How To Tell An Octopus From A Dolphin

The porpoise may well be our last, only hope. The octopus, by contrast, may well be our greatest enemy. It is critical do distinguish between these two—one savior, the other archnemesis; one shining day, the other blackest night; one yang, the other yin, except in this case there’s no yang in the yin and no yin in the yang.

OCTOPUS	DOLPHIN
Flesh-eating, zombie-like beast with fangs and eight tentacles	Playful sea critter, exactly like the character Flipper from the movie Flipper
Lurking in your sink, your toilet, and your water bottle	Barely fits in the bathtub
Totally evil	Totally awesome
Special move: eight-tentacle octo-Chinese snakebite	Special move: shooting laser beams from eyes
Killer (kills people)	Killer (as in “killer!” – cool)
Can communicate only in the universal language of bloodshed and mayhem	Able to understand all languages, communicate telepathically
Favorite food: your face	Favorite food: dolphins subsist on the sustaining power of pure love
Massing just off the shore	We hope will come, even if only; at the nick of time
Can’t survive on dry land for more than half an hour, thank God	Walk among us
“You and I are not so different, Mr. Dolphin”	“That’s what you’d like to think!” (Bites evil octopus in half)

The Octopus: Master of Disguise

It’s a well-known fact that an octopus can camouflage itself so that it looks like rocks, or other underwater features of the landscape. “The secret behind their color capability is special skin cells called chromatophores. Each chromatophore consists of three bags of pigment. By squeezing or expanding the bags, octopuses can change the color displayed by each cell, allowing millions of subtle combinations.”

So if you thought that they’re always the same color, then you obviously don’t know the first thing about octopuses.