…octopuses are neither long-lived nor social. Athena, to my sorrow, may live only a few more months—the natural lifespan of a giant Pacific octopus is only three years. If the aquarium added another octopus to her tank, one might eat the other. Except to mate, most octopuses have little to do with others of their kind.
So why is the octopus so intelligent? What is its mind for? Mather thinks she has the answer. She believes the event driving the octopus toward intelligence was the loss of the ancestral shell. Losing the shell freed the octopus for mobility. Now they didn’t need to wait for food to find them; they could hunt like tigers. And while most octopuses love crab best, they hunt and eat dozens of other species—each of which demands a different hunting strategy. Each animal you hunt may demand a different skill set: Will you camouflage yourself for a stalk-and-ambush attack? Shoot through the sea for a fast chase? Or crawl out of the water to capture escaping prey?
Losing the protective shell was a trade-off. Just about anything big enough to eat an octopus will do so. Each species of predator also demands a different evasion strategy—from flashing warning coloration if your attacker is vulnerable to venom, to changing color and shape to camouflage, to fortifying the door to your home with rocks.
Such intelligence is not always evident in the laboratory. “In the lab, you give the animals this situation, and they react,” points out Mather. But in the wild, “the octopus is actively discovering his environment, not waiting for it to hit him. The animal makes the decision to go out and get information, figures out how to get the information, gathers it, uses it, stores it. This has a great deal to do with consciousness.”
So what does it feel like to be an octopus? Philosopher Godfrey-Smith has given this a great deal of thought, especially when he meets octopuses and their relatives, giant cuttlefish, on dives in his native Australia. “They come forward and look at you. They reach out to touch you with their arms,” he said. “It’s remarkable how little is known about them . . . but I could see it turning out that we have to change the way we think of the nature of the mind itself to take into account minds with less of a centralized self.”
“I think consciousness comes in different flavors,” agrees Mather. “Some may have consciousness in a way we may not be able to imagine.”
We probably won’t find more fascinating creatures to study until/unless we find extraterrestrial life.
[Via Geek Press]
Fascinating creatures. That said, I feel a discussion on how to pluralise the word octopus correctly coming on…
“An octopus. And another octopus.”
I would be too tempted to domesticate them like Sibfoxes.
I’m pretty sure I remember an Arthur C Clarke story from thirty or forty years ago that postulated intelligent octopuses. He was a frequent diver and figured that all the pattern changes of their chromatophores were language.
Me, I’m not convinced, though I must admit I don’t like paella, (or calimari if it comes to that).
I’m not sure that squid are in the same category, intelligence-wise.
Damn, now I feel bad, because I love to eat octopus.
Well, we eat pork, too.
Even though they are intelligent and social creatures you mean?
Yes.
A pig would eat you, so it’s fair. It’s just self-defense via Farmer John and the USDA.
For what it’s worth, this seems appropriately on topic for my ethical take on the eating of animals, namely, I choose to eat or not eat an animal based solely on intelligence.
I greatly reduced the eating of pork precisely because I consider pigs sufficiently intelligent to warrant that consideration. I also avoid eating mammals from the carnivora, cetacea, and primate orders (cats, dogs, dolphins, whales, or monkeys, for example). The final group in this list are the octopuses.
I was snorkeling off the coast of Anguilla and had a close encounter with a cuttlefish about the size of my head. In other words it was huge. I was paddling around on the surface looking down when I saw a rock cliff face down below me. I took a series of big breaths and then dove down straight down the cliff face close to 10 meters deep. My ears were popping at the bottom. There were corrals and colored fish and little crabs scurrying in out of the cliff face; it was an amazing site. As I was coming back up I realized I had a companion hovering over my shoulder just a few feet away. A cuttlefish was sitting there totally transparent except for a few internal organs trying to be as invisible as possible. When I spun around and looked straight at it, it changed color from totally clear to these black Rorschach patters all over its body and it slowly started to swim away. I paddled toward it a bit and it changed color yet again to this milky white complexion and reddish outlines to the black blotches appeared. It then gave a big pump with it’s tentacles and was instantly off and out of sight into the blue water. That experience right there made the whole trip worth it.
But why the unavoidable sell-by date? I’d love to know what forces their death, and what could be done to fix that. Dr. Jack Cohen (CONTACT) has studied these amazing and beautiful creatures for years. I have seen him communicate with cuttlefish, in a tank at the National Zoo. I wish he could comment here on this.
Not a fan of octopi. Love squid. If an octopus could talk, I’d still not eat it. Pigs are pretty smart, them I’ll eat. Cows are dumb as a post, I like burgers and pot roast. Chicken are proof that animals don’t have souls. God doesn’t want them around for Eternity I’m almost certain.
(He’s got a heavy work load, why would God want roosters crowing at dawn!? He’s God, he already KNOWS it’s dawn)
Fish are not too smart, they make noise, but it’s not speech. On the whole, if any of them could speak, I might still eat ’em. I’m that way about my victuals.
If God (if he exists) didn’t want us to eat pigs, he wouldn’t have made them taste like bacon.
True dat. Though low-sodium is better, on two levels.
Yeah, that and the nitrates.
To that end, I’ve been toying with the idea of making my own.
Yeah, but pig’s a filthy animal.