An outline of the anatomy

Abstract

Rather surprisingly for such a common and well-known animal, there is no readily available dissection guide for Octopus vulgaris. Some parts have been described in great detail; the brain, notably, has had a very thorough treatment in Young’s (1971) Anatomy of the nervous system of Octopus vulgaris (690 pp and 645 figures!) but there is no obvious source for a general picture of the anatomy of the animal as a whole. To find an illustration covering the major vessels of the blood system, for example, one must go to Isgrove’s (1909) monograph on Eledone, while the morphology and function of the excretory system is best described in the work of Harrison and Martin (1965) for O. dofleini. In this chapter some rather scattered information about anatomy is gathered together and given in just sufficient detail to define terms and to show how the systems described in the chapters that follow fit in to the overall layout of the animal.