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Cephalopods do not. With rare exceptions, most of them are solitary animals that aren't above cannibalizing one another when they meet. Even those that swim in groups, like some squid, don't form the kinds of deep social bonds that chimps or dolphins do. Cephalopods also tend to live fast and die young. Most have life spans shorter than two years, and many die after their first bout of sex and reproduction.

This combination of short lives, solitude, and smarts is unique to cephalopods. And according to a recent paper by Piero Amodio from the University of Cambridge and five of his colleagues, the traits are all linked to a particular development in the octopus's evolutionary history: Its ancestors lost their shells.
Read: What ecstasy does to octopuses
About 530 million years ago, an ancient group of mollusks slowly modified their protective shells into buoyancy aids by filling them with gas. With this transformation, they could more easily walk along the ocean floor, and then swim over it. They were the first cephalopods. For eons, they and their descendants kept their shells.

But about 275 million years ago, everything changed. It's possible that competition from fast, shallow-water fish forced cephalopods to become more agile, or drove them into deeper waters where buoyant shells would have been a hindrance. For these reasons, or perhaps others, the ancestors of octopuses lost their shells entirely, while the ancestors of squid and cuttlefish internalized theirs. (Thewhite, brittle slabs that people feed pet birds are cuttlebones, the internalized shells of cuttlefish.)

Unencumbered by a shell, cephalopods became flexible in both body and mind, according to Amodio and his colleagues. They could move faster, expand into new habitats, insinuate their arms into crevices in search of prey. "This allowed them to feed on many more kinds of food, requiring more complex foraging techniques," Amodio says. "We think this is one of the key challenges that pushed them to become smarter."

Losing their shells also made the cephalopods exquisitely vulnerable. 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. This gantlet of threats might have fueled the evolution of the cephalopods' amazing color-changing skin, their short life spans, and their large brains. After all, intelligence can help an otherwise defenseless creature create new defenses, as Blue Planet II 's shark-defeating octopus so ably showed.
Read: Blue Planet II is the greatest nature series of all time
It's telling that the nautilus-the only living cephalopod that still has an external shell-bucks all of these trends. It lives for up to 20 years, reproducing several times during its life. It also has a much smaller brain than its shell-less relatives, and doesn't seem to be anywhere as smart. The loss of the shell "has been linked to so many of the adaptations that make cephalopods special," Amodio says.

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intelligent animals.members of the animal kingdom

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reproduction.this combination of short lives

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For Smart Animals, Octopuses Are Very Weird

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Cephalopods do not. With rare exceptions, most of them are solitary animals that aren't above cannibalizing one another when they meet. Even those that swim in groups, like some squid, don't form the kinds of deep social bonds that chimps or dolphins do. Cephalopods also tend to live fast and die young.

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The ABCs of Cephalopods with Conservation Biologist Samantha Cheng

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For decades, scientists and sea explorers have sought to hunt down and photograph the giant squid. The hunt is over.

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You'll never go to dinner in the deep sea. It's dark, vast and weird down there. If the pressure alone didn't destroy your land-bound body, some hungry sea creature would probably try to eat you.

Fortunately for you, something else has spent a lot of time down there, helping to prepare this guide to deep sea dining.

For nearly three decades, robots with cameras deployed by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute have glided through the ocean off the coast of central California at depths as deep as two and a half miles below.

Cameras on these remotely operated vehicles captured the feeding habits of anything that didn't flee them. They revealed 242 unique feeding relationships comprising 84 different predators and 82 different prey items. Building on prior research using other methods, these videos enhance understanding of the deep sea food web, particularly the jelly dishes and diners.

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A remotely operated underwater vehicle, or R.O.V., deployed by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, which captured images of underwater creatures devouring each other - at least, those that didn't flee it. Credit Anela Choy/Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute

It was once thought that these wobbly mounds of water were not worth being eaten. But thanks to the cameras mounted on the researchers' underwater probes - and elsewhere on penguins, monk seals and sea turtles - we now realize that gelatinous animals aren't just ravenous predators invading the ocean, but major food items in a complex web of interactions.

You're probably more familiar with that web as a chain, ending in the tuna on your dinner plate. That beautiful hunk of red meat was once a top predator. But if it weren't for the food web deep under the ocean - a whole collection of crustaceans, worms, fish, jellies and squids feasting on one another miles below the fishing boat that caught your tuna - there'd be no food to forage and no tuna to catch.

"It's really exciting and really important," said Anela Choy, a marine biologist at MBARI, who led the study published this month in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. "It's taking a bigger view and allowing you to see a lot more of the connectivity of the ocean ecosystem."

So let's go eat.

No one knows exactly what species this creature is, but Dr. Choy calls it a galaxy siphonophore. It waits in the water for whatever swims into its orange curtain of tentacles.

The deep sea can be a tough place to find food, and the creatures that live down here have adapted to its fickle abundance. They don't just use tentacles to grab unwitting prey.

Consider detritivores, including crustaceans and even some jellies that eat them: They munch on decaying organic matter called "marine snow" that sinks down to the bottom from sloppy feeders or phytoplankton near the surface. And the black swallower fish: It uses its big jaw to swallow prey bigger than itself whole, like a snake. These different species show there are diverse ways to fill your belly in an unforgiving environment.

One of the most common interactions that Dr. Choy and her colleagues observed were cephalopods like this Gonatus, preying on fish.

Gonatid squid, like the one in this picture, are abundant in midwaters and play the role of both predator and prey in the food web. Endowed with an insane metabolism, the voracious cephalopods are constantly eating. They dine on deep sea fish including lantern fish, owl fish and dragon fish.

The species ranges in size from six inches to a foot long, but it can consume fish bigger than its own body. To do so, the squid grasps onto its prey with tentacles lined with hooks and suction cups. Then it pierces the fish's brain with its beak, which is creepily located right between the squid's eyes. It bites off pieces of fish flesh, which it chews and swallows through an esophagus in the center of its brain.

Credit Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute

That's a gonatid squid eating a gonatid squid. This kind of cannibalism is common in the deep sea. And for the squid it can be beneficial. By eating competitors from within its species, a Gonatus may free up more food and find more opportunities to mate.

But they don't just eat one another. Other species of squid, swordfish, bottle-nosed whales, sperm whales, hooded seal and other marine animals eat Gonatus too.

This Solmissus is also called a dinner plate jelly because it's the size and shape of one. In this video it's eating a ctenophore. But you wouldn't know if we didn't show it. Try to collect a ctenophore, and it will disintegrate in your hands.

In the deep sea, jellyfish from the narcomedusae order are quite abundant. MBARI's recordings revealed that they are major predators, consuming nearly two dozen different sea creatures including other gelatinous animals, especially ctenophores or comb jellies, worms and krill.

Crustaceans, hard-bodied creatures like krill and shrimp, are like dinner rolls of the deep sea. They're always around, and practically everyone eats them.

This lobate ctenophore is eating krill. But their appetites for crustaceans are nothing compared with physonect siphonophores, gelatinous animals that live in long chains.

Some eat all kinds of crustaceans, the researchers found, but Nanomia, siphonophores that are quite abundant off the central California coast, feed almost exclusively on krill - just like a filter-feeding whale.

Correction:

Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this article gave the wrong name for an organism being eaten by a ctenophore. It is a krill, not a mysid. Additionally, using information provided by a research institution, the fish being eaten by a squid was misidentified. It was a melamphaid, not a bathylagid.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page D6 of the New York edition with the headline: Under the Sea, Who's Having Whom for Dinner. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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What Eats What: A Landlubber's Guide to Deep Sea Dining

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You'll never go to dinner in the deep sea. It's dark, vast and weird down there. If the pressure alone didn't destroy your land-bound body, some hungry sea creature would probably try to eat you. Fortunately for you, something else has spent a lot of time down there, helping to prepare this guide to deep sea dining.

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Trilobites

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Scientists in Taiwan examined a giant squid accidentally caught by fishermen. The catch let scientists study the optic lobe of a living giant squid. Credit Credit Chuan-Chin Chiao/National Tsing Hua University

Giant squids, which roam the deep sea and grow bodies large enough to spoon a school bus, are the stuff of legend. Their rare visits to the ocean's surface may have inspired the kraken of Norse mythology and the beasts in Jules Verne's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea."

Among the creature's biggest claims to fame are its eyes - along with another species of squid, giant squids have the largest orbs in the animal kingdom. But the sophistication of the giant squid's visual brain may not be commensurate with its basketball-sized peepers, according to a paper published Wednesday in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

A recent, lucky opportunity to study part of a giant squid brain up close in Taiwan suggests that, compared with cephalopods that live in shallow waters, giant squids have a small optic lobe relative to their eye size.

Furthermore, the region in their optic lobes that integrates visual information with motor tasks is reduced, implying that giant squids don't rely on visually guided behavior like camouflage and body patterning to communicate with one another, as other cephalopods do.

"This is the first time we get to have any information about what the world might look like to a giant squid, and that's just super cool," said Robyn Crook, an assistant professor of biology at San Francisco State University who was not involved in the study.

Usually when a giant squid is spotted, it has died and its decomposing carcass has floated to the surface. But when Taiwanese fishermen accidentally caught a giant squid while trawling for mullet in 2016, scientists for the first time were able to examine a giant squid optic lobe that was fresh off the boat and relatively intact, said Chuan-Chin Chiao, a professor of neuroscience at National Tsing Hua University.

Dr. Chiao, who helped lead the study, got a call shortly after the catch. His students rushed to the site, and the scientists were able to take a high-resolution M.R.I. scan of the optic lobe before it was preserved at Taiwan's National Museum of Natural Science with the rest of the squid.

They were interested in two structures that make up the optic lobe - the cortex, which mostly processes visual information, and the medulla, which helps guide camouflage and dynamic body patterning.

Compared with two more commonly encountered, shallow-water species - pharaoh cuttlefish and oval squids - giant squids have rather small optic lobes, given how huge their eyes are. In particular, though their cortex is densely packed with neurons, their medulla is disproportionately small.

This makes sense, said Roger Hanlon, a senior scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., because shallow-water cephalopods live in much more visually complex environments, where camouflage and body patterning are more useful for things like avoiding predation and communicating with members of the same species.

The giant squid's "eyes are really adapting to something quite different" - namely, darkness, said Dr. Hanlon, who was not involved in the study.

As for why giant squids even need such big eyes, previous research has suggested that their eyesight is uniquely adapted to spotting faint clouds of bioluminescence that indicate a sperm whale - their main known predator - is approaching from a distance.

This new study supports that conclusion, Dr. Chiao said, by showing that the part of the giant squid's optic lobe that processes visual information is indeed rich with neurons. It also shows that giant squids probably don't use that information to perform the complex and dramatic appearance changes other cephalopods are famous for.

After all, when you live in near-total darkness, what you're wearing likely doesn't matter, Dr. Chiao said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page D2 of the New York edition with the headline: In Sight: In the Deep Sea, Giant Eyes Don't Help. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Giant Squids, Giant Eyes, but Rather Small Brain Lobes

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Trilobites Giant squids, which roam the deep sea and grow bodies large enough to spoon a school bus, are the stuff of legend. Their rare visits to the ocean's surface may have inspired the kraken of Norse mythology and the beasts in Jules Verne's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea."

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Giant Squid, Elusive Creature of the Deep, Gets a Vivid Close-Up

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A fisherman spotted the creature, known as an Architeuthis, gliding near the water's surface in Japan's Toyama Bay, northwest of Tokyo.

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Ocean explorers have finally achieved one of their most alluring but elusive goals: video footage of the legendary giant squid ( Architeuthis dux)in its natural deep-sea habitat. Scientists say that the spectacular film, captured during an expedition off Japan's Ogasawara archipelago, answers enduring questions about the enigmatic invertebrate.

The 6-week mission was funded by the Japan Broadcasting Commission (NHK) and the US Discovery Channel, and took place in July. It is only now being discussed publicly, as the two companies prepare to broadcast documentaries that include the footage later this month.

