found was larger females mate longer no matter what male size or order sperm removal by males was
not observed or shown in this data analysis and then sperm removal by female was seen in 19 trials
the number of arch and pumps was also not related to male size or order oh sorry okay so now that
I've got done the behavioral stuff now I want to know okay well what do the what does the
genetic analysis tell me so all those females that mated with those males they went on to lay eggs
and so I did genetic analysis on those eggs to see okay who's contributing to this to these eggs
and what I found was that there is multiple paternity in this species and that means that
multiple males all the males that the female was mating with ended up contributing to the
brood they ended up fertilizing some of those eggs and that happened both in the field so
the females that I collected from the field who laid eggs and those in these experimental trials
and with the genetic evidence there was actually it showed that the first male to mate with the
female had a higher ratio of fertilized eggs so that was an interesting pattern that I saw
and then also the larger males seem to have also a higher ratio of fertilization success
so here I'm just kind of trying to show you um basically that there it's all random the
the eggs are fertilized by multiple males on each of the strands it's not like one strand has one
male contributing and one the other one has one male the point of this slide is just to show you
that it's kind of all over the place that the the fertilization is happening all over so how come
we saw that maybe the first male is going to be contributing more well maybe he's taking up more
real estate in the oviduct because he's you know the first one that she's mating with and so
there's more space and taking up more space maybe the female was sperm limited when she encountered
the first male and so she's like oh I don't know if I'm ever going to be mating with another male
after this I better take on as much sperm as possible so that I can fertilize these eggs
another possibility is that there was a scientist who suggested that spermatophore
size is related to the size of the mantle of the octopus and the mantle is kind of what we think of
as like the head where all the organs are back there and so the larger male is going to have
a larger sperm packet which is going to hold more sperm and a smaller male
is going to have a smaller sperm packet so there's going to be less sperm in there to be
contributing to the female so I did find multiple paternity is present in octopus olivari which
makes sense because you would think that their higher genetic diversity means that there's a
higher probability of the species surviving the you know the little babies out in the
open ocean who are going to have to be struggling to survive the more genetic diversity there is
hopefully more of them will end up surviving and also it appeared that size did matter in this case
and that the larger males do have a higher probability of having more eggs fertilized
but in terms of female cryptic choice it seems like probably not it didn't the there was no real
pattern that in those trials where the female was ejecting that sperm packet those males still ended
up fertilizing some of those eggs so she wasn't saying no thank you it's probably more likely
that there was kind of like a mechanistic error that he put it in the wrong place
and so she was like let's try again try again so okay so the behavior showed us that larger
females do mate longer there didn't seem to be a pattern in the male behavior in these experiments
and then it looked like from the behavior it looked like oh maybe there is female choice
but then when we took in the picture of the genetics we saw that the first male in these
experiments had a higher ratio of fertilized eggs and then the large males also had a higher ratio
and it also kind of told me that female choice is unlikely
so that was kind of the research that i did for for my PhD did a you know very broad overview if
you actually want all the technical stuff there's a link I think in the chat that you can see and
so that's pretty much all I have for my talk today and now I have some time I think for questions.
Awesome thank you so much Heather there was just a lot of awesome content and I learned a lot so
you folks have been sending in a lot of awesome questions we definitely won't be able to get
through them but kind of filtering through we'll answer a few and then we'll do some closing slides
to end the webinar so I think we'll start off with um there have been there have been several
questions regarding how can you easily distinguish the males from the females. Oh that's a great
question so like I was telling you the males have that hectocotylus and it's actually kind of
shorter and stubbier than the other arms so and it's the third arm on the right so if you catch
your octopus and you kind of the middle of the between the eyes are the first two arms the one on
the right I guess in this video it looks like left the one on the right is number one and then two
three the third one on the right is going to be shorter and stubbier and and also another
thing that you can see is that the males will sometimes have these kind of larger suckers
that are sporadically distributed around their arms and that's kind of used to probably when they
mount the female so females don't have that it's very regular size of suckers all the way up.
Thank you Heather. So next question. There were quite a few questions on inking. So how energy
effective is inking is it harmful to the animal and how does the ink regenerate? Great question.
So the inking it's not energetically difficult they have that ink sac and they actually kind of
mix it with some mucus when they let it out so they're not using all of it at once they have a
store of it and it's yeah it's kind of it's a it's not gonna wear them down by having to do it.
Oh sorry can you ask the rest of the question again I forgot. No problem. Is it
how energy effective is inking is it harmful to the animal and how does the ink regenerate okay
perfect so it is not energetically taxing it does not harm the animal and it it regenerates by
it has like I said it has like a large reserve of ink and so it's not using a whole lot
every time it's just kind of using a little bit and mixing it with the mucus
all right and I think we'll finish off with one more question and we had a few requests
actually for your thoughts on the Oscar nominated documentary My Octopus Teacher. Yeah you know
I loved it i thought it was a great I thought what this guy is a great field biologist going
out there every day looking at this octopus and uh gosh just beautifully filmed so I thought it
was great and it also brings a lot of attention to how incredible these animals are so so yeah I
definitely thought it was and most of the science is really well done so yeah it was great. Thank you
Heather. So we do have a lot of questions for you that we'll send to you after but for now we are
going to finish off with a few closing slides so I'm going to share my screen and bring back on
Allen Tom our Superintendent but thank you so much Heather my pleasure. So again I want to thank
Heather I think just by all the questions I was looking at and how many people had attended
clearly folks were very interested in this and as Cindy said we are going to be downloading all the
questions sending them to Heather and then having her respond to us and then we will email them back
out to you all. So again I want to let people know we've had a whole host of videos this past or
actually last year and into this year some really great speakers so feel free to go to our webinar
archive and take a look at it this is where Heather's talk will be posted hopefully in
the next couple of weeks. Next slide Cindy and you know I thought you know I had been watching a
lot of the questions Heather and I think one of the questions or suggestions was you should
lead a octopus tours at night so just an FYI for a second career. All of you who have stayed with
us will get one contact unit hour of professional development I'll be sending out the certificate
hopefully within the next 24 hours once we download all the people's emails. Next slide Cindy
and we do want to know the feedback from you if you are an educator especially
I know I saw some schools on there from the Big Island and other places
please teachers fill out the evaluation form let us know what other topics we could
put on to our webinar series because we also from the general public
would like to know what other topics you might be interested in. Next slide please
and I do want to just put in a plug for our next talk that the Humpback Whale Sanctuary
will be hosting April 24th we'll be having a talk from a speaker from Travis from
Kona from the Big island and he will be talking about whale sharks so please join us for that
go online and register for it and again if you can't make it if you register at least
you'll get a notification when the video is ready and the final slide I think that is it
but again I want to thank everybody for joining us for taking the time out of their day
to participate with us with us and I definitely want to thank Cindy and Jean
and especially Heather for this great talk. Mahalo everybody stay safe and hope to see you in April.