Its a snake..no no..its a fish...no no it's a..its an..

...Octopus..a Mimic Octopus.

Now, for all fans of the underwater animals it is a well known fact that Octopus are intelligent sea-faring creatures with remarkable ability to adapt to their surroundings, at literally a blink of the eye.

These intelligent invertebrates with the special skin pigmenting cells (chromatophores), can blink their cells into different colors to adjust to their surroundings. They also exhibit remarkable problem solving ability, especially through the process of trial and error. This author has seen a controlled laboratory experiment where an octopus just brought in from the sea was put into a tank with a corked bottle containing food. For a while the octopus tried doing everything to get into the bottle, and then remarkably enough uncorked the bottle to get at the food!

For all the remarkable nature of their intelligence, this Mimic Octopus is just a tad too much. I mean come on, being able to play a game of charades? Aint that amazing?

This Mimic Octopus, not discovered until 1998 or 2001 (pick your take, I have read about their discovery during either of the two years, were found off the delta areas of the Indonesian islands and South East Asia. And amazingly enough, in lieu of its rather recent discovery, in the Latin name world of "proper" speciology, the Mimic Octopus does not have a name.
Apparently the reason for this rather late discovery of a rather remarkable ocean species is put down to the fact that they inhibit what is considered a rather bland piece of ocean topography, something that is not as colorful or with the variety and splendor of a coral reef.

While mimickry is often part of natural adaptation of many species for sheer survival purposes, this is the first time that the scientific world has had a chance ot observe a species mimicking more than one species - in the case of the Mimic Octopus it has been observed to mimic atleast three and maybe more species.

Sole Fish or Flatfish(mimicked by aligning its arms in a flat oval and swimming close to the sea floor), Sea Snake (by sticking 6 tentacles together with body and undulating the remaining two to mimic the balck and white striped sea snake) and Lion Fish (by holding tentacles out in a "burst of sunlight" like spines of the poisonous lion fish) were the routine victims of this tricky charading octopus. See here, here and here for visuals of this amazing creature.

One thing is for certain - if this creature is able to imitate a bunch of species, it did pick it up as an evolutionary upgrade in terms of its ability to protect itself from the environment. And it is just as highly likely that the three species of sea creatures that the Mimic Octopus has been observed to imitate, are part of a larger range of creatures that the Mimic can imitate.

Personally I have been impressed over the years by the various social and survival skills seen in various animals - both land and sea-borne. But aside of the family tendencies of a herd of elephants, this is the only other animal that has impressed me so. So much so, I have my MSN sign-on name is Mimic Octopus in honor of this tricky creature, which seemingly has the ability to take a disguise at the drop of a hat, and in response to the situation at hand.