Octopus lures from the Mariana Islands found to be oldest in the world
Octopuses are ocean creatures that are most famous for having eight arms and bulbous heads. Some other fun facts: They have three hearts and blue blood; they squirt ink to deter predators; and being boneless, they can squeeze into (or out of) tight spaces. They are quite intelligent and have been observed using tools.
And sadly, for them, sex is a death sentence.
Description
The order Octopoda includes 289 species, according to the World Animal Foundation. The word also refers specifically to animals in the genus Octopus. The word octopus comes from the Greek, októpus, which means "eight foot," according to a Smithsonian magazine article that summarized facts in Katherine Harmon Courage's book, "Octopus! The Most Mysterious Creature in the Sea."
Some people call their appendages tentacles, but that is incorrect; they are arms. Most octopus species have suction cups on the bottom of each arm. The arms seem to have a mind of their own. In fact, two-thirds of an octopus' neurons are in its arms rather than its head, according to the article. That means that an octopus can focus on exploring a cave for food with one arm while another arm tries to crack open a shellfish.
Some octopuses even have warts. Two deep-sea octopuses in the Graneledone genus — G. pacifica and G. verrucosa — have skin bumps dotting their pink-hued mantles. These warty protrusions, it turns out, can be used to distinguish the two species, which have been incredibly difficult to tell apart. Scientists reporting June 7, 2017 in the journal Marine Biology Research catalogued the distribution of warts on both species, pinpointing two variables that were consistent across the individuals within a given species: distance between the warts and the tip of the mantle and the extent to which the skin bumps spread down the creature's arms.
Octopuses have an excellent sense of touch, according to the World Animal Foundation. Their suckers have receptors that enable an octopus to taste what it is touching.
Most octopuses — those in the suborder Incirrata (or Incirrina) — have no internal skeletons or protective shells. Their bodies are soft, enabling them to squeeze into small cracks and crevices, according to National Geographic. In April 2016, an octopus at the National Aquarium of New Zealand squeezed out of its tank and made an eight-armed dash for a drainpipe that — luckily for him — led directly to the sea.
A bulbous sack-like body, or mantle, is perched on top of an octopus' head. The only hard part of their bodies is a sharp, parrot-like beak that is on the underside, where the arms converge. Octopuses have powerful jaws and venomous saliva, according to National Geographic.
Octopuses weren't always squishy creatures. The ancestors of octopuses and squid sported hard shells. A study published online March 1, 2017 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences revealed these marine animals lost their hard "mobile homes" in the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. This shell loss likely helped the ancient relatives of today's octopus, squid and cuttlefish become more agile to evade predators and nab prey, the researchers said.
"That's back to the time when people were first living in the Mariana Islands. So we think these could be the oldest octopus lures in the entire Pacific region and, in fact, the oldest in the world," said Michael T. Carson, an archaeologist with the Micronesian Area Research Center at the University of Guam.
The study, titled "Let's catch octopus for dinner: Ancient inventions of octopus lures in the Mariana Islands of the remote tropical Pacific," is published in World Archaeology, a peer-reviewed academic journal. Carson, who holds a doctorate in anthropology, is the lead author of the study, assisted by Hsiao-chun Hung from The Australian National University in Canberra, Australia.
The fishing devices were made with cowrie shells, a type of sea snail and a favorite food of octopuses, that were connected by a fiber cord to a stone sinker and a hook.
They have been found in seven sites in the Mariana Islands. The oldest lures were excavated in 2011 from Sanhalom near the House of Taga in Tinian and in 2016 from Unai Bapot in Saipan. Other locations include Achugao in Saipan, Unai Chulu in Tinian, and Mochom at Mangilao Golf Course, Tarague Beach, and Ritidian Beach Cave in Guam.
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"The artifacts have been known—we knew about them. It just took a long time considering the possibilities, the different hypotheses, of what they could be," Carson said. "The conventional idea—what we were told long ago from the Bishop Museum [in Honolulu]—was that these must be for scraping breadfruit or other plants, like maybe taro. [But] they don't look like that."
The shells didn't have the serrated edge of other known food-scraping tools. With their holes and grooves where the fiber cord would have been attached as well as the stone sinker components, they appeared a closer match to octopus lures found in Tonga from about 3,000 years ago, or 1100 B.C.
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| (Top image) A re-created example of an ancient octopus lure from Tonga housed |
An invention of the ancient CHamorus?
Carson said the question now becomes: Did the ancient CHamoru people invent this adaptation to their environment during the time when they first lived in the islands?"
That's a possibility, he said, the other being that they brought the tradition with them from their former homeland; however, no artifacts of this kind have yet been discovered in the potential homelands of the first Marianas settlers.
If the CHamoru people did invent the first octopus lures, it provides new insight into their ingenuity and ability to problem solve—having to create novel and specialized ways to live in a new environment and take advantage of an available food source.
"It tells us that […] this kind of food resource was important enough for them that they invented something very particular to trap these foods," Carson said. "We can't say that it contributed to a massive percentage of their diet—it probably did not—but it was important enough that it became what we would call a 'tradition' in archaeology."
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| Study sites in the Mariana Islands, shown within the Asia-Pacific region. Ancient octop |
The next question to look at, Carson said, is whether there are similar objects anywhere else from an older time.
"Purely from an archaeology standpoint, knowing the oldest of something is always important—because then you can track how things change through time," he said. "[…] The only other place that would be is in the overseas homeland area for the first CHamoru people moving to the Marianas. So we would look in islands in Southeast Asia and Taiwan for those findings."
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