The squid was first glimpsed using a specialised camera system, called Medusa, which the team deployed from a ship and left suspended about 700 metres down in the water. Later, researchers came face-to-face with one while in a submersible. "It was so beautiful that I have no words to explain it," says zoologist Tsunemi Kubodera of Japan's National Museum of Nature and Science, who was in the submersible.

The camera system was developed by Edith Widder, a deep-sea explorer and founder of the Ocean Research and Conservation Association in Fort Pierce, Florida. She thinks that the key to its success was a focus on the squid's sense of sight. To avoid bright lights that might scare the squid away, the system uses a low-light camera with a dim red light, because few deep-sea animals see light with such a long wavelength.

Alluring success

In hopes of drawing the animals in, Widder used a different sort of light. Although very little sunlight penetrates to the deep sea, many deep dwellers produce a bioluminescent light. Past research by Widder suggests that the bioluminescence can act as a sort of burglar alarm, among other functions. The idea is that the bioluminescence produced by some prey when they are attacked may serve to attract larger predators - such a giant squid - that will then eat the attacker.

Widder and her colleagues therefore fitted Medusa with an electronic device that mimicked the bioluminescence that jellyfish produce when attacked to serve as a lure. It worked: Medusa first encountered a squid during its second deployment, igniting jubilation on the ship. "I just was blown away," says Widder," I couldn't have been happier."

Medusa ended up encountering a squid five times, culminating with a full view of one apparently attacking the camera system in a manner consistent with the alarm hypothesis. The squid was about 4 metres long, although giant squid can grow as large as 10 metres or more.

During a dive about a week after the first Medusa success in their Triton submersible, Kubodera and pilot Jim Harris had a face-to-face encounter. Once they had taken enough low-light footage, they turned on the sub's bright main lights, expecting to spook the squid. Instead, the animal continued to feed on bait tied to the sub. For 18 mesmerising minutes the pair watched as the huge animal's skin shifted between unexpected gold and silver metallic hues.

Two previous expeditions, both of which involved Kubodera, have returned still photographs of a giant squid in the deep and video footage of one at the surface. Numerous dead specimens have also been collected around the world. But, Kubodera says, the up-close, extended view was like seeing an entirely new animal. He believes giant squid hunt looking up, to detect faint silhouettes, so he attached one of the animal's prey, a diamondback squid, to the front of the sub as an attractant, but also used a lighted squid jig.

Clyde Roper, a giant-squid expert and zoologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, says that the encounters answer longstanding questions. For instance, the giant squid was thought to be fairly passive, but the vigorous bait attacks show that it is actually a very strong swimmer and feeder.

"This has gone a long, long way to helping us understand this animal," says Roper, "They did just a marvellous job."

The Discovery Channel will broadcast the documentary in the US on 27 January.

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Giant squid filmed in its natural environment

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Ocean explorers have finally achieved one of their most alluring but elusive goals: video footage of the legendary giant squid ( Architeuthis dux)in its natural deep-sea habitat. Scientists say that the spectacular film, captured during an expedition off Japan's Ogasawara archipelago, answers enduring questions about the enigmatic invertebrate.

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Edie Widder was eating lunch in the mess hall of the Research Vessel Point Sur on Tuesday when her colleague Nathan J. Robinson dashed in. He didn't have to say anything - in fact, he wasn't yet quite able to say anything. She ran from the table, made certain by his flailing arms and the look on his face that their expedition had turned up something big.

Dr. Widder, the founder of the Ocean Research and Conservation Association, was part of the team of scientists that in 2012 recorded the first video of a giant squid swimming in its natural habitat, off Japan's Ogasawara archipelago. For that expedition, she developed a new camera system called Medusa. It employs red light, which most sea creatures can't see, and, at the end of a milelong plastic line, an optical lure in the form of a ring of LED lights that resembles a bioluminescent jellyfish.

Dr. Widder had hypothesized that the sounds and lights of remote-operated vehicles and submersibles were scaring away large sea creatures, and preventing researchers from observing deep-ocean life as it is really lived.
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Dr. Robinson, the director the Cape Eleuthera Institute in the Bahamas, had been watching the videos that Medusa recorded on its latest expedition - a 15-day journey through the Gulf of Mexico, funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, and called Journey Into Midnight: Light and Life Below the Twilight Zone. As part of the expedition, Dr. Widder was putting her Medusa camera lure to the test, to see if it could capture another squid in a different part of the world.

So far the camera had turned up the usual sorts of deep-sea wonders: lantern sharks, deep-sea jellyfish, what the researchers believed was the first in-the-wild recording of a shrimp spewing bioluminescence.

Then, about 20 hours into the recording from the Medusa's fifth deployment, Dr. Robinson saw the sharp points of tentacles sneaking into the camera's view. "My heart felt like exploding," he said on Thursday, over a shaky phone connection from the ship's bridge.

At first, the animal stayed on the edge of the screen, suggesting that a squid was stalking the LED bait, pacing alongside it.

And then, through the drifting marine snow, the entire creature emerged from the center of the dark screen: a long, undulating animal that suddenly opened into a mass of twisting arms and tentacles. Two reached out and made a grab for the lure.

For a long moment, the squid seemed to explore the strange non-jellyfish in puzzlement. And then it was gone, shooting back into the dark.

To the scientists, the footage was exhilarating. "People started crowding around, shouting, getting pretty excited, but trying not to get too excited," Dr. Widder said. "Because we had to be sure it really was what we thought it was."

The expedition team watched the 25-second clip of the attack over and over on a loop, peering at the details of how suction cups were positioned and consulting identification books. (Giant squids aren't the only squids that live in the deep sea, and this one was only - "only" - about 10 feet long: a juvenile, in a species that can grow to nearly 40 feet.)

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Nathan Robinson, left, Sönke Johnsen, Tracey Sutton, Nick Allen, Edie Widder and Megan McCall gathered to watch video of the giant squid. Credit Danté Fenolio

The team reached out to Michael Vecchione, a cephalopod expert with NOAA at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, to confirm what they were seeing. The size and location of the sighting left only one other possible identification, Dr. Vecchione said: Asperoteuthis, a squid with much longer, thinner tentacles than the large ones, each with a flattened, sucker-covered club, that he saw on the video. This, he agreed, was a giant squid, Architeuthis, the famous colossus of literature.

It was only the second expedition to film a giant squid in its deepwater habitat, and the very first giant squid to be filmed in the waters of the United States. And here it was, only about 100 miles southwest of New Orleans, and within sight of the methane flaring at Appomattox, Shell's largest floating oil-drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico. ( Another video was made in 2015, of a giant squid near the surface of Japan's Toyama Bay.)

For Sönke Johnsen, a professor of biology at Duke University and the leader of the expedition, the experience was a reminder of how close even the most distant-seeming natural wonders are to human infrastructure and human impacts, from oil spills to the agricultural runoff that regularly turns portions of the gulf into dead zones.

"Even just a hundred miles off the coast, we're seeing things that they put on the corner of the maps - you know, 'Here lie monsters,'" he said. "You could be out here, and beneath you are giant squid, the things of our wildest imagination! They're part of our land, they're part of our country."

Deep-sea researchers frequently point out that science knows less about the still largely unexplored deep waters beyond human vision than it does about the surface of Mars.

The giant squid has long been an exemplar of this reality: a gargantuan creature, yet known to humans only because dead specimens washed ashore or huge squid beaks were found in the stomachs of sperm whales, the animals' primary predator.

Even as fishery depletion has forced ships to trawl in deeper waters, meaning that more giant squid specimens are hauled up in nets, this offers only narrow glimpses into their world. A body on its own, Dr. Vecchione said, "doesn't tell us anything about how they make a living in their natural environment."

The new video, recorded at a depth of 759 meters, in a spot where the ocean bottom lies at 2,200 meters, offers rare and useful clues to the animal's habitat and hunting methods.

Dr. Widder designed the optical lure to emulate the light that a jellyfish emits when it is being attacked. According to the "burglar alarm theory," the animal's light is meant to attract some larger predator, which will attack whatever is attacking the jellyfish. That a second giant squid was attracted to the lure seems to bolster the theory.

Still, scientists have little idea how the species as a whole is faring, especially as the oceans it calls home are rapidly warming and acidifying. "It could fall out of existence without us even knowing," Dr. Robinson said.

But the new video sighting, brief as it is, joins the 2012 footage as an enormous addition to our limited knowledge of giant squids: a tiny glimpse into how a famous but mysterious creature lives in a world that is usually beyond our sight.

As the members of the expedition stood around the monitors, celebrating and high-fiving, they began to say that lightning had struck twice: The Medusa camera had managed to record not one but two sightings of the elusive giant squid, if seven years apart.

Then, just half an hour after Dr. Robinson ran into the mess to alert Dr. Widder, actual lightning struck the ship. An antenna and instruments on the starboard side fell to the deck in fragments, and a plume of smoke filled the air.

The researchers ran to check the Medusa's computer to make sure the precious footage they had just watched was safe. It was: There was the squid, still emerging from the darkness.

Earlier reporting on cephalopods and giant squids

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Giant Squid, Phantom of the Deep, Reappears on Video

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Edie Widder was eating lunch in the mess hall of the Research Vessel Point Sur on Tuesday when her colleague Nathan J. Robinson dashed in. He didn't have to say anything - in fact, he wasn't yet quite able to say anything.

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Journey into Midnight: Light and Life Below the Twilight Zone: Mission Logs: June 17: NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research

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Gigantism in animals found exclusively in the water column is usually restricted to below the twilight zone (the mesopelagic zone), meaning below 1,000 meters (3,280 feet; the bathypelagic or midnight zone). There are several explanations for this phenomenon. One is that these species have delayed sexual maturity, so they can put more energy into growth when they're young, rather than into reproduction.

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Roger Hanlon (MBL) Part 1: Camouflage and Signaling in Cephalopods

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Roger Hanlon (MBL) Part 3: Changeable Skin

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Roger Hanlon (MBL) Part 2: Exploring Mechanisms of Visual Perception

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Roger Hanlon: The amazing brains and morphing skin of octopuses and other cephalopods

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Octopus, squid and cuttlefish -- collectively known as cephalopods -- have strange, massive, distributed brains. What do they do with all that neural power? Dive into the ocean with marine biologist Roger Hanlon, who shares astonishing footage of the camouflaging abilities of cephalopods, which can change their skin color and texture in a flash.

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Cuttlefish Camouflage | The New York Times

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Dancing Chromatophores of the squid, Loligo pealeii

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You're Not Hallucinating. That's Just Squid Skin. | Deep Look

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Weird is Beautiful: Cephalopods and Self-Confidence

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Weird is Beautiful: Cephalopods and Self-Confidence

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Weird is Beautiful: Cephalopods and Self-Confidence | Eliza Ewing | TEDxPrincetonU

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Octopuses are the World’s Greatest Escape Artists (Ft. PhilosophyTube)

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"Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins..."

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"Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins..."

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Peter Godfrey Smith: "Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins..." | Talks at Google

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The Extraordinary Secret of Cephalopod Vision

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How is a nautilus different from a squid?

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Octopuses and cuttlefish through alien eyes

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Primeval squids - In the hunting grounds of the mysterious Cephalopods

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Super Suckers:  Cephalopods! | JONATHAN BIRD'S BLUE WORLD

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You're Not Hallucinating. That's Just Squid Skin. | Deep Look

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Why the octopus brain is so extraordinary - Cláudio L. Guerra

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Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI)

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How squids outsmart their predators - Carly Anne York

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Danna Staaf: "Squid Empire: The Rise and Fall of the Cephalopods" | Talks at Google

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Contributed photo/Dominic Sivitilli. Red octopus.

Enormous tentacled legs emerging from the deep dark depths of the sea, causing mammoth waves, tossing ships and dooming sailors. That is the legend of the Kraken, a terrifying sea monster likely originating from the octopus, whose appearance resembles no other creature on Earth, yet holds an intelligence and curiosity similar to humans.

