Untangling The Science of Octopus Arms

Short Wave

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4.7 • 6K Ratings

🗓️ 19 September 2025

⏱️ 8 minutes

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Summary

Octopuses and their arms are a bit of a mystery. Not because scientists don’t know how they work; they’re boneless hydrostats, made up of groups of muscles working together and capable of bending, twisting, elongating or shortening — like a frog’s tongue, or an elephant’s trunk. But because scientists are still figuring out how most octopuses use those arms in the wild.

Scientists at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole and the marine lab at Florida Atlantic University wanted to answer that question. By analyzing videos taken in the wild, they found that octopuses seemed to prefer doing certain tasks with certain arms… and that the majority of the time, they used their front arms to explore and their back arms to get around. Researchers on the project hope that furthering our understanding of octopus behavior and movement will be useful for developing things like soft robotics.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
0:05.4	Hey, Shortwave is Regina Barber here.
0:07.5	And Rachel Carlson with our biweekly science news roundup featuring the hosts of all
0:11.8	things considered. And today we have the always fun Ari Shapiro. We're going to miss you, Ari.
0:16.6	Oh, I'm only always fun when I'm with you. It's a testament to your show.
0:22.0	I love doing it.
0:22.8	So I hear today you're going to tell me about some mysterious red dots in space.
0:26.7	Yeah, and how the brain might fill in missing information.
0:29.8	And lastly, you'll love this, Ari, the wiggly world of octopus arms.
0:33.7	Eight times the fun.
0:34.9	Exactly.
0:35.7	All that on this episode of Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
0:45.8	Okay, to kick us off, tell me about these red dots in space. I'm imagining like intergalactic acne.
0:50.3	What is it? Well, let's start at the beginning, Ari. The universe probably started with the Big Bang.
0:55.4	At the very beginning. Very, very beginning. So, Ari, this story starts with images from the new James Webb Space Telescope of the very, very early universe. We're talking like 500 million years after the Big Bang, which since the universe is 13.8 billion years old, that's basically less than 5% of the universe's life.
1:13.6	So when scientists were looking far back into the dawn of the universe, they noticed these very strange red objects in these images of space.
1:21.4	They debated whether the dots were big black holes or galaxies.
1:25.2	But the weird thing was, if they were galaxies, they were much older than they should have been.
1:29.8	It would be like checking on your little kid and finding a fully ground adult.
1:34.5	That's Bing J. Wang, an astrophysicist who is part of a team that published a study about one of these red dots in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics last week.
1:42.1	What does her team think these red dots are?
1:44.7	So long story short, Ari, we still don't know.
	...

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