Science news in brief: From octopus arms to whale songs with secrets

Sign up for our free Health Check email to receive exclusive analysis on the week in health Get our free Health Check email Get our free Health Check email SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Itamar Katz, one of the study’s authors, first noticed the light-detecting powers while studying a different phenomenon: how light causes the octopus’s skin to change colour. Asher Elbein open image in gallery The skin of the marine mammals can host many creatures Manatees may carry half a million microscopic hitchhikers Nematodes are roundworms that are mostly microscopic that have adapted to a spectacular range of homes, from Antarctic soil to the inside of your gut. Ellie Shechet open image in gallery Booming cetacean calls can help scientists read the ocean floor Whale songs could reveal deep secrets beneath the oceans In 2019, Václav Kuna, a seismologist, was perusing recordings from dozens of seismometers at the bottom of the northeast Pacific Ocean, when he kept finding strange noises: one-second chirps, repeating every 30 seconds or so. “Because I’m a seismologist, I wasn’t just like, oh, fin whales, that’s cute,” says Kuna, then a doctoral student at Oregon State University.