Cephalopod aficionados looking to spice up their lighting should look to Adam Wallacavage's Octopus Chandeliers. His unusual light fixtures hold up their bulbs with sucker-bearing tentacles that come in a variety of colors and levels of kitsch.

As New Year's Eve approaches, this curious creature, created by Phineas X. Jones (and featured on the Half Acre Beer holiday card), hopes you have a weird and wonderful new year, filled with cryptids and unexpected cephalopods.

The blue-ringed octopus is tiny, cute — and incredibly deadly. One bite from its beak could kill a human, and most sea creatures wouldn't fare much better. But the blue-ringed octopus shares a trait with poisonous butterflies. It has coloration that warns predators not to eat its deadly flesh. In the case of the…

The color patterns on cephalopods are controlled in large part by chromatophores, pigment-filled cells controlled by the animal's muscles. Michael Bok, a graduate student at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, filmed this video of a dead Longfin Inshore Squid (Loligo pealeii) still-active chromatophores…

Cuttlefish are among the most remarkable of cephalopods, but nobody expected the creatures to have this particular trick up their sleeve. Cuttlefish can actually see information in the angle of intense polarized light that we can barely comprehend.

As far as invertebrates go, you don't get much smarter than the members of the mollusk phylum, which includes octopuses, cuttlefish, and squid. But mollusks apparently didn't think through their evolutionary path very well, developing brains four times over.

Tools aren't just for vertebrates anymore. The veined octopus has been spotted lugging around coconut shells to serve as mobile shelters, the first time scientists have observed tool use in an invertebrate species.