Roger Highfield, editor, New Scientist magazine
True to its name, the North Pacific giant octopus is the largest of all octopus species.
The animals, which stand head and multiple shoulders above other invertebrates in terms of intelligence, grow to 45 kilograms and typically measure around 4 metres from arm tip to tip. Yet they only live for a maximum of five years.
This remarkable image comes from Sea, a collection of photographs that is published this month by Abrams. In it the fantastic and unusual marine creatures have been treated as still life objects by American photographer Mark Laita.
Underwater photography often gives animals a blue-green tint, because of absorption in the red part of the light spectrum. To show colours as they actually are, Laita photographed the creatures in tanks using studio strobe lighting.
By using tanks, both in his studio in Los Angeles and at public aquariums, he could create images which capture the ethereal and otherworldly nature of marine life.
In many images he ensured his subjects were reflected near the surface of their watery world. "I found the shapes, colors, and dancing, aqueous impressions spellbinding," writes Laita in the book's foreword.
As the common name suggests, this species of octopus - Enteroctopus dofleini - is found in the North Pacific Ocean, along the continental shelf from the Aleutian Islands west of Alaska to Baja California in Mexico and north-eastern Japan.
They feed on bivalves, crabs and lobsters and will often take their prey back to their den, a crevice or gap big enough to accommodate an individual's beak, the only hard part of an octopus. The octopus's musculature stands in for a skeleton, giving it a flexible structure so that a large animal is able to squeeze into a small space.
When it has finished its meal, the octopus pushes the remains out of the den's opening, creating an "octopus garden", or midden, of empty shells.
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