how smart are octopus

Even those that swim in groups, like some squid, don’t form the kinds of deep social bonds that chimps or dolphins do. Like other cephalopods, the octopus is bilaterally symmetric with two eyes and a beak, with its mouth at the center point of the eight limbs. Today, only a single shelled cephalopod survives—the nautilus, which spends most of its life lurking deep underwater. “You can’t lose your defense before you have the alternatives ready, no question,” says Jennifer Mather, a cephalopod expert from the University of Lethbridge. Other questions demand a hearing. Last year, Jean Boal of Millersville University and her colleagues found fault with Mather’s experiments on left- and right-brained octopuses.

Similarly, when an octopus escapes an attack, it may puff up its body and turn white to scare a predator, shoot off puffs of ink to distract it, zigzag through the water, and then suddenly switch its skin to match the surrounding coral.
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Members of the animal kingdom’s intelligentsia tend to be sociable; indeed, the need to remember and manage a complex network of relationships might have helped drive the evolution of their brains. But are they aware of what they are doing? An octopus morphs into the shape of a rock and then inches across an open space.

A new hypothesis suggests that their vaunted intelligence and short-lived, solitary nature are all linked to a fourth trait.

One scientist described their soft, unprotected bodies as the equivalent of “rump steak, swimming around.” The rest of the ocean seemingly agrees: Almost every major group of predators eats cephalopods, including dolphins, seals, fish, seabirds, and even other cephalopods. Amodio adds that his ideas still need to be tested. Consider, again, the octopus. Octopus is still considered poorly understood, but scientists are constantly discovering new and impressive octopus abilities. Inky the wild octopus has escaped from the New Zealand National Aquarium. But they only made that big leap forward, Amodio argues, after they got rid of their shells. — And if you’ve got a good definition, there are quite a few scientists who would love to hear it.

We’ve accumulated so many and such incredible differences over that time that 20th-century scientists were excited to discover a few deep similarities. According to their neuroscience, it turns out that the human lacks the special neural structure they believe necessary for generating consciousness. April 14, 2016 10.48am EDT Inky the wild octopus has escaped from the New Zealand National Aquarium. About 530 million years ago, an ancient group of mollusks slowly modified their protective shells into buoyancy aids by filling them with gas. Correction, June 25, 2008: The original version said that early cephalopods used bursts of air to propel themselves, and that octopuses used jets of water to push toys around a tank. Consciousness might be closely tied to the particularities of human-like intelligence. Cephalopod consciousness: behavioral evidence.
The octopus has half a billion neurons. A small shark spots its prey—a meaty, seemingly defenseless octopus. Octopuses are known for their complex brains, intelligence and mischievous temperament. They can slip their entire body through a hole the size of a medium-length hardcover novel. Jean Boal and her colleagues have done some experiments that show how good octopuses are at learning geography. Cephalopods belong to the same lineage that produced snails, clams, and other mollusks. It lives for up to 20 years, reproducing several times during its life. After all, intelligence can help an otherwise defenseless creature create new defenses, as Blue Planet II’s shark-defeating octopus so ably showed. 135 views Mather bases her claim not just on how octopuses behave but also on how their brains work. In comparison with their body weight, octopuses have the biggest brains of all invertebrates. Octopuses instead moved to the sea floor, where they could use their shell-free bodies to explore cracks and crevices for prey. For example, one sign of the complexity of the human brain is that we can be left-handed or right-handed. They certainly seem to, although the sceptic might claim that all they do is react to stimuli as if they were in pain. They were preadapted for intelligence. So, is the octopus really all that smart? A common octopus has about 240 suckers on each limb, and a particularly large sucker can hold up to 35 lbs. (The white, brittle slabs that people feed pet birds are cuttlebones, the internalized shells of cuttlefish. In both cases, the animals used water, not air. Slate relies on advertising to support our journalism. It depends on how you define intelligence. *  They are playing, she argues. All rights reserved. Boal would move them from one to the other after each trial. First, it shoves one of its arms into the predator’s vulnerable gills. So, is the octopus really all that smart? When you watch those types of specials, one of the subjects that is impossible to ignore is the impact evolution and natural selection have had the on diversity of life on … GIF via … And once they had figured out this test, the octopuses knew to select any horizontal rectangle they saw, no matter what its particular dimensions.

You’ve run out of free articles. ), Unencumbered by a shell, cephalopods became flexible in both body and mind, according to Amodio and his colleagues.

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