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rfmcdonaldI came across this video the other day.
Cephalopods, the video above should make clear, are made of magic. (And no, every night before I go to bed I don’t sweep my bedroom walls for cloaked organisms, really.)
Cephalopods are also amazingly smart. Eric Scigliano’s 2003 Discover article ”Through the Eye of the Octopus” sets
These completely non-vertebrate animals are amazing. They have personalities, or at least, different individuals do things in different ways. They appear to play. They seem to learn from experience and may even learn from others. They even use tools (below, an octopus using a coconut half-shell to hide).
Cephalopods seem capable of interiority. When you perform an electroencephalogram on other invertebrates, or on less intelligent vertebrates, there’s only the static of neurons firing at random. When you perform an electroencephalogram on cephalopods, you pick up the slow, varying waves of EEG patterns common to smart animals. Scigliano notes that--unlike other invertebrates--they seem to sleep, may even dream, and seem to have emotional states which can be influenced by their environment. This has obvious implications.
(As an aside, I remain struck by a passage in Andrew Solomon’s A Noonday Demon where he described an octopus trained to change colours on demand in a circus that, after it had been transferred from the circus to a holding facility where no one paid attention to it, stopped changing colours altogether, went through one last performance without getting attention and then tore its breast open with its beak.)
io9, Slate, BoingBoing, and Seed Magazine all have extensive articles examining the question of cephalopod intelligence (how great is it, how human-like is it). Despite the above profoundly suggestive signs, no one really knows for sure. Not enough attention has been paid to cephalopod intelligence, and cephalopods are so profoundly different from vertebrates--our last common ancestor is entirely hypothetical--that we’ve little idea where to start. How do you motivate cephalopods, or communicate with them? They remain a huge mystery in so many ways. How can they match background colours so perfectly when they are colour-blind?
What does this mean? If nothing else, it’s sufficient reason for me to stop eating calamari. And you?
Cephalopods, the video above should make clear, are made of magic. (And no, every night before I go to bed I don’t sweep my bedroom walls for cloaked organisms, really.)
Cephalopods are also amazingly smart. Eric Scigliano’s 2003 Discover article ”Through the Eye of the Octopus” sets
Octopuses and their cephalopod cousins the cuttlefish and the squid are evolutionary oxymorons: big-brained invertebrates that display many cognitive, behavioral, and affective traits once considered exclusive to the higher vertebrates. They challenge the deep-seated notion that intelligence advanced from fish and amphibians to reptiles, birds, mammals, early primates, and finally humans. These are mollusks, after all—cousins to brainless clams and oysters, passive filter feeders that get along just fine, thank you, with a few ganglia for central nervous systems. Genetic studies show that mollusk ancestors split from the vertebrates around 1.2 billion years ago, making humans at least as closely related to shrimps, starfish, and earthworms as to octopuses. And so questions loom: How could asocial invertebrates with short life spans develop signs of intelligence? And why?
Although biologists are just beginning to probe these questions, those who observe the creatures in their natural haunts have long extolled their intelligence. "Mischief and craft are plainly seen to be the characteristics of this creature," the Roman natural historian Claudius Aelianus wrote at the turn of the third century A.D. Today's divers marvel at the elaborate trails the eight-leggers follow along the seafloor, and at their irrepressible curiosity: Instead of fleeing, some octopuses examine divers the way Steve checked me out, tugging at their masks and air regulators. 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.
That Steve was named Steve was also revealing: Octopuses are the only animals, other than mammals like cuddly seals, that aquarium workers bother to name. So Anderson, Seattle's lead invertebrate biologist, began to wonder: If keepers recognize octopuses as individuals, how much difference is there among individual octopuses? Might these bizarre-looking mollusks have personalities? And if so, how else might their evolution have converged with ours across a billion-year chasm?
These completely non-vertebrate animals are amazing. They have personalities, or at least, different individuals do things in different ways. They appear to play. They seem to learn from experience and may even learn from others. They even use tools (below, an octopus using a coconut half-shell to hide).
Cephalopods seem capable of interiority. When you perform an electroencephalogram on other invertebrates, or on less intelligent vertebrates, there’s only the static of neurons firing at random. When you perform an electroencephalogram on cephalopods, you pick up the slow, varying waves of EEG patterns common to smart animals. Scigliano notes that--unlike other invertebrates--they seem to sleep, may even dream, and seem to have emotional states which can be influenced by their environment. This has obvious implications.
The ultimate question, with octopuses as with other sentient creatures, may be how we should treat them. In 2001 Mather argued in The Journal of Applied Welfare Science that people should err on the humane side, since some octopuses "very likely have the capacity for pain and suffering and, perhaps, mental suffering." If captive cephalopods suffer mentally—or even get "bored," as Boal puts it—then they should benefit from enrichment: amenities and activities that replicate elements of their natural environment. Mather, Anderson, and Wood have urged enriched environments but have no experimental evidence that it makes a difference. Recently that evidence came from a French study that even the skeptical Boal calls "beautiful work." Ludovic Dickel, a neuroethologist at the University of Caen, found that cuttlefish raised in groups and in tanks with sand, rocks, and plastic seaweed grew faster, learned faster, and retained more of what they learned than those raised alone in bare tanks. Performance rose in animals transferred midway from impoverished to enriched conditions and declined in those transferred to solitary confinement.
(As an aside, I remain struck by a passage in Andrew Solomon’s A Noonday Demon where he described an octopus trained to change colours on demand in a circus that, after it had been transferred from the circus to a holding facility where no one paid attention to it, stopped changing colours altogether, went through one last performance without getting attention and then tore its breast open with its beak.)
io9, Slate, BoingBoing, and Seed Magazine all have extensive articles examining the question of cephalopod intelligence (how great is it, how human-like is it). Despite the above profoundly suggestive signs, no one really knows for sure. Not enough attention has been paid to cephalopod intelligence, and cephalopods are so profoundly different from vertebrates--our last common ancestor is entirely hypothetical--that we’ve little idea where to start. How do you motivate cephalopods, or communicate with them? They remain a huge mystery in so many ways. How can they match background colours so perfectly when they are colour-blind?
What does this mean? If nothing else, it’s sufficient reason for me to stop eating calamari. And you?