"They have an uncanny nature about them," said Dominic Sivitilli, a behavioral neuroscience graduate student who has been studying octopuses at the University of Washington Friday Harbor Marine Laboratories for several years. "They are strangely familiar in their curiosity ... the way they explore their environment or the way their interact with novelty," he said, noting that the diversity of their personality never to amaze him.

Sivitilli discussed his research in a talk "Octopus, an alternative model for intelligence, distributed cognition," which focuses on how the arms of an octopus communicate with each other. The talk was free and open to the public at the lab's commons lecture hall, Wednesday, Aug. 1.

His fascination with octopuses began over five years ago, during a class on fish, Sivitilli told the audience. A baby octopus had been accidentally collected amongst the fish samples. By the time it was discovered, the animal had died. Its skin was still actively camouflaging. Octopus skin is made up of essentially tiny pixels, Sivitilli explained, which are all designated colors. The octopus can contract or enlarge each pixel, allowing the animal to change color and blend in with its surroundings.

"No matter how much time I spend with them, I am always impressed by their camouflage abilities," he said.

Due to the fact octopuses live in dimly lit environments, octopus are essentially color blind. Scientists have puzzled over how, without seeing what color they are attempting to blend in with, the octopus knows what color to change.

"If you can solve that, you might really be on to something," Sivitilli said.

Another mystery that Sivitilli is attempting to solve is how its arms, which operate independently of each other, keep from becoming entangled with or separated from each other.

Vertebrates have a highly centralized nervous system, he explained, and an octopus' system exists mostly in its arms. He described the neural system in the lab's winter 2018 newsletter, "Tidal":

"A chain of neural clusters, or ganglion, process the input of tens of thousands of sensory receptors from the adjacent sucker. By outsourcing a large degree of motor and sensory processing into the localized semi-autonomous neural pathways within these chains, the octopus can process this massive amount of sensory information in parallel while relieving the brain of much of the necessary computational burden to respond accordingly."

In other words, this unique anatomy keeps daily busywork in their hands, allowing octopuses to be ace at multitasking.

Sivitilli also noted in the newsletter that by understanding their model of cognition, scientists may gain a better understanding of cognition in general.

To learn more about how octopuses' distributed cognition works, Sivitilli and his team of undergraduates has been studying four red octopuses at the labs and a few more at the UW campus in Seattle. Red octopus are one of two types found around the San Juans, the other is the Giant Pacific octopus, which can grow to 20 feet long, according to Sivitilli, is the largest species in the world.

Using high tech cameras, the team is able to track and monitor the animals' movements, and the how they use their arms.

Sivitilli has also set up cameras outside two known giant Pacific octopus dens in San Juan County to see how these creatures behave in the wild when they think no one is watching.

During his research, Sivitilli said, he has been shown time and time again the extent of these creatures' curiosity. Often when the animal gets a hold of something new, be it a net, brush or toy, it will grab on tightly and sometimes try to crawl away with it. On occasion that item is actually someone's hand, he said, and the person's first response is to tense up or pull back.

"This (reaction) will make the octopus grab on tighter. I have seen a lot of people's composure slip when they realize how strong these animals can be," he said, adding how difficult it can be convincing someone the best thing they can do - as this foreign slimy creature tightly and persistently probes their skin - is relax.

Sivitilli is still compiling data in his studies, but examples of their tool use, curiosity, memory and individual personalities show that a cognizant being is behind the horizontal slit of an octopus eye.

"We should not be asking how intelligent are they, but how are they intelligent," said Sivitilli.

Contributed photos/Dominic Sivitilli

Contributed photos/Dominic Sivitilli

Contributed photos/Dominic Sivitilli

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In the arms of an octopus | The Journal of the San Juan Islands

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Enormous tentacled legs emerging from the deep dark depths of the sea, causing mammoth waves, tossing ships and dooming sailors. That is the legend of the Kraken, a terrifying sea monster likely originating from the octopus, whose appearance resembles no other creature on Earth, yet holds an intelligence and curiosity similar to humans.

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about octopuses

Octopuses (or octopi, if you prefer) are cephalopods, invertebrates that also include squid and cuttlefish. They have bulbous heads, large eyes, and eight very useful arms. "Cephalopod" is Greek for "head-foot," which makes sense, since their limbs are attached directly to their head.

Self-protection

Octopuses are highly intelligent animals, masters of camouflage that have evolved an array of tricks over tens of millions of years to avoid or thwart would-be attackers. They can match the colors and even textures of their surroundings, allowing them to hide in plain sight. If a predator gets too close octopuses can escape quickly, shooting themselves forward by expelling water from a muscular tube called a siphon. Octopuses can also release a cloud of black ink, which obscures them and dulls an encroacher's sense of smell.

Their soft bodies mean octopuses can fit into impossibly small nooks and crannies, as long as the holes are not smaller than the only hard parts of their bodies: their beaks. If all else fails, octopuses can lose an arm to an attacker and regrow one later.

Super smart

The octopus's arms are lined with hundreds of suckers, each of which can be moved independently thanks to a complex bundle of neurons that acts as a brain, letting the animal touch, smell, and manipulate objects. Octopuses can open clamshells, maneuver rocks-even dismantle the filtration systems of an aquarium tank. They've also can develop opinions about people; one routinely squirted water down the back of a keeper it seemed to dislike. Another shot a jet of water at a light to cause a commotion.

Habitat and behavior

There are around 300 species of octopus and they are found in every ocean. Most live on the seafloor, but some, like the paper nautilus, drift nearer to the surface. Octopuses mostly feed on crabs, shrimp, and mollusks.

Solitary animals, they typically live alone, sometimes in dens they build from rocks, sometimes in shells they pull over on top of themselves. Some even make a door for themselves-a rock pulled into place once they're safely tucked into their homes.

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about octopuses Octopuses (or octopi, if you prefer) are cephalopods, invertebrates that also include squid and cuttlefish. They have bulbous heads, large eyes, and eight very useful arms. "Cephalopod" is Greek for "head-foot," which makes sense, since their limbs are attached directly to their head.

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50,000 octopuses hatch off West Seattle!

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50,000 octopuses hatch off West Seattle!

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Select 720p for HD! A giant pacific octopus mother who lived just across from downtown Seattle had her hatch right under the noses of local divers. Her den was sequestered in Cove Two in West Seattle, in a location that spared her from predators and over-visitation by humans.

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The blanket octopus can rip a poisonous tentacle from a Portuguese man-o-war and wield it like a sword to ward off enemies as it soars through the ocean trailing its webbed cloak behind it.

Vampyroteuthis infernalis, the vampire squid from hell, has been egregiously misnamed. This poor little thing - more like a wallflower or a tumbleweed than a devil from hell - is sometimes reduced to defending itself by biting off its own arm tip. Then the tip floats off, sparkling its blue lights in the darkness and luring away the enemy.

The giant Pacific octopus with its eight huge arms can pass a baseball or golf ball all the way down its arm, from sucker to sucker, with apparent ease, like the way we grasp small items with our thumb and forefinger. If you're feeding them, beware. All those suckers can easily grab the food pan and carry it away. And they have a lot more suckers than you have fingers and thumbs.

Octopus dexterity is a thing of awe. One veterinarian saw an octopus undo its own surgical sutures. Divers off the Pacific Northwest Coast have seen male octopuses stand on undersea rocks in the cold salt water, stretching two arms out before them like antennae, apparently searching for that perfect female.

Cephalopods - squid, octopus, cuttlefish and nautiluses - have been around for millions of years. The word "cephalopod" means "head-foot." Some scientists believe that we humans separated from cephalopods, evolutionarily speaking, perhaps more than 700 million years ago. That's hundreds of millions of years before the Cambrian Explosion, when so many life forms radiated throughout our planet's oceans.

Given that long divergence, we should be very different species. And we are. In some ways. Cephalopods are invertebrates, animals without skeletons. They usually have eight arms, some have a couple tentacles too. These appendages attach not to the main body; instead, they encircle the animal's mouth like some kind of living beard. Many cephalopods can change the color of their skin almost instantaneously. Some, like the fabulous cuttlefish, look like flashing neon lights.

These guys are weird.

And yet - they are a lot like us, in some very basic ways. For one thing, we both have similar brain cells. For almost 100 years, scientists have used the giant axon of a little squid, Loligo pealeii, to study how our own brains work. In most animals, the neuron is the cell that's the central processor of the world outside the body. The neuron has a main body and an axon, a long thin living tube that extends from the main body somewhat like a thread or a wire.

Our own axons are gossamer-like, delicate and easily damaged. It's difficult for researchers to work with them. But the little squid's axons may be as thick as a pencil lead. They are visible to the naked eye and are easily handled. By studying how the squid axon works, scientists have learned quite a bit about how ours function. They hope to apply some of what they've learned to finding cures for diseases like Alzheimer's.

Recently, as our understanding of cephalopods has improved, we've begun to wonder: Are these animals intelligent? It depends on how you define "intelligence."

James Wood, a teuthologist (cephalopod scientist), imagined creating an intelligence test for humans, by an octopus:

"So the octopus thinks: 'All right. I'm going to make an intelligence test for humans, because they show a little bit of promise, in a very few ways.' And the first question the octopus comes up with is this: How many color patterns can your severed arm produce in one second?"

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So You Think You're Smarter Than a Cephalopod?

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The blanket octopus can rip a poisonous tentacle from a Portuguese man-o-war and wield it like a sword to ward off enemies as it soars through the ocean trailing its webbed cloak behind it. Vampyroteuthis infernalis , the vampire squid from hell, has been egregiously misnamed.

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"Despite centuries of investigation by everyone from natural historians, psychologists, and psychiatrists, to ethicists, neuroscientists, and philosophers, there is still no universal definition of emotion or consciousness," Laurel Braitman wrote in her terrific exploration of the mental lives of animals. Virginia Woolf defined consciousness as "a wave in the mind," but even if we're able to ride the wave, we hardly know the ocean out of which it arises.

During my annual visit to NPR's Science Friday to discuss my choices for the year's best science books, my co-guest - science writer extraordinaire Deborah Blum - mentioned a fascinating book that had slipped my readerly tentacles, one that addresses this abiding question of consciousness with unparalleled rigor and grace: The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness (public library) by naturalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker Sy Montgomery.

Montgomery begins with a seemingly simple premise. The octopus is a creature magnificently dissimilar to us - it can change shape and color, tastes with its skin, has its mouth in its armpit, and is capable of squeezing its entire body through a hole the size of an apple. And since we humans experience reality in profoundly different ways from one another, based on our individual consciousnesses, then the octopus must be inhabiting an altogether different version of what we call reality.

The constellation of complexities comprising this difference, Montgomery reveals over the course of this miraculously insightful and enchanting book, expands our understanding of consciousness and sheds light on the very notion of what we call a "soul."

She writes:

More than half a billion years ago, the lineage that would lead to octopuses and the one leading to humans separated. Was it possible, I wondered, to reach another mind on the other side of that divide? Octopuses represent the great mystery of the Other.

Among the pitfalls of the human condition is our tendency to see otherness as a source of dread rather than an invitation to friendly curiosity. The octopus, as the ultimate Other, has a long history of epitomizing this inclination and sparking our primal fear of the unknown. Montgomery cites one particularly emblematic depiction from Victor Hugo's novel Toilers of the Sea:

The spectre lies upon you; the tiger can only devour you; the devil-fish, horrible, sucks your life-blood away... The muscles swell, the fibres of the body are contorted, the skin cracks under the loathsome oppression, the blood spurts out and mingles horribly with the lymph of the monster, which clings to the victim with innumerable hideous mouths...

Setting out to "defend the octopus against centuries of character assassination," Montgomery notes that octopuses have highly individual personalities and can exhibit marked curiosity - faculties we tend to think of as singularly human. Even their motives for friendliness and unfriendliness, far from the baseless brutality of depictions like Hugo's, parallel our own:

In one study, Seattle Aquarium biologist Roland Anderson exposed eight giant Pacific octopuses to two unfamiliar humans, dressed identically in blue aquarium uniforms. One person consistently fed a particular octopus, and another always touched it with a bristly stick. Within a week, at first sight of the people - looking up at them through the water, without even touching or tasting them - most of the octopuses moved toward the feeder and away from the irritator. Sometimes the octopus would aim its water-shooting funnel, the siphon near the side of the head with which an octopus jets through the sea, at the person who had touched it with the bristly stick.

