You’ve heard jokes about octopuses who become baseball pitchers, but that’s just because they have so many arms. Sea creatures don’t really throw things, do they? It turns out they do, indeed. The act of throwing an object at a target had only previously been observed in primates, birds, elephants, and mongooses. But octopuses in the wild do it, too, and they most often do it underwater. An octopus will use its tentacles to throw debris out of a nest, or to defend against unwanted mating behavior, or to argue with another octopus (they are not social animals).
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These creatures have a unique method to their throw, to overcome the difficulty of tossing objects underwater. They use their tentacles to gather up objects, such as seashells, and lob them in the right direction. As they release, they also send a jet of water from their siphons to propel the object through the water. Throwing behavior is more often seen in darker colored octopuses, and in females. Such tossing has been captured on video. -via reddit
(Image credit: Peter Godfrey-Smith et al)
Source: neatorama