加州大学伯克利分校研究小组3月31号)发表在《海洋生物学期刊》上的研究结果显示，章鱼的爱情生活远比人们想象的要复杂。虽然它们没有骨头，但它们调情、手牵手并防备情敌接近它们的配偶。

The love lives of octopuses are far more complex than anyone thought, a team at the University of California, Berkeley, reported on Monday.

Graduate student Christine Huffard snorkeled in the waters off Indonesia to watch Abdopus aculeatus, an octopus with a spiky tan body the size of a small orange and arms 20 to 25 cm long.

Octopuses are well studied in captivity but because they are shy and often nocturnal, their natural wild behavior is less understood.

"Each day in the water, we learned something new about octopus behavior, probably like what ornithologists must have gone through after the invention of binoculars," said Huffard, now at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in Moss Bay, California.

"We quickly realized that Abdopus aculeatus broke all the rules, doing the near opposite of every hypothesis we'd formed based on aquarium studies."

They saw male cephalopods guarding the dens of their mates for several days, warding off rivals and even strangling them if they got too close.

Small males would sneak in to mate by swimming low to the ground in feminine fashion and not displaying their "male" brown stripes, the researchers reported in the journal Marine Biology.

And size matters, although perhaps not in quite the same way as for humans.

"If you're going to spend time guarding a female, you want to go for the biggest female you can find because she's going to produce more eggs," biology professor Roy Caldwell said. "It's basically an investment strategy."

Caldwell said he believes the behavior is common to many of the nearly 300 species of octopus.

The animals usually mate several times a day once they reach sexual maturity. Males have a specially designed arm they use to deposit a sperm packet into the female, who retires to her den and lays tens of thousands of eggs.

(Agencies/China Daily)

Vocabulary:

octopus：章鱼

snorkel：使用通气管潜游

nocturnal：夜晚最活跃的

cephalopod：头足纲动物：软体动物门的一种海生软体动物，如章鱼、鱿鱼。