Surely, a skeptic might argue that this is more instinct than "consciousness." But Montgomery goes on to outline a number of strikingly specific and context-considered behaviors indicating that octopuses are animated by complex conscious experiences - things we tend to term "thoughts" and "feelings" in the human realm - that upend our delusions of exceptionalism. Lest we forget, we have a long history of bolstering those delusions by putting other species down, much like petty egotists try to make themselves feel big by making other people feel small - even Jane Goodall contended with dismissal and ridicule when she first suggested that chimpanzees have consciousness.

But beyond intellectual considerations of this weird and wonderful creature's inner life, Montgomery points to the physical, bodily presence with an octopus as a transcendent experience in its own right - one that pulls into question our most basic assumptions about consciousness:

While stroking an octopus, it is easy to fall into reverie. To share such a moment of deep tranquility with another being, especially one as different from us as the octopus, is a humbling privilege. It's a shared sweetness, a gentle miracle, an uplink to universal consciousness.

Indeed, the book's greatest reward isn't the fascinating science - although that is riveting and ablaze with rigor - but Montgomery's bewitching prose, pouring from the soul of a literary naturalist who paints the marvels of the ocean's depths like Thoreau did the marvels of the New England woods. Finding herself "drunk with strange splendors" as she beholds the marine world's "parade of wonders," Montgomery writes:

A splendid toadfish hides beneath a rock. Once thought to live only in Cozumel, it's pancake flat, with thin, wavy, horizontal blue and white stripes, Day-Glo yellow fins, and whiskery barbels. A four-foot nurse shark sleeps beneath a coral shelf, peaceful as a prayer. A trumpet fish, yellow with dark stripes, floats with its long, tubular snout down, trying to blend in with some branching coral... A school of iridescent pink and yellow fish slide by inches from our masks, then wheel in unison like birds in the sky.

I have known no natural state more like a dream than this. I feel elation cresting into ecstasy and experience bizarre sensations: my own breath resonates in my skull, faraway sounds thump in my chest, objects appear closer and larger than they really are. Like in a dream, the impossible unfolds before me, and yet I accept it unquestioningly. Beneath the water, I find myself in an altered state of consciousness, where the focus, range, and clarity of perception are dramatically changed.

Suddenly acutely aware that the octopuses she has met and come to love on her expeditions experience this dizzying otherworldliness as their basic backdrop of existence, she considers the limited array of sensations and perceptions that we've come to accept as the whole or reality:

The ocean, for me, is what LSD was to Timothy Leary. He claimed the hallucinogen is to reality what a microscope is to biology, affording a perception of reality that was not before accessible. Shamans and seekers eat mushrooms, drink potions, lick toads, inhale smoke, and snort snuff to transport their minds to realms they cannot normally experience.

[...]

In my scuba-induced altered state, I'm not in the grip of a drug: I am lucid in my immersion, voluntarily becoming part of what feels like the ocean's own dream.

Out of this perspective-shifting consideration arises Montgomery's most profound inquiry. Sitting in a Tahitian temple dedicated to the spirit of the octopus, where one of her expeditions has taken her, she wonders:

What is the soul? Some say it is the self, the "I" that inhabits the body; without the soul, the body is like a lightbulb with no electricity. But it is more than the engine of life, say others; it is what gives life meaning and purpose. Soul is the fingerprint of God.

Others say that soul is our innermost being, the thing that gives us our senses, our intelligence, our emotions, our desires, our will, our personality, and identity. One calls soul "the indwelling consciousness that watches the mind come and go, that watches the world pass." Perhaps none of these definitions is true. Perhaps all of them are. But I am certain of one thing as I sit in my pew: If I have a soul - and I think I do - an octopus has a soul, too.

This, no doubt, is what Alan Watts meant when he asserted that "Life and Reality are not things you can have for yourself unless you accord them to all others."

The Soul of an Octopus is an astoundingly beautiful read in its entirety, at once scientifically illuminating and deeply poetic, and is indeed a worthy addition to the best science books of the year.

You can listen to the complete Science Friday segment below:

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the soul of an octopus: a surprising exploration into the wonder of consciousness

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The Soul of an Octopus: How One of Earth's Most Alien Creatures Illuminates the Wonders of Consciousness

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"While stroking an octopus, it is easy to fall into reverie. To share such a moment of deep tranquility with another being, especially one as different from us as the octopus, is a humbling privilege... an uplink to universal consciousness."

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You're sitting on the seabed, just off the coast of the Indonesian island of Lembeh. You're not deep-20 feet or so-and there's plenty of light. As you'd expect in such a tropical place, the water is warm. All around, you see ripples of a fine gray-black sand, covered, in places, with a kind of greenish scum. As you explore, you notice a conch shell. Stoutly made, it has six heavy spikes coming off it. Perhaps the maker is within. Or perhaps the maker is long dead, and the shell now belongs to a hermit crab. Curious, you flip it over. A row of suckers. A pair of eyes.

An octopus. In particular, Amphioctopus marginatus, also known as the coconut octopus. Its common name comes from its habit of hiding in discarded coconut shells (sometimes it even picks them up and carries them about, for use as an emergency shelter). But in fact, any big shell will do-such as a conch.

With a few of its suckers, this octopus is holding two halves of a clamshell. As you watch, it drops them and hoists itself up a little. It gives the impression of evaluating the situation. You make like a statue. After a moment, the octopus climbs out of the shell. Its body is the size of your thumb, its arms perhaps three times that. As it moves onto the sand, it turns a matching shade of dark gray. Is it leaving? No. It snakes several of its arms over the sand, and the rest over the shell. With a single heave, it flips the shell back over and flows inside.

Not wanting to disturb it further, you're about to swim off, when you notice a small movement. The animal has squirted a jet of water, clearing sand from beneath the lip of the shell. There's now a small gap between shell and seafloor. In the gap, the eyes reappear. You bring your mask close, and for a moment, you look at each other. Of all the invertebrates-animals that lack a backbone-octopuses are the ones that seem the most like us. In part, it's the way they return your gaze, as if they're scrutinizing you. (This sets them apart from plenty of vertebrates too: Most fish don't appear to stare at you.) In part, it's their dexterity. Their eight arms are lined with hundreds of suckers; this allows them to manipulate objects, whether it's to open clamshells, dismantle the filtration system of an aquarium tank, or unscrew lids from jars. This distinguishes them from mammals like dolphins, which, for all their smarts, are limited by their anatomy and can't easily unscrew anything.

At the same time, octopuses are as alien as any extraterrestrial you might dream up. For starters, they have three hearts and blue blood. When feeling under threat, they squirt a cloud of ink and jet off in another direction. They have no bones. The only hard parts of their bodies are a parrot-like beak and a nub of cartilage around their brain. This makes it easy for them to vanish through tiny cracks-an ability that allows them to escape, Houdini-like, from all but the most octopus-proofed aquarium. Not only can all of their suckers be moved independently; each one is covered with taste receptors-imagine your body covered with hundreds of tongues. Their skin is embedded with cells that sense light. Most otherworldly of all-but let's wait on that. First, let's meet another octopus.

You're standing in a small, windowless office in the Natural History Museum in London. In front of you, on a desk crowded with files, lies a slab of pale, fine-grained stone. Beside you, Jakob Vinther, a burly Dane with blond hair and a ginger beard, is pointing at it.

"That thing there is the ink sac," says Vinther, an expert on fossil invertebrates at the University of Bristol, in Great Britain. "That's actually pigment-chemically preserved melanin."

You lean forward to look. The stone is clearly marked with the impression of an octopus. It's not large: In life the animal would have been perhaps 10 inches long. You can trace the mantle-the baglike structure that housed its gills, hearts, and other vital organs. Ah yes. That dark stain in the middle there-that's the ink sac. The arms hang down, loosely grouped together, each marked with rows of circles. "And those little round structures," says Vinther, "those are the suckers."

Octopus fossils are rare; animals with soft bodies generally leave no trace. This fossil is about 90 million years old, which makes it one of the oldest known octopuses. When this animal lived, the extinction of the dinosaurs was still 25 million years in the future. "It comes from a locality in Lebanon where you find all kinds of wonderfully preserved soft-bodied creatures," Vinther says. Lampreys. Fire worms. All entombed, long ago, in fine, chalky mud on the floor of a long-vanished sea.

Just as humans are mammals, octopuses are cephalopods. The word is Greek for "head-foot" and refers to their weird anatomy, by which their arms are attached directly to one side of their head while their "torso"-the baglike mantle-is on the other. Cephalopods, in turn, are a type of mollusk-a group that includes snails and slugs as well as clams and oysters.

Cephalopods were among the first predatory animals to hunt in the ancient seas. They evolved more than 500 million years ago-long before fish got going-from a small animal with a shell like a witch's hat. Indeed, if you were to travel back in time 450 million years, some of the fiercest predators in the oceans would have been shell-wearing cephalopods. Some of these were apparently enormous: The shell of the long-extinct Endoceras giganteum may have been more than 18 feet long.

Today there are more than 750 known living species of cephalopods. Besides around 300 species of octopus, these include an array of squid and cuttlefish (both of which have 10 limbs) and a few species of nautilus-peculiar animals that have 90 tentacles and live in shells.

Modern octopuses are a diverse bunch. The giant Pacific octopus, Enteroctopus dofleini, is, as its name suggests, gigantic. Each arm of a large individual can be 6.5 feet long, and the whole animal can weigh more than 200 pounds. Others, such as the star-sucker pygmy octopus, Octopus wolfi, are teensy, weighing just a fraction of an ounce. Some octopuses have a tiny mantle but immensely long arms; others are more evenly proportioned. Most clamber around on corals, mud, or sand, swimming only to get from A to B or to escape from a predator, but a few have taken to cruising the ocean currents. You can find octopuses from the tropics to the poles, from coral reefs to sand flats, from tide pools to the abyss. At least you can if you can spot them.

Back in Lembeh, it's a sunny morning. You're swimming over a shallow reef. Your guide-a man named Amba-makes a hand sign that shows he's seen an octopus. A big octopus. Where? You look around. No octopus. Just rocks, covered with corals and sponges of different colors. Amba gestures insistently: big octopus! You look where he's pointing. Nope: nothing. Wait. Look again. That patch of dark, velvety coral, that one over there. That's no coral. That's a day octopus, Octopus cyanea. Astonishing to have missed it: It's as big as a dinner plate.

Octopuses and cuttlefish that live in shallow water and hunt during the day are the world champions of disguise. Of course, disguise is not unusual: Many creatures have evolved to look like something they're not. That orange sponge over there, for example, is not a sponge but a frogfish, lying in wait for an unwary fish. That leaf you see drifting above the sand is not a leaf; it's a fish that's evolved to look like a leaf. That leaf-that one there, scuttling over the sand-really is a leaf, but it is also really scuttling. A crab has taken it and stuck it to its shell. That small anemone is a sea slug that has evolved to impersonate an anemone. And everywhere you look, patches of sand get up and walk about (tiny crabs with sand-colored shells) or swim off (sand-colored flatfish).

What makes octopuses and cuttlefish (and to a lesser extent, squid) different is that they can disguise themselves on the fly, now looking like coral, now like a clump of algae, now like a patch of sand. It's as if they use their skin to make three-dimensional images of objects in their surroundings. How do they do it?

Octopus disguise has three main elements. One is color. Octopuses generate color through a system of pigments and reflectors. The pigments-usually tones such as yellows, browns, and reds-are kept in thousands of tiny sacs in the top layer of the skin. When the sacs are closed, they look like minute speckles. To show the pigment, an octopus contracts the muscles around the sac, thus pulling it open and revealing the color. Depending on which sets of sacs an octopus opens or closes, it can instantly produce patterns such as bands, stripes, or spots. The reflecting cells come in two types. The first type reflects back the light that arrives-thus causing the skin to appear white in white light, red in red light, and so on. The second type is like a living soap bubble that presents different colors when seen from different angles. Together, the reflectors plus the pigment organs allow an octopus to create a huge variety of colors and patterns.

