With hundreds of suckers on each of their eight gangly arms, it’s a wonder how octopuses don’t tie themselves up in knots all the time. A new study reveals how they manage this feat: Chemicals produced by their skin temporarily prevents their suckers from sucking.

Their bowl-shaped suckers are made of thick muscles, which help them stick to just about anything. And it’s a reflex. Experiments have shown that octopuses don’t know where their arms are exactly -- unlike humans and our rigid skeletons. Our brains have a fixed representation of our motor and sensory systems, like a map with body part coordinates, according to Binyamin Hochner from Hebrew University of Jerusalem. "It is hard to envisage similar mechanisms to function in the octopus brain because its very long and flexible arms have an infinite number of degrees of freedom,"


Read more at http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/how-octopuses-dont-get-tangled#kRuwR1gvVy6pptu8.99