![]() What fascinated Jeffs more than how sneaky the battling males can be is the role females play in deciding their partners. Giant cuttlefish mating: The Blue Planet II team worked in South Australia with cuttlefish scientist Alexandra Schnell, who’s been studying what Jeffs terms “this quite incredible, tumultuous scene of amazing behaviors.” When a large male has its eye on a female that’s clearly over him, a smaller male may take it upon himself to mute his coloring and “tuck in his arms” and pose as a female - so he can swim right up to the larger male and then to the female, with whom he’ll mate. Giant cuttlefish in Whyalla, South Australia, gathering together to mate. She fought back and escaped, and it’s quite amazing.” “The behavior with her pushing her arms through the gills really was quite a surprise to us all - certainly a surprise to them, I think. Were they about to see their little star predated?” Jeffs says. “Because they got to know this octopus so well, their hearts were in their mouths when a shark did actually attack her. Foster uses the tracking skills he mastered in the Kalahari to try to understand the lives of the animals living in the kelp forests, and after six years of daily morning dives, he knows individual octopuses and their personalities. “There’s this phenomenally clever animal that’s just doing everything it can, using its wits to survive against quite a ruthless predator.”Īs viewers will learn in the making-of segment that ends the episode, the attack was particularly upsetting for cameraman Roger Horrocks and naturalist Craig Foster, who allowed Horrocks to follow alongside him for months in search of an octopus on the hunt. “You have this impression that they just have this sort of alien intelligence that we couldn’t perhaps understand, but seeing this footage was just mind-blowing because then there’s proof,” she says. Jeffs has long considered octopuses one of her favorite animals because they’re so wily. This octopus then does something that had never been filmed before: she (yes, it’s a she) gathers shells with her tentacles and creates an armored disguise - hiding in plain sight, as narrator Sir David Attenborough says. The shark can’t breathe, so it has to let the octopus go. It grabs hold of the octopus and shakes it violently - until the octopus slips its tentacles into the shark’s gills (as seen in the photo above). A pyjama shark, which is an expert at hunting in the undergrowth, is just small enough to reach into the crevice where the octopus tries to hide. The former sequence takes place in a South African kelp forest, where the hunter, a common octopus stalking a crab, suddenly becomes the hunted. 17 “Green Seas” installment has an octopus that episode producer Kathryn Jeffs likens to Sherlock and a spider crab she thinks of as Jon Snow. We’ve seen a lot of amazing things in the first four weeks of BBC America’s Blue Planet II, but the Feb. A common octopus fights off an attack by a pyjama shark in Blue Planet II. ![]()
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