The second element of disguise is skin texture. By contracting special muscles, octopuses can change their skin from smooth to spiky. The effect can be extreme. The algae octopus, Abdopus aculeatus, generates temporary wispy structures that give the impression that the animal is just a piece of seaweed. The hairy octopus, a creature yet to be scientifically described, has evolved a permanently wispy look and is hard to tell apart from a scrap of red algae.

The third part of disguise is posture. The way an octopus holds itself can make it more or less conspicuous. Some octopuses, for example, will ball themselves up like a lump of coral and, using just two of their arms, creep slowly across the seafloor. (No, no, don't look at me-I'm just a rock ...)

How did octopuses get so good at this? The short answer is: evolution. Through tens of millions of years, individuals that were better at disguise were more likely to evade predators and leave offspring. And plenty of animals-including eels, dolphins, mantis shrimps, cormorants, many fish, and even other octopuses-are enthusiastic eaters of octopuses. Because octopuses have no bones, predators can eat the whole animal. As Mark Norman, a world expert on living cephalopods at Museum Victoria, in Melbourne, Australia, puts it, "These animals are pure meat walking around-they're filet mignons."

Now let's turn to the matter of the octopus's nervous system. A typical pond snail has just 10,000 neurons; lobsters have around 100,000; jumping spiders, perhaps 600,000. Honeybees and cockroaches, which after cephalopods have a claim to be the planet's most neuronally rich invertebrates, have around a million. So the 500 million neurons of the common octopus, Octopus vulgaris, put the animals into a completely different league. In terms of their neuron count, they are better endowed than a mouse (80 million) or rat (200 million) and almost on a par with a cat (around 700 million). Yet while vertebrates keep most of their neurons in their heads, two-thirds of an octopus's are in its arms. What's more, nervous systems take a lot of energy to run and can evolve to be large only when the benefits outweigh the costs. So what's going on?

Peter Godfrey-Smith, a philosopher turned octopus biologist at City University of New York and the University of Sydney, in Australia, suggests that several forces may have helped the octopus develop a complex nervous system. The first is its body. Nervous systems, after all, evolve in tandem with bodies, and the octopus body has evolved to be unusually complex. Being boneless, an octopus can extend any arm in any direction at any point; unlike you or me, it's not limited to moving at shoulder, elbow, or wrist. This gives the octopus an enormous range of possible movements; also, each arm can be doing something different. An octopus on the hunt can thus be an impressive sight. It can have every arm stretched out over the sand, each one exploring, rummaging, probing into holes. If one arm startles a shrimp, two more can reach out to catch it. Octopuses also have all those suckers that can be moved independently, not to mention the structures and mechanisms for controlling skin color and texture. At the same time, the animal has evolved the capacity to receive and process a huge amount of incoming sensory information: taste and touch from the suckers, gravity sensed by structures called statocysts, as well as all the information that its sophisticated eyes collect.

On top of this, many octopuses live in spatially complicated environments-they must navigate on, around, and through reefs. Having no body armor, they need to keep a sharp lookout for predators, and in case camouflage is not enough, they need to know where to hide. Finally, octopuses are fast, agile hunters that catch and eat a wide variety of animals, from oysters to crabs to fish. Boneless bodies, complex environments, diverse diets, avoiding predators-all factors, Godfrey-Smith suggests, that can drive the evolution of intelligence.

Yet while octopuses clearly have complex nervous systems, are they, in fact, smart? Evaluating the intelligence of other animals is tricky at the best of times, and sometimes tells us more about ourselves than about the animal in question. Markers of intelligence in birds and mammals, such as the ability to use tools, often don't make much sense for an octopus: Its whole body is a tool. It doesn't need a tool to reach into crevices-it can just reach in-or to pull oysters apart.

That being said, experiments starting in the 1950s and 1960s showed that common octopuses are good at tasks involving learning and memory-two attributes that we associate with intelligence. Indeed, a particular part of the octopus brain, the vertical lobe, is dedicated to such tasks. I'm stressing the common octopus here because it has been studied the most, by far. Octopus species do differ somewhat in the organization of their brains, and as only a few have been studied, no one knows whether all of them are equally gifted. Roy Caldwell, an octopus researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, says, "Some that I've had in the lab seem to be as dull as toast." Name names? " Octopus bocki, a tiny little octopus." What makes it dull? "It just doesn't seem to do much."

But perhaps whether they are smart or dull-whether they are pondering philosophy or lunch, or not thinking anything at all-is less important than the fact that they are just all around astonishing. Enchanting.

Let's go on one final dive. It's dusk in Lembeh. You're kneeling by a rocky slope. In front of you, swimming cheek to cheek, a pair of small fish are spawning. An eel is curled in a hole. A large hermit crab, in its borrowed shell, comes clunking past. And there, sitting on a rock, is a small algae octopus.

As you watch, it starts to move. One moment it seems to float, levitating like an eight-armed yogi. Another moment it appears to glide. Now it starts to crawl over the rocks-but whether it pulls itself with the arms in front or pushes with the arms behind, you cannot say. As it moves down the slope, one arm finds a tiny hole, and, one arm after another, the animal streams into it. Gone. No-not quite. The tip of an arm reaches out of the hole, feels around, grabs some small stones, and pulls them over the entrance. There. All secure for the night.

To photograph the octopuses for this story, David Liittschwager put them in custom-fitted aquariums placed in front of white backgrounds.

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Why Do Octopuses Remind Us So Much of Ourselves?

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You're sitting on the seabed, just off the coast of the Indonesian island of Lembeh. You're not deep-20 feet or so-and there's plenty of light. As you'd expect in such a tropical place, the water is warm. All around, you see ripples of a fine gray-black sand, covered, in places, with a kind of greenish scum.

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Digestive System In this picture you can see digestive systems of the five main types of cephalopods. They all have similar qualities, but look very different. The digestive system is a two-way...

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Octopus: This is a structural image of an octopus where you can see all of it's major organ are located within the mantle behind their head.

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An appetite to match

Giant Pacific octopuses have huge appetites. Their diets consist of crustaceans (Dungeness crabs are a particular favorite); mollusks such as clams, squid, and even other species of octopus; and fish. In the wild, their rocky dens can be recognized by the piles of discarded shells just outside the entrances. Giant Pacific octopuses can consume 2-4% and gain 1-2% of their body weight each day. That's the equivalent of a 150-pound person eating up to six pounds of food and gaining up to three pounds every single day! Octopuses are the most efficient animals in converting food to body mass: even with all that eating and gaining, they never become fat.

Night moves

Generally nocturnal, giant Pacific octopuses move about and do their hunting at night. They use their arms, each covered with approximately 200 suckers, to find and hold their prey. Depending on the type of prey, they may paralyze prey such as fish with a toxic saliva, then tear into it with their parrot-like beak. Or, they may simply pull their prey's defenses apart (as with crab shells) to get at the meal within.

Calling all divers!

Help collect data on a Puget Sound icon. If you go diving anytime during October 6-14, we'd like to know whether or not you see any giant Pacific octopuses. More information coming soon!

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An appetite to match Giant Pacific octopuses have huge appetites. Their diets consist of crustaceans (Dungeness crabs are a particular favorite); mollusks such as clams, squid, and even other species of octopus; and fish. In the wild, their rocky dens can be recognized by the piles of discarded shells just outside the entrances.

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How Many Hearts, Arms And Suckers Is That?* Results from the 18th annual Seattle Aquarium octopus survey | Seattle Aquarium

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Our most recent survey, conducted by 49 volunteers and 11 Seattle Aquarium staff members in October 2018, revealed that 29 GPOs were spotted at 26 dive sites throughout Puget Sound. This annual effort wouldn't be possible without help from the local dive community-we're grateful for their longtime support.

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Tobias Schwarz/Reuters

Despite his name, Squidward Q. Tentacles-the grouchy neighbor of SpongeBob SquarePants in Nickelodeon's long-running cartoon-isn't a squid. He's an octopus. (Allegedly, creator Stephen Hillenburg named him Squidward because "Octoward" sounded too weird.) On the show, Squidward lives inside a head at 122 Conch Street, next door to SpongeBob's pineapple, in the underwater city of Bikini Bottom.

A sarcastic loner, he tries to avoid the relentlessly chipper sponge and his other neighbor, the slow-witted starfish Patrick, by staying in, drinking tea, and practicing the clarinet. You know what they say: An octopus's moai is his castle.

Hillenburg, as many of the show's fans know, used to be a marine biologist, and it turns out that Squidward's domestic bent is shared by octopuses in the real world. The species has long been known to collect bits and pieces from the sea floor to make "gardens" (thanks, Ringo) or build themselves personal dens. But now comes evidence that Tentacle Acres-the cephalopod-only community that Squidward briefly moves to in Season Two of "SpongeBob"-is not just a fiction.

In Quartz, Ephrat Livni writes that researchers have identified a community of 15 octopuses living together in Jervis Bay, off eastern Australia. The discovery was surprising because members of this species, the Sydney or gloomy octopus, were thought to be loners. Instead, the researchers observed them "congregating, communicating, dwelling together, and even evicting each other from dens" at the cephalo-city, which the scientists dubbed Octlantis.

This is the second such octopus conclave found near eastern Australia in recent years. The first, Octopolis, was discovered in 2009, and was considered an anomaly at first.

Octopolis and Octlantis both sit on rock outcroppings on otherwise flat, nondescript areas of the sea floor. Lead researcher David Scheel of Alaska Pacific University speculates that topography might have something to do with the octopuses' turn toward urbanism. "Congregations such as these probably occur wherever shelter is limited to small patches of habitat, and food is plentiful," he told Quartz. (If food were less plentiful, presumably they'd be fighting each other too much to live together for any period of time.)

The octopuses didn't just drift toward the same secure-looking outcroppings, though. Once there, they built piles out of shells from scallops, clams, and other animals they ate, then sculpted the piles into dens, "making these octopuses true environmental engineers," as another of the researchers, Stephanie Chancellor, has noted. The creatures were about as patient with each other as Squidward is with SpongeBob on a bad day at the Krusty Krab, starting fights and chasing each other out of the dens-a phenomenon the research team doesn't quite understand yet.

Octopuses are far from the only non-human animals to engage in architecture and city-building. A beehive may hold tens of thousands of bees, and they build its structure-the honeycomb-out of wax that worker bees secrete, which is then formed into six-sided cells for maximum compactness and labor efficiency. Tiny termites can construct earth-and-fungus mounds as tall as a two-story house. And fire ants climb on top of each other to build towers out of their own bodies.

Octopuses aren't part of a super-organism, as those insects are. They're still mainly solitary creatures. But the complex social interactions required to establish a village lend support to the theory that they are much, much smarter than we had ever suspected.

In 2009, researchers observed veined octopuses collecting coconut-shell halves, schlepping them around, and later assembling them into a protective armor-essentially, using them as tools. In zoos and aquariums, octopuses are notorious escape artists who may start disassembling their tanks when no one's looking. They have distinct personalities and form strong opinions about the humans they meet, and not always good ones: One octopus at the New England Aquarium sprayed a jet of water at the same volunteer every time she visited him.

What makes the octopus so extraordinary is its nervous system. Most of its neurons are in the tentacles. For humans, it's hard to conceptualize a kind of intelligence in which the head plays a secondary role: What would it be like to think with your arms? Recent research also suggests that octopuses may be able to see with their skin, which enables their color-changing mimicry of other animals.

There is still a lot scientists don't know about why octopuses create these mini-cities and what they do there. But the idea of a city that might be navigated with limbs and skin is tantalizing-and not so different, in fact, from the field of tactile design, which seeks "to engage the whole person and not just the eyeballs," as proponent Ellen Lupton has said. (A good example of tactile design is a multi-sensory crosswalk with textured paving.)

