How Does an Octopus Move? Crawling, Jetting, and More

Octopuses move using a surprisingly diverse toolkit of locomotion strategies, with crawling along the seafloor and jet propulsion through the water column as their two primary modes. What makes their movement remarkable is not just this versatility but how radically different each mode is from animal locomotion as we typically understand it. An octopus crawling across a reef has more in common, mechanically, with an inflating balloon than with a walking dog, and its jet-powered escape bursts work on the same principle as a deflating one. Beyond these two staples, octopuses also walk on two arms, swim with fins, burrow into sand, and even stilt-walk while carrying coconut shells.

Crawling by Pushing, Not Pulling

When an octopus crawls, it does not swing its arms forward and pull itself along the way a person might drag themselves across ice. Instead, individual arms elongate against the ground and push the body in the desired direction. The arms are muscular hydrostats, meaning they have no bones or joints; they generate force entirely through the interplay of muscles pressing against an internal volume of incompressible fluid. Longitudinal muscles running the length of each arm can shorten it, while transverse muscles running across its width can thin and elongate it. By selectively contracting transverse muscles, the octopus extends an arm tip against the substrate and shoves its body forward.

This pushing-by-elongation mechanism has a strange consequence: the octopus can crawl in any direction relative to which way its body is facing. A 2015 study analyzing 145 independent pairs of video frames found that octopuses crawled in virtually all directions relative to their body orientation, with no strong preference for “forward” as we would define it.¹ The most common crawling angle was roughly 45 degrees off from the body’s midline, but the full spread covered every direction from straight ahead to straight behind. Even more unusual, the octopus can change its crawling direction while keeping its body pointed the same way, or rotate its body while continuing to crawl in the same direction. These two parameters appear to be controlled independently.

This omnidirectional crawling also lacks the rhythmic limb coordination found in nearly every other walking or crawling animal. Insects, crabs, horses, and humans all use repeating gait patterns, alternating sets of limbs in a predictable cycle. Octopuses do not. Their arm coordination shows no apparent rhythmic pattern, suggesting the central controller generates a fundamentally different kind of motor output.² The radial symmetry of the arms around the body, combined with the simple push mechanism, seems to make rhythmic gaits unnecessary.

Jet Propulsion for Speed

When an octopus needs to move fast, crawling will not do. Jet propulsion is the escape mode, and it works by forcefully expelling water from the mantle cavity through a narrow muscular funnel. The mantle, which is the fleshy dome behind the head, acts as a biological pump. To fill, the octopus opens the mantle cavity and draws water in through openings near the head. To jet, it contracts the thick circular muscles of the mantle wall, squeezing the cavity and shooting water out through the funnel at high pressure. The funnel can be aimed in different directions, giving the octopus some steering control over where the thrust sends it.

The refilling phase is just as mechanically interesting as the expulsion. The mantle wall contains layers of radial muscles that antagonize the circular ones, and the connective tissue within the mantle stores elastic energy during contraction. When the circular muscles relax, this stored energy helps spring the mantle back open, pulling water in for the next pulse.³ The result is a pulsatile jet, a rhythmic squeeze-and-refill cycle that can accelerate an octopus to impressive speeds over short distances. Jet propulsion is energetically expensive compared with crawling, though, and octopuses rely on it mainly for predator evasion or short bursts of repositioning rather than sustained travel.

The Role of Elastic Tissue in Arm Movement

The arms themselves are not simply bags of muscle. The internal architecture of an octopus arm includes a complex network of intramuscular connective tissue, and the way that tissue is organized differs between the two main muscle groups in the arm. Confocal imaging has revealed that the elastic fibers in the longitudinal muscles (running along the arm’s length) are more coiled and orderly, while those in the transverse muscles (running across the arm’s width) are more chaotic and less coiled.⁴

These differences matter because they give each muscle group distinct mechanical properties. At rest, the longitudinal muscles sit under about 20 percent compression while the transverse muscles are under about 30 percent stretch, meaning there are built-in tensions in the arm even when the animal is doing nothing. The longitudinal muscles show higher viscoelasticity, which means they are better at storing energy and damping vibrations, useful for dynamic movements like reaching. The transverse muscles are stiffer, better suited for maintaining posture and resisting unwanted deformation. This division of labor within the arm helps explain how an octopus can both flail an arm rapidly to catch a crab and hold it rigidly to brace against a current.

