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If a piece of food is placed near the severed arm, "itll try to pass the food down the arm toward where the phantom mouth used to be," Anderson says. Through the centuries, octopuses of the giant kind, and giant squid, have been unjustly portrayed as monsters of the deep, Anderson says. The 1869 Jules Verne novel "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea," and the 1954 Walt Disney movie version feature a giant squid (which in reality can get to a ton in size) attacking the submarine Nautilus. "All fiction," says Anderson about murderous cephalopods. In 2007, he was one of the authors of a paper about giant Pacific octopus attacks on divers. "Although predators, they are generally shy and retiring animals that would rather retreat to a den than have any contact with humans," says the paper. The paper does recount four instances of the octopuses attacking divers, although there have been no documented diver fatalities attributed to giant octopuses. In one instance, the paper tells of divers collecting marine life on the Washington coast reporting a 15-pound octopus pulling off a divers dry-suit glove, "causing him great aggravation as the cold water leaked up his sleeve." The attack was "no worse than a puppy worrying a shoelace," says the paper, though pointing out that the octopus could have pulled off a divers mask or torn the divers suit with a bite from its beak. Now, about the octopuses tragic sex life. One of the eight arms of the male octopus is a "specialized" arm with an organ at the end called the ligula. The ligula has erectile tissue and is used to transfer billions of sperm from a yard-long packet into the female through one of its two gill openings. The actual sex act lasts more than four hours. Then tragedy begins for the male, something called "senescence." The male stops eating, loses weight, acts disoriented, even wanders into stinging sea anemones, which he would normally avoid. He crawls out of water onto the beach. Within two or three months, hes dead, if not already eaten by predators. The female crawls into a cave that becomes the den for her and the eggs, which are the size of grains of rice. She weaves them into a string of chitin thats material like your fingernails which she hangs down from the ceiling of the den, maybe 200 strings, with 200 eggs per string. She blocks the den with rocks for six to eight months and stays inside, never going out, never eating. When the eggs hatch, the mother blows water on them and they drift toward the surface. Then the mother soon dies, as if knowing that she had done her duty in keeping the species alive, Anderson says. On average, two out of 200,000 babies will survive, but thats enough to keep the population going. "Live fast, die young," is the famous saying that Anderson likes to use to describe octopuses. ___ Information from: The Seattle Times,