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Neuroscience reveals that humans experience urban places through the movement of our bodies as much as our conscious thoughts. And biomimetic architecture applies time-tested principles from the natural world to human design problems. A building in Harare, Zimbabwe, employs a cooling system based on the engineering of a termite mound. Why not an octopus-inspired building, or city, one day?

One thing that's very clear about octopuses: They have a strong instinct for self-protection. Their coconut-shell armor and stony dens are ways to fend off predators. As they evolved, octopuses lost their own shells, which freed their bodies to move more, but also left them more exposed.

To go through life in a soft, vulnerable body and evade danger by your wits: That is something we humans can relate to. Safety and collective self-defense are the main reasons our species chose to overcome our suspicions of each other and gather together to live in cities in the first place, after all. Maybe that's why we're fascinated by these ink-squirting, city-building, marvels of the deep.

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Despite his name, Squidward Q. Tentacles-the grouchy neighbor of SpongeBob SquarePants in Nickelodeon's long-running cartoon-isn't a squid. He's an octopus. (Allegedly, creator Stephen Hillenburg named him Squidward because "Octoward" sounded too weird.) On the show, Squidward lives inside a head at 122 Conch Street, next door to SpongeBob's pineapple, in the underwater city of Bikini Bottom.

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Jaime Henry-White/AP

On a recent Sunday, two divers at a small cove in West Seattle pulled on their suits, air tanks, and masks. With their fins in their hands, they walked slowly towards the edge of Puget Sound, ready to descend dozens of feet into the water's foggy depths in search of the largest octopus in the world-the giant Pacific octopus.

Jerry Dollar, a seasoned amateur diver who organized the expedition through the Emerald Sea Dive Club, offered Andrew Creighton and Mark Newland some last-minute advice. Keep an eye out for piles of clam and crab shells, because that may indicate you're next to their den, he told them. Look carefully through piles of rocks and in the Honey Bear, a shipwrecked boat about 35 feet under water. And don't skip the shallow areas.

"I've seen [octopuses] in 10 feet of water," Dollar told Creighton and Newland. "They're opportunistic. They go where the food is."

This West Seattle expedition was one of dozens of local dives carried out as part of the 18th Annual Seattle Aquarium Octopus Survey. For about one week during the month of October, 60 volunteers searched Puget Sound at 26 dive sites and reported their findings back to the aquarium. After each underwater trip, the citizen scientists submitted an online form detailing the location and depth of their dive, the number of giant Pacific octopuses they saw, and their general size.

Last week, after all of the diving was completed, a team at the Seattle aquarium examined the 41 reports submitted. A total of 29 giant Pacific octopuses were spotted-10 fewer than the number at this time last year, and found in almost all of the same places, said Kathryn Kegel, senior aquarist at the Seattle Aquarium.

The decrease isn't a cause for alarm, she said. "Over the last 18 years, we have seen the numbers cycle up and down. So even though we saw less octopuses this year, it doesn't mean the population is in decline. It seems to be part of their natural population cycle."

The divers at the West Seattle cove didn't find any giant Pacific octopuses during their first one-hour dive. "If you're lucky, you'll find some. If you aren't, you won't," as Dollar put it. "That's the way it is out there." During their evening dive, they found five octopuses, but these were likely all East Pacific red octopuses, which are smaller and overall more common than the giant Pacific on the West Coast.

Initially, the octopus survey was launched to try to answer a question that staff members got regularly at the Seattle Aquarium: How many giant Pacific octopuses live in the Puget Sound? It turns out it's not an easy question to answer, since there isn't a firm population number for giant Pacifics.

These octopuses normally live about three years. They eat a lot of crustaceans, mollusks, squid, fish and sometimes other species of octopus. They are so big that they only really have to watch out for extremely large fish, such as halibut and lingcod, and some marine mammals. But they hatch from an egg the size of a rice grain, so for more than a year after they're born, they are at the mercy of a wide array of predators.

Although adults weigh 90 pounds on average and can have an arm span as long as 20 feet, giant Pacifics blend very well into their surroundings. They can change color and even texture to protect themselves from predators, or communicate with others around them. They also tend to move around to different dens depending on the amount of food available, said Joel Hollander, an associate curator at the Seattle Aquarium.

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But perhaps the biggest challenge with keeping tabs on these creatures is the fact that standard counting methods are virtually impossible to use. They're soft-bodied animals, so scientists avoid rigid tags to mark them. They also can't reliably use dyes to tag them because it's so difficult to see the color when they're in their dens. "It's really difficult," said Hollander. "We haven't really found any tried and true method on how to tag them."

Almost two decades ago, staff members at the aquarium decided they'd try something a little different. They enlisted members of the very active local dive community to try to help them collect information on the giant Pacific population. "While we may never be able to tell you exactly how many GPOs are in the [sound],we can see general trends and changes that [are] maybe happening in their population or where they are being found," said Kegel.

Three years ago, the survey's organizers refined it to get more consistent findings. Rather than having divers explore any site they wanted, they enlisted some of them to check the same key six sites, which are now visited every year. They also moved the event from January to October, in the hopes that better weather would increase participation.

That seems to be paying off. The census has become an annual, up-close look at the giant Pacific octopus, so if the population is impacted by environmental changes or pollution, the aquarium staff will know. "If our [scheduled] sightings and reports stay the same, yet we're getting very, very, very low numbers for probably two to four years, then we probably would raise the flag to the Department of Fish & Wildlife and say, 'You guys might want to take a look at this,'" said Hollander.

But the survey has also simply been a good way to educate the community about a creature that has become source of interest because of its unique characteristics.

Giant Pacific octopuses have three hearts and about 200 suckers on each of their eight arms, which have the ability to taste. They are also incredibly smart. In lab tests, they've been able to solve mazes, and have reportedly mimicked their fellow octopuses and even pried open jars.

"When you look into its eyes," Hollander said, "[the Giant Pacific] seems to have some sort of intelligence behind that."

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Seattle's 'Octopus Census' Sheds Light on Giant Cephalopods

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On a recent Sunday, two divers at a small cove in West Seattle pulled on their suits, air tanks, and masks. With their fins in their hands, they walked slowly towards the edge of Puget Sound, ready to descend dozens of feet into the water's foggy depths in search of the largest octopus in the world-the giant Pacific octopus.

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matter

It has eight arms, three hearts - and a plan. Scientists aren't sure how the cephalopods got to be so intelligent.

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An octopus in an aquarium in Brest, France. The animals are highly intelligent, but researchers are uncertain how the trait evolved. Credit Credit Fred Tanneau/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

To demonstrate how smart an octopus can be, Piero Amodio points to a YouTube video. It shows an octopus pulling two halves of a coconut shell together to hide inside. Later the animal stacks the shells together like nesting bowls - and carts them away.

"It suggests the octopus is carrying these tools around because it has some understanding they may be useful in the future," said Mr. Amodio, a graduate student studying animal intelligence at the University of Cambridge in Britain.

But his amazement is mixed with puzzlement.

For decades, researchers have studied how certain animals evolved to be intelligent, among them apes, elephants, dolphins and even some birds, such as crows and parrots.

But all the scientific theories fail when it comes to cephalopods, a group that includes octopuses, squid and cuttlefish. Despite feats of creativity, they lack some hallmarks of intelligence seen in other species.

"It's an apparent paradox that's been largely overlooked in the past," said Mr. Amodio. He and five other experts on animal intelligence explore this paradox in a paper published this month in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution.

For scientists who study animal behavior, intelligence is not about acing a calculus test or taking a car apart and putting it back together. Intelligence comprises sophisticated cognitive skills that help an animal thrive.

That may include the ability to come up with solutions to the problem of finding food, for example, or a knack for planning for some challenge in the future. Intelligent animals don't rely on fixed responses to survive - they can invent new behaviors on the fly.

To measure animal intelligence, scientists observe creatures in the wild - watching a dolphin stick a sponge on its beak to avoid getting cuts from sharp rocks and coral, for example. Or they bring animals into the lab and offer them puzzles to solve, such as rewarding crows when they learn to rip paper into strips of just the right size.

Only a few species stand out in these studies, and by comparing them, scientists have identified some shared factors. The animals have big brains relative to their body size, they live for a long time, and they can form long-lasting social bonds.

Those similarities have led to some promising explanations for how certain animals evolved to be smart.

One is known as the ecological intelligence hypothesis. It holds that intelligence evolves as an adaptation for finding food. While some animals have a reliable food supply, others have to cope with unpredictability.

"If you eat fruit, you have to remember where the fruiting trees are and when they're ripe," said Mr. Amadio. "It can be much more cognitively challenging than eating leaves."

Tools allow animals to get to food that they couldn't reach otherwise. And if they can make plans for the future, they can store food to survive hard times.

Other researchers have argued for what's known as the social intelligence hypothesis: Smarter animals "cooperate and learn from other members of the same species," said Mr. Amadio.

Together, these forces appear to have encouraged the development of bigger, more powerful brains.

Smart animals also tend to live for a long time, and it's possible that bigger brains drove the evolution of longevity. It takes years for juveniles to develop these complex organs, during which time they need help from adults to get enough food.

Cephalopods behave in ways that certainly suggest they're highly intelligent. An octopus named Inky, for example, made a notorious escape recently from the National Aquarium of New Zealand, exiting his enclosure and slithering into a floor drain and, apparently, out to sea.

Cuttlefish can scare off predators by forming eyespots on their bodies in order to look like giant fish. But they only use this trick against predators that rely on vision to find prey. If a predator that depends on smell shows up, the cuttlefish are smart enough just to flee.

Octopuses show the same flexibility when scientists bring them into labs. In one study, researchers at Hebrew University presented octopuses with an L-shaped box with food inside. The animals figured out how to push and pull the morsel through a tiny hole in the wall of their tank.

Another feature that cephalopods share with other smart animals is a relatively big brain. But that's where the similarities appear to end. Most of the neurons that do the computing, for example, are in the octopus's arms.
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Most strikingly, cephalopods die young. Some may live as long as two years, while others only last a few months. Nor do cephalopods form social bonds.

They get together to mate, but males and females don't stay together for long or care for their young. While chimpanzees and dolphins may live in societies of dozens of other animals, cephalopods seem to be loners.

Mr. Amodio and his colleagues think the evolutionary history of cephalopods may explain this intelligence paradox. About half a billion years ago, their snaillike ancestors evolved to use their shells as a buoyancy device. They could load chambers in the shell with gas to float up and down in the ocean.

A cousin of cephalopods, the nautilus, still lives this way. Like cephalopods, it has tentacles. It also has a somewhat enlarged brain, although it doesn't seem to be anywhere as intelligent as an octopus.

About 275 million years ago, the ancestor of today's cephalopods lost the external shell. It's not clear why, but it must have been liberating. Now the animals could start exploring places that had been off-limits to their shelled ancestors. Octopuses could slip into rocky crevices, for example, to hunt for prey.

On the other hand, losing their shells left cephalopods quite vulnerable to hungry predators. This threat may have driven cephalopods to become masters of disguise and escape. They did so by evolving big brains, the ability to solve new problems, and perhaps look into the future - knowing that coconut or clam shells may come in handy, for example.

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An octopus pulls together two empty shells in order to hide off the coast of Sulawesi, Indonesia. Credit Ethan Daniels, via Getty Images

Yet intelligence is not the perfect solution for cephalopods, Mr. Amodio suggested. Sooner or later, they get eaten. Natural selection has turned them into a paradox: a short-lived, intelligent animal.

Mr. Amodio said that scientists still need to learn a lot more about cephalopods before they can know if this hypothesis is sound. But the research may do more than shine a light on octopuses and their cousins: It could give us a deeper understanding of intelligence in general.

"We can't take for granted that there's just one way to intelligence," Mr. Amodio said. "There could be different paths."

More octopus articles you might like

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Yes, the Octopus Is Smart as Heck. But Why?

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matter It has eight arms, three hearts - and a plan. Scientists aren't sure how the cephalopods got to be so intelligent. To demonstrate how smart an octopus can be, Piero Amodio points to a YouTube video. It shows an octopus pulling two halves of a coconut shell together to hide inside.