Walking on Two Arms

Some octopuses occasionally get up on just two arms and walk bipedally, which looks as bizarre as it sounds. The behavior was first formally described in two tropical species, the coconut octopus (Amphioctopus marginatus) and the algae octopus (Abdopus aculeatus), both of which walk on two alternating rear arms using a rolling gait while bundling the remaining six arms up to look like something else entirely.⁵ Each walking arm contacts the ground for more than half of the stride, technically qualifying the movement as walking rather than running.

This behavior is not limited to tropical species. Bipedal locomotion has since been observed in the common octopus (Octopus vulgaris), where it appears linked to defensive displays.⁶ And a more recent report documented it in Callistoctopus furvus, a species observed walking backward on its rear arm pair while raising its front arms in a corkscrew shape with head papillae extended, creating a convincing resemblance to floating Sargassum seaweed.⁷ The walking octopus performed this display across sand, rock, seagrass, and algae-covered substrates.

The common thread in bipedal walking is disguise. By tucking most of their arms into a compact shape and moving on just two, these octopuses apparently mimic drifting plant material or a coconut shell rolling along the bottom. The cost is slower, clumsier locomotion compared with normal crawling, but the tradeoff is camouflage while on the move, a problem most animals solve by simply freezing in place.

Fin Swimming in the Deep Sea

Not all octopuses live in shallow reefs. Deep-sea species in the suborder Cirrina, often called “dumbo octopuses” because of their prominent ear-like fins, rely on fin swimming rather than jet propulsion as their primary way of getting around. These animals live in a world with far less structure to crawl on and far greater energy constraints, making a gentler mode of locomotion more practical.

Observations of the Arctic finned octopod Cirroteuthis muelleri show it cruising slowly just above the seafloor at a pace of about four to eight fin stroke cycles per minute, body held perpendicular to the bottom with the funnel facing forward and the arms slightly curved.⁸ When the animal shifts into active prey capture, though, the fin rate jumps dramatically, up to 24 to 34 stroke cycles per minute, apparently to press its webbed arms down against the seafloor and pin prey between its body and the substrate. This is a very different locomotory world from the reef-dwelling species that jet and crawl, and it highlights how much octopus movement varies across habitats and lineages.

How the Nervous System Manages Eight Independent Arms

Coordinating eight flexible arms with no skeleton is a control problem of staggering complexity, and octopuses solve it in a way no other animal does. About two-thirds of an octopus’s neurons reside in the arms themselves rather than in the central brain. The neural circuitry generating arm movements engages every division of the nervous system, from the nerve cords running along each arm to the central brain above the esophagus.⁹

This distributed architecture means the arms have substantial local autonomy. An amputated arm, stimulated either by touch or by electrical current to its nerve cord, can produce movements with natural-looking kinematics, bending and reaching as though still attached to a living animal.¹⁰ The detailed instructions for executing a reaching motion appear to be embedded in the neuromuscular system of the arm itself, rather than being micromanaged by the brain.

The brain’s role seems to be more about deciding what to do rather than dictating every muscle contraction involved in doing it. Motor commands traveling down the central nerve cord recruit large groups of motor neurons simultaneously along the arm’s length, which is useful for actions like stiffening the whole arm at once. Where along the arm a movement begins appears to depend on an interplay between these broad central commands and local sensory signals picked up by the arm.¹¹ This hybrid control scheme, part centralized strategy and part local improvisation, is what allows an octopus to crawl, reach, manipulate objects, and taste its environment all at the same time without overwhelming its brain.

Sensory feedback also plays a critical role. Experiments using an opaque maze, where the octopus could not see its own arm, showed that octopuses can learn to direct a single arm through a maze to retrieve a food reward using touch and proprioception alone. The learning was mediated by the central brain, since positive reinforcement learning in cephalopods is processed centrally, but the sensory information feeding that learning came entirely from the arm.¹² The octopus, in other words, can “feel” its way through a problem and remember the solution, even when it never saw what its arm was doing.

How Suckers Help with Grip and Movement

While the arms provide thrust, the suckers provide traction. Each arm of a common octopus carries roughly 200 to 300 suckers, and every one of them is an independently controlled adhesive organ. Adhesion works by reducing the pressure inside the sucker cavity. When a sucker seals against a surface, contraction of radial muscles within the sucker wall thins and expands the enclosed volume. Because water resists expansion when trapped, the pressure inside drops, creating suction.¹³ Measurements with miniature pressure sensors have confirmed that suckers can generate pressures below zero kilopascals on wettable surfaces, though they fail to do so on non-wettable ones.

