Anybody who knows me will have, at some stage, stumbled (much to their ever-lasting regret), upon my great love of the octopus. Not because I think they are overly beautiful, and most certainly not because I like to eat them – the day an octopus passes my lips, may the god of cephalopods smite me down – no. Contrary to what people may think, the octopus is an creature of great intelligence, and exhibits behaviours which set it apart entirely from other invertebrates, and render it one of the most fascinating animals on this planet.
So, I present to you skeptics: Octopus – the world’s next dominant species.
The octopus as a forward-planner.
The ability to plan is something which we, as humans, take entirely for granted. However, it is not something which is shared throughout the animal kingdom, and definitely by no other sea-dweller. Many behaviors which one could describe as forward-planning could more correctly categorized as fixed action patterns – behaviors which, through trial and error, over many generations, have been learned, and which are demonstrated amongst all, or most, members of a species or group.
The octopus however, shows the ability to plan a set of complex actions tailored to its specific situation…
While watching an Octopus in Bermuda, a researcher observed it sitting in its sheltering den after a foraging expedition, where it caught several crabs, took them home and ate them. Suddenly it jetted out directly to a small rock about two meters away, tucked it under its spread arms and jetted back. It then gathered three other stones, propped these at the den entrance and, thus shielded, took a safe siesta. The strategy suggested qualities that weren’t supposed to occur in the lower orders: foresight, planning, perhaps even tool use.
Researchers and aquarium attendants tell tales of octopuses that have tormented and outwitted them. Some captive octopuses lie in ambush and spit in their keepers’ faces. Others dismantle pumps and block drains, causing costly floods, or flex their arms in order to pop locked lids. Some have been caught sneaking from their tanks at night into other exhibits, gobbling up fish, then sneaking back to their tanks, damp trails along walls and floors giving them away.
Maze and problem-solving experiments have shown that they do have both short- and long-term memory. Their short lifespans limit the amount they can ultimately learn. There has been much speculation to the effect that almost all octopus behaviors are independently learned rather than instinct-based.
In laboratory experiments, octopuses can be readily trained to distinguish between different shapes and patterns. They have been reported to practice observational learning, and have also been observed in what some have described as play: repeatedly releasing bottles or toys into a circular current in their aquariums and then catching them. Octopuses often break out of their aquariums and sometimes into others in search of food. They have even boarded fishing boats and opened holds to eat crabs.
The octopus has a super brain!
They are capable of associative and observational learning, they are curious and adaptive, and can invent new solutions to problems. They have a large brain relative to their body size, containing about 500 million cells, and they have condensed the classically distributed invertebrate central nervous system into a dense, discrete brain. Rather than retaining the very large and accessible identifiable neurons we associate with invertebrates, the cephalopods have paralleled the vertebrates, microminiaturizing neurons to pack more cells into a given space. They’ve also built layered structures into their brains, and thrown the tissue up into folds that increase surface area, much as the vertebrate cortex has.
In many countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom, octopuses are on the list of experimental animals on which surgery may not be performed without anesthesia.
Octopuses are able to open jars after just observing this being done a couple of times – an ability which is entirely outside what they would encounter in their natural lives. They are able to learn, to plan. They show their own distinct personality traits. As much as I love my goldfishies, that’s something you can’t say for them…
It is this ability to learn which sets octopi apart from all other lower-order creatures. Their behaviour is not merely a result of a survival instinct, rather it is a result of their observation, allowing them to learn, to form memories, in a manner more similar to that of higher mammals than invertebrates.
_______________
It’s interesting that when, billions of years ago, we supposedly evolved out of the water and took to land, the octopus stayed. The octopus has a brain unlike that of any other marine creature, and that is the fundamental point. Our ancestors at some point developed a different brain, and over millions and millions of years, we became what we are today…
So here’s the question – has the octopus been the intellectual giant of the sea for those billions of years, did the octopus brain evolve at the same point the human brain evolved, or is this a fairly recent (evolutionarily recent – a few million years or so…) intelligence? And if so, how long until the cephalopods evolve out of the water?
If it weren’t for the fact that they have a short lifespan, the octopus could be ruling the Earth…well, maybe that’s an exaggeration for now. Give it a few million more years though, and the next dominant species could well have eight legs.
Some links:
http://discovermagazine.com/2003/oct/feateye
http://www.fortunecity.com/emachines/e11/86/cephpod.html
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/06/octopus_brains.php
http://www.biolbull.org/cgi/reprint/210/3/308
Roped 