In a piece on octopus farming, Katherine Harmon mentions a fascinating fact — octopuses don’t have an adaptive immune system, the handy-dandy network of different immune-response cells that allow us vertebrates to more easily fight off infections our bodies have encountered before.
That’s a problem if you’re trying to raise a bunch of invertebrates in close quarters (as per a farm) because you can’t immunize them against pathogens that could easily spread from one octopus to another.
via Boing Boing
Image: Alice Cai
