Looking for another book to add to your reading list? I highly suggest “Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness”
by Peter Godfrey-Smith. Read my review here.
An octopus’s body contains 500m neurons, roughly the same as a dog’s, but most of these reside in the cephalopod’s arms and allow the tentacles to act independently from the brain (their arms literally have a life of their own). The type of consciousness experienced by an octopus, then, is wholly alien to humans.
Early experiments assumed that the intelligence of animals could be estimated by their ability to carry out tasks, such as learning to pull a lever in exchange for food. Octopuses perform quite well in such tests but not as well as rats. Yet it is the anecdotes buried in research papers or related to him by scientists who work with animals that Mr Godfrey-Smith contends are often more revealing than the experiments themselves. One researcher told him of an octopus that expressed its displeasure with the lab food by waiting until she was looking before stuffing the unwanted scrap of squid down the drain.
Source: https://goo.gl/UqonrB
How Smart Is an Octopus?
In other words, an encounter with an octopus can sometimes leave you with the strong feeling that you’ve encountered another mind.
But that mind—if mind it is—has evolved along a route entirely different from the one that led to our own. The most-recent common ancestors of humans and octopuses lived about 600 million years ago, early in the evolution of animal life. Although much about our joint ancestors is obscure, they were probably small wormlike creatures that lived in the sea. This makes octopuses very different from other animals we suspect of sentience, such as dolphins and dogs, parrots and crows, which are much more closely related to us. In the words of Peter Godfrey-Smith, “If we can make contact with cephalopods as sentient beings, it is not because of a shared history, not because of kinship, but because evolution built minds twice over. This is probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien.”
A diver since 10 years, never before had Enda Kesim witnessed a phenomenon like this one. An octopus revealed itself stealthily, and then came out of its hiding place to show how it could contort and camouflage itself.
The cephalopod, a colour-changing creature, is one of the most intelligent species on the planet. It interchanges its shape and colour cleverly, in accordance to its surroundings.
The video shows how is almost impossible to differentiate the octopus from its coral surroundings, but then it comes out of its hiding place in an amazing display of camouflaging capabilities.
It’s hard to hear your friends when you’re in a crowded room! And right now, many places in the ocean are becoming like that crowded room, as noise pollution – like sounds from ships – makes the ocean environment much louder than it used to be.
That’s a major concern, since many marine animals, like humpback whales, depend on sound for everything from communicating with their mates and offspring to finding food.
Dr. David Wiley, research coordinator at Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary, has been studying the impacts of ship noise on foraging humpback whales. A recent study he collaborated on is among the first to show that humpback whale foraging behavior is significantly altered from exposure to ship noise. As the intensity of ship noise increases – from increased shipping, for example – humpback whales decrease the number of bottom-feeding events per dive, perhaps because ship noise interferes with the sounds they produce to coordinate their bottom-feeding behavior.
(Photo: Laura Howes)
Whales can’t wear noise-cancelling headphones :(
Source: noaasanctuaries
Octopuses and the Puzzle of Aging
Octopuses are so smart, but why do they have such a short life span?
who needs space really i mean this is no doubt an alien
Octopuses freak me out
Intrigue!
Who decided this is edible…. why do people eat this?!
THERES SO MUCH GOING ON OMG
@why-animals-do-the-thing WHAT IS GOING ON HERE
The octopus is pretty much just chilling and pushing water over it’s gills via the siphon (the hole you see pulsing that tentacles poke out through at the beginning) in order to breathe. It’s a pretty vigorous motion compared to most resting/sleeping octopus I’ve seen, so I might guess it’s paying attention to something. Sometimes you can tell an octopus’ mood from skin texture or changes in color, but it tends to be very specific to each individual.
The whole ‘tentacles poking through the siphon’ thing is pretty fascinating. Octopus don’t totally have purposeful control of all of their tentacles, as far as we know. They do, however, have neurons that go all the way down each arm - it’s sort of thought each arm operates independently because of that - they don’t really check in with the central nervous system for instructions each time there’s sensory input, instead responding locally to the stimulus. The brain gives the arms high-level commands like ‘catch a fish’ or ‘pass the food to the mouth’, but the instructions for how to do so and the neural impulses required to make the details of the actions happen come from each arm. So a lot of time, the arms move pretty independently… and sometimes end up in weird places, like poking through the siphon.
@aquaristlifeforme, @thesmileoctopus, anything else to add?
This particular octopus was actually part of my thesis trials (at@aquaristlifeforme’s aquarium, actually). So. It’s not necessarily that the animal totally doesn’t know where its arms are or what they’re doing, or else they would be losing arms left and right. This behavior here is actually a very purposeful grooming of the gills and siphon, kind of the octopus equivalent of picking your nose. They shed dead skin about once a week, and rubbing their their arms (tentacles are those feeding appendages that squid and cuttlefish have) over their bodies. The GPOs in my lab in Alaska do this too!
Mating octopuses
Photo by Robert F. Sessions, 1971.
