Ink and jet

Threatened, an octopus squirts a cloud of ink and jets away, mantle first: a last-resort defense when camouflage has failed.

Species involved

common octopus Octopus vulgaris

Where to see it in the game: An octopus threatened by a bigger predator.

Source: Hanlon & Messenger 1996, Cephalopod Behaviour

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Spinyhead is a free game you play in your browser: you are a spinyhead blenny, a fish about 3 cm long living in a worm hole on a Caribbean coral head. Feed, fight for a better hole, court, raise eggs and dodge predators, while everything around you behaves the way field biologists have seen it behave. Most behaviors in the game come from published field studies; the rest are borrowed from other reefs or extrapolated, and this page says which. There are 82 on these pages, and more in the game’s field notebook waiting to be found.