The Octopus, the Chimera & Virgo

Awwwe....a baby octopus

Octopus

Related to the spiral of life, it is reflective of the mystic center and the unfolding of creation. Octopus people usually have good memories.

The number eight is important – eight is the number of power.

Octopus shows us how to get what we want
in an intelligent and efficient way.
Octopus people can accomplish more than
the average person in the same amount of time.
However, they must be careful to care for themselves while working
and not neglect their basic health.
Housekeeping is not a strong point with Octopus totem people.

~ swiped from Linsdomain

 

Lakshmi Tatma's parents were day laborers who earned less than 40 rupees per day, and were unable to afford a separation surgery for their daughter. The daughter was named after Lakshmi, the multi-limbed Hindu goddess of wealth. She was sometimes an object of worship as an incarnation of the goddess Lakshmi; by the age of 2, she was known all over India.

At one point, a circus had offered the couple a sum of money to buy Lakshmi as a sideshow, which forced them into hiding. [there's an arsehole born every day]

At the time of being found by Dr. Sharan Patil, she was suffering from an infected pressure ulcer at the neck end of the parasitic twin and continuous fevers.

Lakshmi was the subject of a surgery carried out by Dr. Sharan Patil and 30 other physicians which included Chief Anesthetist Dr. Yohannan John at Sparsh Hospital in Bangalore, Karnataka.

The twins' two pelvises formed a single combined ring. Each twin had one working kidney. Lakshmi had a second kidney which was necrotic.. The autosite's feet were affected by clubfoot.

Her abdominal aorta gave off iliac branches to the autosite's legs and continued as a main trunk artery which gave off iliac branches to the parasite's legs and continued, and finally forked into the parasite's subclavian arteries.

The parasitic twin's spine and abdomen merged with Lakshmi's body. The twins' backbones were joined end-to-end and nerves were entangled. Lakshmi could not crawl normally or walk, but she could drag herself around somewhat. Doctors surmised early on that without the operation, she would not be able to live into her teens.

The surgery began on Tuesday, 6 November 2007, at 7 am IST (1:30 AM UTC), and was planned to last 40 hours at the most. An estimated cost of over USD$625,000 was paid entirely by the hospital's charitable wing Sparsh Foundation. A team of more than 30 surgeons worked in shifts. The surgery lasted for 27 hours. The doctors gave Lakshmi a 75-80% chance of survival during the surgery.

The steps of the operation were:

1. (8 hours): Abdominal operation: remove the parasite's abdominal organs.
2. Remove the autosite's necrotic kidney and replace it with the parasite's kidney. Tie off the blood vessels that supplied the parasite.
3. Move the reproductive system and the urinary bladder into the autosite.
4. (6 to 8 hours) Amputate the parasite's legs at the hip joints: this caused heavy bleeding. Cut the joined backbone: the nervous system around the join was found to be extremely chaotic, and care had to be taken to avoid causing paralysis.
5. Separation, at 12.30 am on 7 November 2007. The combined pelvic ring was divided through or near the parasite's hip joints and not at the pubic symphyses. The remaining incomplete pelvic ring was cut and bent to make the ends meet, and not left as an open part-circle.
6. External fixation to hold the parts of the pelvis in place. This caused the pelvis to close in 3 weeks to the normal position.
7. (4 hours): Suturing. Operation completed at 10 am on 7 November 2007.

After the operation, the camera showed the amputated parasite and its legs laid out so that for a while they looked like a separate human form.

Lakshmi's recovery so far has been swift and satisfactory. Within a week after the surgery, the doctors held a press conference showing Lakshmi being carried by her father. Her feet were still bandaged. She was in the hospital for a month after the operation.

Afterwards, she and her family moved to Sucheta Kriplani Shiksha Niketan in Jodhpur in Rajasthan, where Lakshmi joined a school for disabled children and her father got a job on that school's farm.

Standing proudly, Lakshmi's first Day of School January 2010

The Growing Evidence for Octopus Intelligence

Octopuses have the largest brains of any invertebrate. Athena's is the size of a walnut-as big as the brain of the famous African gray parrot, Alex, who learned to use more than one hundred spoken words meaningfully. That's proportionally bigger than the brains of most of the largest dinosaurs.
Another measure of intelligence: you can count neurons. The common octopus has about 130 million of them in its brain. A human has 100 billion. But this is where things get weird. Three-fifths of an octopus's neurons are not in the brain; they're in its arms.


"It is as if each arm has a mind of its own," says Peter Godfrey-Smith, a diver, professor of philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and an admirer of octopuses. For example, researchers who cut off an octopus's arm (which the octopus can regrow) discovered that not only does the arm crawl away on its own, but if the arm meets a food item, it seizes it-and tries to pass it to where the mouth would be if the arm were still connected to its body.


"Meeting an octopus," writes Godfrey-Smith, "is like meeting an intelligent alien." Their intelligence sometimes even involves changing colors and shapes. One video online shows a mimic octopus alternately morphing into a flatfish, several sea snakes, and a lionfish by changing color, altering the texture of its skin, and shifting the position of its body. Another video shows an octopus materializing from a clump of algae. Its skin exactly matches the algae from which it seems to bloom-until it swims away.


For its color palette, the octopus uses three layers of three different types of cells near the skin's surface. The deepest layer passively reflects background light. The topmost may contain the colors yellow, red, brown, and black. The middle layer shows an array of glittering blues, greens, and golds. But how does an octopus decide what animal to mimic, what colors to turn? Scientists have no idea, especially given that octopuses are likely colorblind.


But new evidence suggests a breathtaking possibility. Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory and University of Washington researchers found that the skin of the cuttlefish Sepia officinalis, a color-changing cousin of octopuses, contains gene sequences usually expressed only in the light-sensing retina of the eye. In other words, cephalopods-octopuses, cuttlefish, and squid-may be able to see with their skin.


One octopus researcher Mather was watching had just returned home and was cleaning the front of the den with its arms. Then, suddenly, it left the den, crawled a meter away, picked up one particular rock and placed the rock in front of the den. Two minutes later, the octopus ventured forth to select a second rock. Then it chose a third. Attaching suckers to all the rocks, the octopus carried the load home, slid through the den opening, and carefully arranged the three objects in front. Then it went to sleep.

What the octopus was thinking seemed obvious:

 "Three rocks are enough. Good night!"

The scene has stayed with Mather. The octopus "must have had some concept," she said, "of what it wanted to make itself feel safe enough to go to sleep." And the octopus knew how to get what it wanted: by employing foresight, planning-and perhaps even tool use.

(read full article here)

Could there be a connection between the rituals observed in humans who are diagnosed with OCD and the bedtime ritual of this octopus?

Could it be that the octopus behaved this way because it was being observed by a human who may or may not have strong VIRGO valency?