Found out that octopus have THREE hearts while researching a marine horror story

I was trying to write a creepy sea creature scene and stumbled on this fact. Apparently two of them pump blood to the gills and one does the rest, and their blood is BLUE. Has anyone else had a random biology fact totally derail their plot planning?

2 comments

2 Comments

sageross17d agoMost Upvoted

Wait, so you're telling me this thing has three hearts and blue blood, but the real horror is that you had to scrap your plot? That's rough, buddy. I once had a whole story about a shark with a grudge get completely ruined because I learned sharks can't get cancer, so my whole "rage-filled tumor shark" concept went down the drain. Now I just picture a very well preserved octopus moodily pumping its three hearts while I rearrange my story outline.

valw3617d ago

Tore up my whole deep sea horror plot about a giant squid when I found out they have the largest eyes in the animal kingdom. The eyes are the size of dinner plates and they don't even have color vision, so a lot of my dramatic eye contact scenes just fell flat. Ended up turning the whole thing into a comedy about a near-sighted squid that just bumps into things in the dark. Then I went down a rabbit hole about how octopus brains are distributed through their arms and they can taste with their suckers, which totally messed up my original "smart monster" concept. Now I'm three chapters into a story about a sea creature that's basically a walking tongue with attitude problems.