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Octopuses observed at the Davidson Seamount, an ocean habitat about 80 miles to the southwest of Monterey. (Ocean Exploration Trust/NOAA)

It was at the very end of a 35-hour expedition on Tuesday when scientists spotted the octopuses - more than a thousand of them - in a previously unexplored rocky habitat near the Davidson Seamount, an ocean habitat about 80 miles southwest of Monterey.

Marine scientists embarked on a 10-day research expedition to a previously unexplored part of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary with the help of two remote-controlled robots.

They were found in "brooding" positions, with their arms inverted as they covered their eggs, which they cemented to rocks approximately 10,000 feet below the ocean surface.

It was the first time scientists had found this type of cluster on the West Coast, and only the second time they have ever been observed. The previous sighting was a much smaller cluster near Costa Rica.

"This has never been discovered on the West Coast of the U.S., never in our sanctuary and never in the world with these numbers," said Chad King, a lead scientist on the Nautilus exploration vessel.

He said the Nautilus, a 211-foot research boat with a team from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the nonprofit Ocean Exploration Trust, initially set out to explore coral and sponge fields.

"I've never in my career come across something like this, where these could potentially be nursery habitats, and another extremely important reason why we need to protect this area," King said.

The Davidson Seamount was added to the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary in 2008, but King said many deep-sea habitats like this still need protection.

There are several possible reasons why the octopuses might have chosen this area for brooding. King said it could be the warmer water, the higher oxygen content, a specific mineral in the water or the fact that they were gathered in fluid seeps, which are warmer pockets of seawater.

"It's quite possible they're just using those areas because they have the cleanest rock," he said.

The species was identified as Muusoctopus robustus, a small deep-water ocotpus lacking an ink sac.

King said they can't revisit the site right away because of a technical problem with their vehicle.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute regularly conducts deep-sea research, but King said the last time they were in the Davidson Seamount area was 12 years ago.

"We really don't know much about the deep sea - we've seen less than 1 percent of the world's deep ocean bottoms. On any particular dive you could be shocked by something," he said.

He hopes the discovery will lead to more funding for research to go back and understand whether the site is actually a nursery.

"If it is, that's important because it will sustain their population," he said.

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Huge Cluster of Octopuses Observed Southwest of Monterey

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Octopuses observed at the Davidson Seamount, an ocean habitat about 80 miles to the southwest of Monterey. (Ocean Exploration Trust/NOAA) It was at the very end of a 35-hour expedition on Tuesday when scientists spotted the octopuses - more than a thousand of them - in a previously unexplored rocky habitat near the Davidson Seamount, an ocean habitat about 80 miles southwest of Monterey.

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art by Michael Doyle

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Port Townsend Marine Science Center - Home

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© 1982-2018 Port Townsend Marine Science Center - All Rights Reserved

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Eliza Heery

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Eliza is a marine ecologist researching ecological processes and community dynamics on urban artificial structures in coastal cities. She received her PhD from the University of Washington, where she researched biological colonization of underwater artificial structures, such as pipelines and breakwaters, as well as the use of urban debris by giant Pacific octopus. She also holds an MS in Fisheries Science (stock assessment modelling) from Virginia Tech and a BS in Biology from Emory University. Eliza currently serves as a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore, where she studies the ecology of seawalls and ecological enhancement strategies for improving seawall biodiversity.

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Eliza is a marine ecologist researching ecological processes and community dynamics on urban artificial structures in coastal cities. She received her PhD from the University of Washington, where she researched biological colonization of underwater artificial structures, such as pipelines and breakwaters, as well as the use of urban debris by giant Pacific octopus.

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Urbanization has winners and losers. Synanthropes are organisms that live near and benefit from humans and from the artificial landscapes and seascapes that humans create.

Urban octopus
Key Points:

Giant Pacific octopus are the largest known octopus species in the world.

A recent study suggests that deep-dwelling giant Pacific octopus are positively correlated with urbanization intensity.

This may be due to the large amount of junk that ends up on the seafloor in urban areas.

In 1955, Columbia Pictures released the thriller It Came From Beneath The Sea, in which an enormous octopus begins terrorizing the good citizens of San Francisco. Though lacking in certain factual details (for instance, the octopus possesses only six legs in some shots) and decidedly biased against the octopus, the film alludes to one phenomenon that is not entirely fictitious.

It turns out there are giant octopodes lurking in the depths of urban waterfronts in coastal cities on the West Coast of North America. They are giant Pacific octopus ( Enteroctopus dofleini), the largest known octopus species in the world. Reaching over 20 feet in length from one tentacle tip to the other, they are veracious predators of crabs, clams, and other invertebrate prey.

In a 2018 study in Urban Ecosystems, Eliza Heery and colleagues at the University of Washington, Seattle Aquarium, and NOAA set out to determine whether giant Pacific octopus distribution and habitat-use patterns were related to urbanization intensity, and if so how and why.

Because of the large size and expansive home range of giant Pacific octopus, characterizing their distribution patterns using traditional ecological survey techniques is not an easy feat. Instead, Heery et al. relied upon citizen-contributed data from the REEF program ( www.reef.org). These data provided information about octopus presence/absence over a much larger spatial scale and a much longer time period than would otherwise have been available. Heery et al. used the REEF data in a series of statistical models, which you can read more about here, to ultimately conclude that urban effects varied with depth. In deep habitats (> 24 m), the probability of encountering octopus increased with adjacent land-based urbanization intensity.

Why might this be? They conducted additional field surveys to explore two potential explanations - giant Pacific octopus are considered to be a mesopredator, meaning they are medium sized predators that are at a middle point in the food chain, with some prey and some predators of their own. Past studies in terrestrial urban ecology have demonstrated that urbanization facilitates mesopredators such as raccoons, in part by providing food and shelter resources. To determine whether the increased occurrence of octopus at depth in urban areas was associated with food resources, Heery et al. collected middens - piles of shells leftover from past meals of octopus - from octopus dens throughout Puget Sound. These data indicated there were no differences in the diets of urban octopus and more rural octopus, suggesting that food resources are not the driver of urban-related distribution patterns. Secondly, Heery et al. conducted a series of video surveys in adjacent areas where there was a lot of versus very little anthropogenic debris (junk). Results from these surveys indicated that octopus are far more common where there is a lot of junk on the seafloor, suggesting that this may be one of the mechanisms driving urban-related distribution patterns in giant Pacific octopus.

Algal turf takeover
Key Points:

Algal turfs are thick, carpet-like beds of seaweed that retain sediment and compete with foundation species like corals and kelps.

High nutrient and sediment loads in urban waters may be facilitating the expansion of algal turfs.

Are algal turfs taking over the marine environments as a result of widespread urbanization? That's the worry of scientists who study marine macroalgae. Algal turfs are expansive beds of sediment-retaining seaweeds, and are common features of urban areas. They have long been black listed by conservationists and many ecologists because they compete directly with reef-building corals and perhaps also canopy-forming kelps, both taxonomic groups of considerable importance for marine biodiversity.

Though the term 'algal turfs' is used to refer to a variety of different types seaweeds, those in urban areas are typically formed by filamentous algae that are just a few centimeters tall and grow in dense, intertwined matrices or 'thickets'. Urban algal turfs are thought to consist of opportunistic, pioneer species capable of colonizing novel habitats rapidly and tolerating of stressful environmental conditions that are inhospitable to other organisms. In particular, urban turfs appear to thrive on elevated nutrient levels (primarily nitrogen and phosphorous from wastewater, sewage, and runoff) and high sediment loads (from coastal construction, dredging, and other sources). Recent studies also suggest urban turfs may be further facilitated by increases in temperature and CO ₂ associated with climate change. Currently, researchers are working to understand how herbivores and competitors that limit algal turf may be used to control turf growth in urban areas.

Sea lions: City slickers
Key Points:

Urban sea lions utilize the extensive haul-out opportunities provided by buoys, floating docks, and other urban infrastructure.

Dense aggregations of sea lions in many coastal cities suggest they may be synanthropic, yet more research is needed to characterize the patterns and drivers of sea lion populations in urban areas.

Strange encounters with urban sea lions are a familiar tale that regularly make local news headlines in many coastal cities. For instance, in San Diego, an eight-month old sea lion pup recently took up residence in an ocean-front restaurant and was quite obviously grumpy (pictured) when it came time for her deportation by a marine mammal rescue team ( link). In the same area, another sea lion pup allegedly climbed 145 steps from the beach below to hang out in a gift shop and only left after being bribed with salmon ( link). In yet another episode, a paddle boarder captured this video as a young sea lion who climbed aboard, bummed a ride, and perhaps overstayed her welcome:

Sea lions are smart and versatile. Though they fit many of the characteristics of synanthropes, and are clearly a common inhabitant of many coastal cities, particularly on the West Coast of North America, their population dynamics with respect to urbanization have yet to be thoroughly studied.

It's possible sea lions capitalize on urban environments in a manner similar to terrestrial mesopredators (mid-sized consumers) like raccoons and coyotes, that are dietary generalists and behaviorally flexible. However, raccoons and coyotes particularly benefit from the cornucopia of food resources in terrestrial urban environments that's provided by human trash and/or small domesticated pets. There's no evidence thus far that urbanization enhances food resources for marine mesopredators. Alternatively, urban sea lion populations may benefit from fewer predators in urban areas - as raccoons and coyotes do - yet this has not been well studied. While some smaller sharks are known to inhabit urban estuaries, urbanization is thought to have negative impacts on many marine predators ( link). Yet, it remains unclear whether urban-related patterns in apex consumers are strong enough to drive synanthropy among mesopredators like sea lions.

What is evident is that sea lions utilize the extensive haul-out opportunities provided by urban infrastructure. Sea lions are a common fixture on buoys and floating docks in many cities, often causing quite a headache for port authorities. For instance, in the late 1980s, sea lions took over a major dock at a popular tourist destination in San Francisco en masse and have maintained their territorial claim to the site ever since, effectively barring entry to humans and eliminating the dock as usable infrastructure for the port (though it came with other tourist benefits: link). Some cities attempt to prevent such take-overs by requiring sea lion deterrents at public harbors and waterfronts ( link).

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Marine Synanthropes - Urban Marine Ecology

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Urbanization has winners and losers. Synanthropes are organisms that live near and benefit from humans and from the artificial landscapes and seascapes that humans create. Key Points: Giant Pacific octopus are the largest known octopus species in the world. A recent study suggests that deep-dwelling giant Pacific octopus are positively correlated with urbanization intensity.

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The octopus - our thriving neighbor | Seattle Aquarium

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A new study published in the journal Urban Ecosystems this past February, has shown a preliminary link between urban habitats and giant Pacific octopus populations. The research, which was coauthored by one of the Aquarium's very own staff Amy Olsen, found that giant Pacific octopus numbers were greater in deep water, urban areas around Puget Sound in comparison with more rural locations.

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One octopus was being released into the Window on Washington Waters exhibit Friday at the Seattle Aquarium as part of Octopus Week. On Saturday, the aquarium will release another octopus into Puget Sound at noon.

Share story

Octopus Week runs through Sunday, Feb. 25. Go to seattleaquarium.org/octopus-week to view scheduled activities.

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One octopus was being released into the Window on Washington Waters exhibit Friday at the Seattle Aquarium as part of Octopus Week. On Saturday, the aquarium will release another octopus into Puget Sound at noon. Share story Octopus Week runs through Sunday, Feb. 25. Go to seattleaquarium.org/octopus-week to view scheduled activities.

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Diving into "Octopus Week" at the Seattle Aquarium

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The story of Inky, an octopus who escaped a New Zealand aquarium by climbing out of his tank and taking a drainpipe to the ocean, was one of the Washington Post's most-read stories on Wednesday. And understandably, Inky's feat inspired lots of reader questions about octopus anatomy, intelligence and behavior.
Joining us today to provide some answers is Jennifer Mather, a professor of psychology at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada. Mather has long studied the behavior of octopuses and squid, and her work has taken her to the waters of Bermuda, Hawaii and Bonaire. She's also focused on octopuses' cognitive abilities, assessed their personalities and evaluated their play. Who better than to explain how and why Inky made his great escape?
So let's get to it. Fire away with questions about all things octopus!