Sustained attachment does not require constant muscular effort. Crossed connective tissue fibers within the sucker store elastic energy, providing an economical way to maintain grip over long periods. A more detailed model of continuous adhesion proposes that the sucker seals the opening between its two internal chambers (the infundibulum and acetabulum) via a small protuberance, while the outer surface flattens against the substrate, locking in the pressure difference.¹⁴ This means an octopus clinging to a rock in a surge zone is not burning much energy just holding on, freeing its muscles for other tasks.

During crawling, the suckers serve as anchor points. An arm that is pushing against the bottom needs grip to transmit force without sliding, and the suckers provide exactly that. When the octopus transitions to climbing a vertical surface or maneuvering through a crevice, the suckers shift from a stabilizing role to a primary one, gripping rock and pulling the body along. The ability to independently engage and release hundreds of suckers across multiple arms simultaneously gives the octopus a kind of modular traction system that works on almost any natural surface.

Burrowing and Stilt-Walking

Some octopus species have developed locomotion strategies that go well beyond the standard crawl-jet-walk repertoire. The small Australian species Octopus kaurna is the first cephalopod known to burrow beneath sand. It uses a technique involving active fluidization of the sediment, essentially liquefying the sand around its body by jetting water into it, and then uses adhesive mucus for sediment manipulation as it moves below the surface.¹⁵ This appears to be an adaptation to living in structurally simple environments, flat sand plains with few rocks or crevices to hide in, where going underground is the only shelter option.

At the other extreme, the coconut octopus (Amphioctopus marginatus) has been observed carrying coconut shell halves and large bivalve shells while walking. This “stilt-walking” gait involves arranging the shells concave-side up beneath the body, then extending the arms around the outside and walking on them as rigid limbs.¹⁶ The gait is slow, ungainly, and clearly less efficient than unencumbered movement. While carrying the shells, the octopus gets no protection from them, since its head and body are fully exposed. The payoff comes only later, when the animal deploys the shells as a portable shelter at its destination. This behavior is widely cited as one of the clearest examples of tool use in invertebrates, and the locomotion involved is unlike anything else in the animal kingdom.

Recovering Movement After Injury

Octopuses lose arms to predators with some regularity, and they can regenerate lost limbs over time. In the short term, wound closure begins almost immediately. Macroscopic and ultrastructural analyses of Octopus vulgaris arms after amputation showed extensive contraction of the wound margins starting from the earliest time points. By six hours after amputation, the wound area was roughly 64 percent closed compared with its initial size, driven by tissue puckering and migration of epithelial cells over the wound bed.¹⁷

Because octopus crawling does not depend on any fixed gait pattern, losing one or two arms does not break the locomotor system the way losing a leg would for a quadruped. The remaining arms simply take over, with the omnidirectional pushing mechanism redistributing thrust. The lack of rhythmic coordination, which might seem like a limitation, turns out to be an advantage here: there is no gait to reorganize, no pattern that needs to “skip” a missing limb. The animal just pushes with whatever arms are available.

Octopus-Inspired Robotics

The octopus’s ability to move, grip, and squeeze through tight spaces using only soft tissue has made it a model organism for soft robotics. Engineers have built silicone arms embedded with cables that replicate the functionality of octopus arm muscles, producing robots capable of both pushing-based crawling locomotion and object grasping with minimal control inputs.¹⁸ The results support the biological observations that the same pushing-by-elongation mechanism used for crawling can double as a manipulation strategy.

More recent work has integrated stretchable electronic sensors into octopus-inspired arms. One such system, called E-SOAM, uses a bending-elongation propagation model based on the way real octopus arms transmit a bend wave from base to tip, allowing the robotic arm to move, reach, and grasp objects autonomously.¹⁹ These robots are not just engineering curiosities. Soft robots that can navigate cluttered or fragile environments without rigid joints have potential applications in surgical tools, underwater exploration, and search-and-rescue scenarios where a traditional rigid robot would get stuck or break things. The octopus, an animal that solved the problem of moving effectively without a single bone in its body, turns out to have been prototyping solutions that engineers are only now learning to copy.