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
WE MET AN OCTOPUS AT THE LA SCIENCE CENTER AND NOW WE ARE ALL BEST FRIENDS. #octopus #science #eightleggedbestfriend #probablygoodathugging
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.”
This Polish commercial is the purest thing I ever seen in my entire life.
I’m not crying, you’re crying.
I WASN T REA DY 😭
hOLY FUCK
SOBBING
MY HEART OMFG
Source: margalotta
Hidemasa - Octopus Priest. N.d., early 1800s
Eating a leaf.. by basodems
Octopus dance!
Ghostly critters from the deep sea: CIRRATE OCTOPUS
Making a rare appearance just in time for Halloween, this ghostly-looking orange cirrate octopus was recently observed by MBARI’s ROV Doc Ricketts swimming over the Taney Seamounts. These finned octopuses belong to an order of animals called Cirrata named for the presence of hair-like structures called ‘cirri’ on their arms which may aid these animals in the capture of food.
Source: neaq
Prowling coral colonies, the Caribbean reef octopus (Octopus briareus) is built to blend in. This camouflage artist flashes through skin textures and shades of blue, green, red and brown–allowing it to sneak up and envelop prey in a gauzy web of tentacles.
Get up close in our Tentacles exhibition
