Carl Linnaeus classified kraken as cephalopods in 1735 and gave the species the name Microcosmus marinus. In 1250, an anonymous Greenlandic author described the kraken, believing that because it is so large there must only be two in all the world. It stays submerged for days, then rears its head and nostrils above surface and stays that way at least until the change of tide. It is the nature of this creature to swallow men and ships, and even whales and everything else within reach. In the Old Icelandic saga Örvar-Oddr from the 13th century, the heroes describe a kraken-like creature: The kraken appears in some of the earliest literature from the West. However, periodically the kraken would rise, and ships could be consumed, capsized, crushed, or sucked under by the whirlpool of the kraken’s descent. They attracted bevies of fish that fed on their nutrient-rich waste, so a daring ship would have good fishing if they fished over the spot where a kraken lay sleeping. It was said that kraken spent most of their time on the seafloor. Eventually these descriptions coalesced into something more like a giant octopus or squid, so large that it could crush sailing ships in its tentacles. Early versions described something like a giant crab, or giant whale, or serpent. The legend of the kraken is an old one, coming from the coasts of Norway, Greenland, and Iceland. This is perhaps best represented by the legend of kraken, and by the giant squid in both the novel Twenty-Thousand Leagues Beneath the Sea (1870) and its 1954 film adaptation. It represents how little we know of the sea, and how foolhardy we are to venture on and in it. In other stories, the tentacled monster exists without explanation. Their plan is to steer it with a remote control. In Sharktopus (2010), scientists genetically engineer a creature that is half octopus (the half with the tentacles) and half shark (the half with the teeth). For instance, in It Came From Beneath The Sea (1955), the giant octopus is a result of atom bomb testing. Often these monsters are the result of human hubris and mad science. In short, cephalopods are fascinating, mysterious, and weird, and they challenge our assumptions about biology, intelligence, and consciousness.Ĭephalopod-type monsters are staples of legends and of monster-based horror and fantasy. They can control every sucker on their arms independently and they have three hearts. They see with their eyes and breathe with their gills, but they also taste, see, and breathe with their skin. They keep most of their neurons in their arms and their esophagi run right through the centers of their brains.
They include nautilus, cuttlefish, octopus, and squid. Since people first took to the sea, cephalopods have been used to signal the mystery of the sea and the strangeness of space.Ĭephalopods are members of the Cephalopoda class in the Mollusca phylum. However, it is certainly true that octopuses and other cephalopods, while being indisputably from Earth, are bizarre in their behavior, biology, and thought processing.
There’s an awfully big difference between something being “like an alien” and actually being an alien. “It’s the first sequenced genome from something like an alien,” jokes neurobiologist Clifton Ragsdale of the University of Chicago in Illinois, who co-led the genetic analysis of the California two-spot octopus ( Octopus bimaculoides). The misunderstanding stemmed from a quote from Nature: In 2015, the news briefly and erroneously lit up with the announcement that science had revealed that octopuses are actually aliens.
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