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Ask an octopus expert: How did Inky escape?

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The story of Inky, an octopus who escaped a New Zealand aquarium by climbing out of his tank and taking a drainpipe to the ocean, was one of the Washington Post's most-read stories on Wednesday. And understandably, Inky's feat inspired lots of reader questions about octopus anatomy, intelligence and behavior.

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Eventually, he managed to pull the animal to the surface, where a number of divers couldn't help noticing a teenager punching an 80-pound octopus. As they approached, Mayer freaked out. "Let's get out of here," he said, sucker marks ringing his face. "Maybe we shouldn't have done this." But it was too late. He dragged his kill ashore, where a few bystanders, in disbelief, took his picture and threatened to report him. Lugging the octopus to the red truck, Mayer cited his permit. But the divers kept taking pictures. That night, as Mayer butchered the octopus for dinner, they posted the photos online.

In a city finely attuned to both the ethics of food sourcing and poster-worthy animal causes (the spotted owl, the killer whale and marbled murrelet among them), Mayer's exploits became an instant cause célèbre. On Nov. 1 and 2, Seattle 's competing news stations reported the octopus hunt. The next day, The Seattle Times ran the story on the front page. On Web forums, Seattleites tracked down the teenager's name and address through the clues in the photos: the truck's license plate, the high school named on Mayer's sweatshirt and the inspection sticker affixed to his tank. "I hope this sick [expletive] gets tangled in a gill net next time he dives and thus removes a potential budding sociopath before it graduates from invertebrates to mammals," read one typical comment, which received 52 "thumbs-ups." Around the same time, Scott Lundy, one of the men who had confronted Mayer in Cove 2, issued a "Save the G.P.O." petition to ban octopus harvesting from the beach and examine the practice statewide. By the next day, he had collected 1,105 signatures.

Across Elliott Bay, at the same time, a much subtler food sourcer was at work. Chef Matthew Dillon was building his highly anticipated new restaurant, Bar Sajor (pronounced "sigh-your") in Pioneer Square. After the success of his first, Sitka & Spruce, Dillon, 39, earned an unsought reputation as the consummate locavore in a city filled with them. He cultivated rare herbs and foraged for mushrooms in the foothills of the Cascades; whereas many Brooklyn restaurants are only now coming around to wood sorrel and perilla, Dillon has been cooking with them since 1995. At Bar Sajor, there would be a rotisserie and a wood-fire oven, but no gas range; Dillon would make his own yogurt and vinegars, ferment his own vegetables and change his menu every day depending on what looked fresh and interesting - including, as it happened, giant Pacific octopus.

So as the "Save the G.P.O." campaign raged this spring, the city raved about Dillon's octopus salad. In The Stranger, the influential alt-weekly magazine, Bethany Jean Clement described it as having "a restrained oceangoing flavor, a bouncy but tender texture - sometimes a little chewy but never rubbery," plated that day with "a thick walnut sauce, dill for freshness, and an oozing egg yolk for vivid creaminess and color." The Seattle Times also heaped praise. "Bar Sajor Is Matt Dillon 's Finest Yet," ran one Friday headline, just a week after another: "New Hunting Rules Likely for Puget Sound Octopus." Whenever the salad appeared on the menu, it sold out. Inevitably this posed a most uncomfortable question for Seattle's food community: should it save the giant Pacific octopus or just eat it?

The giant Pacific octopus, the world's largest, is the celebrity of cephalopods. For decades, visitors have crowded around its tank at the Seattle Aquarium, marveling at the intelligence of a sea creature that can open childproof jars, recognize its keeper and press its suckers against the glass to match a lifted hand. Found between California and Japan, the octopuses usually weigh anywhere between 30 and 100 pounds and can reach more than 14 feet, or about the height of a double-decker bus. As adults, they have few natural predators in the bays and inlets of Washington and live in abundance in the Puget Sound.

While the octopuses were fished by coastal Native Americans centuries ago, their general unwieldiness has prevented them from catching on in the retail fish market. Commercially, giant Pacific octopus was fished in the Puget Sound as incidental catch mostly from bottom trawls, a practice that topped out in 1988 at 83,500 pounds per year, and then dropped precipitously as fishing methods changed. From 1998 to 2000, direct harvest of octopus by shellfish pots averaged only about 100 pounds annually. In 2001, the pots were outlawed; in 2010, commercial trawlnets were, too. This created the strange rule that direct harvest was legal "by hand or by instrument which will not penetrate or mutilate the body," and you could take one octopus per day. Few bothered. Even in Seattle, where they thrive, the octopus served in most restaurants came from places like the Philippines, Spain, Indonesia and Japan.

And so perhaps diners fell out of the habit of asking where their octopus came from, comforted by the assumption that this iconic marine species - inspiration for countless tattoos, as well as the Seattle Aquarium's booming annual Octopus Week - was not on their plates. Certainly, no one was ready to see it killed by a teenager. And days after Mayer was identified, the regular meeting of the Washington Fish and Wildlife Commission was unusually well attended. Dozens of irate Seattleites filed into a conference room and, seating themselves in plastic chairs, were surprised to see that the first speaker to approach the podium was a teenager in bluejeans. "I'm obviously here today from the incident in Cove 2 with the octopus," Mayer said. "I was the hunter. I did not know that that place was so loved by all the divers, or otherwise I would not have done it. . . . I do agree with how that place should be off limits [to octopus hunting], and it should be clearly posted so that this mistake doesn't happen again."

Mayer stepped down, and others took the lectern to recite their prepared remarks, which failed to acknowledge that the threat had effectively just been neutralized. Eventually, Mike Racine stood to speak, representing the Washington Scuba Alliance, whose director of conservation, Scott Lundy, first posted Mayer's photo online. "I did want to recognize that Dylan Mayer is here today. He and his family took a lot of heat over the last week for this legal taking of an octopus. Much of that heat is vitriolic in nature and inappropriate, and Dylan, just so you know, the Scuba Alliance regrets that, and we applaud you for being here," Racine said. The room stood and clapped. Mayer, once a nemesis of the giant Pacific octopus, had suddenly become its most visible supporter.

From there, Fish and Wildlife went full "Parks and Recreation" on the octopus-hunting problem. The ad hoc Giant Pacific Octopus Advisory Group formed to draft options for protective enclosures. Over the months, they would meet several times, examining the conditions of the celebrity species and amassing a binder of more than 100 (mostly double-sided) pages. The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife hosted public meetings at the aquarium and considered formal comments from more than 400 constituents as well as an expert scientific evaluation. Mark Plunkett, the Seattle Aquarium's Conservation Manager, and his team on the advisory group gathered decades of research data to compile their report.

Their conclusion, however, turned out to be more complicated than anyone anticipated. An informal octopus census as well as studies like a five-year diver survey indicated that the giant Pacific octopus population in the Puget Sound was actually quite robust. The species grew quickly, lived briefly and reproduced effectively - factors important to determining its sustainability. In Alaska, in fact, it seemed as if there were more than plenty of them. When in 2011 the state tried to protect the species by capping incidental catch at 150, they discovered the giant Pacific octopus population was so plentiful that they reached their quota by October; that season's pot cod fishing had to shut down early. The octopus didn't need to be saved, Plunkett's team determined; the people of Seattle simply wanted to save it.

Plunkett says this often happens with "glamour animals," and so the advisory group was faced with a question that seemed begging for mockery: Must a species be endangered to justify protection, or was just liking to look at it reason enough?

The success of any octopus dish lies in its texture. In the Greek isles, fishermen swing octopuses into boulders, up to 100 times, to tenderize the tough meat, which is about 90 percent muscle. In Japan, disciples of the sushi chef Jiro Ono massage their octopuses by hand for up to 50 minutes. Many home cooks, including Mayer, pound it. Even then, the texture can still be unfavorably compared to what Plunkett describes as "butter-fried rubber" - a consistency that caused Mayer's mother to choke when she found a bite of his octopus in her bowl of bouillabaisse.

At Bar Sajor, Dillon has his own three-day-long octopus preparation ritual. He massages it with salt and lets it self-brine for 24 hours ("it really releases some of the muck"), then he rinses it and places it in a braiser with chunks of pork, halved lemons, peppers, whey and flowering dill. In his wood-fire oven, it takes on a new texture. ("It very much has a pork-shoulder quality to it when it's been cooking for a long time - held together but stringy like brisket.") Dillon then lets it rest for another day before returning it to the fire for a rustic finish. In a recent week, he plated the octopus segments on a dollop of smoked yogurt, nestled with wedges of lobster mushrooms, a smash of ember-roasted celeriac and a sprinkle of unopened nasturtium blossoms. It was a decadent, meaty dish.

When the chef started experimenting with octopus, he used imported catch from the Sea of Japan. Eventually, though, he started talking to coastal fishermen about local octopus. His sardine supplier knew a black-cod fisherman who sometimes found octopus among his haul; Dillon asked for his number. (The state demands that trawl fishermen discard incidentally caught shellfish but not octopus and squid.) Now the fisherman sends Dillon a text message when he accidentally snares an octopus, and the chef purchases the bycatch for a sizable investment of $6 to $7 a pound. It's about double the price of the small, imported ones at the fish market, but it tastes great.

This sort of sourcing deftly dodges unease about eating a beloved animal. Bycatch is a poorly managed resource, after all; it can account for six pounds of waste for every pound of shrimp caught. Eating it becomes less a question of "if something is already dead, what's the harm in consuming it?" than "what could feel better than eating something that would otherwise be wasted?" And the small-scale, unpredictable nature of incidental catch is very much aligned with Bar Sajor's ethos. "I'm willing to say: 'If I have it, I have it. And if I don't, I don't,' " Dillon says.

Dillon's reputation as a seasonally shifting master locavore is well earned. He lives on a farm accessible only by ferry and knows where his food comes from (his backyard, mostly). Yet he says a blind adherence to "local" fare misses the point. "I don't buy blackberries because they're local. I buy blackberries from that farmer because they're delicious, and I have yet to be shown a more delicious blackberry that I can get somewhere else and, at the same time, support my economy," he says. "Sustainability and being local is not the part that interests me. I want to support it, and I want to support environmentalists, but I'm interested in supporting people and their welfare." The community itself, in other words, is more important than where the food is from. Dillon suspects the uproar surrounding Mayer's catch wasn't really about sustainability; it was about the social context. "We don't live in a culture where people go out and get octopus and then bring it in and eat it. This isn't Marseille." His issue with it, however, was simply that Mayer found this particular octopus in Elliott Bay, where the Duwamish River Superfund site drains.

Mayer's real offense may have been forcing a community to realize that just because they've embraced local fare doesn't mean they're necessarily ready to see, in gory detail, it slaughtered or hunted or punched out and dragged from the bay. Mayer, who learned as a kid to track and kill coyotes that threaten livestock, recognized this, too. "I've always been a woods person," he says. "I don't mind killing for my food. I do it a lot. I don't really like going to the store at all. Some people are too modernized; they don't realize when they go to the store, that was killed somewhere, generally by people like me."

In the end, though, the Fish and Wildlife department concluded that there was still value in protecting a species, if only as watchable wildlife. The advisory group had drafted a list of 30 popular dive sites, and the department decided to ban octopus harvesting in seven of them, including Cove 2. Earlier this month, the state designated these locations Octopus Protection Areas and published a map that acknowledges the handful of places where octopus may not be harvested. Washington hasn't yet placed permanent signage at the protected areas, but it's doubtful they need it. Seattle's most notorious octopus hunter already knows the rules.

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Eventually, he managed to pull the animal to the surface, where a number of divers couldn't help noticing a teenager punching an 80-pound octopus. As they approached, Mayer freaked out. "Let's get out of here," he said, sucker marks ringing his face. "Maybe we shouldn't have done this."

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Why the octopus brain is so extraordinary - Cláudio L. Guerra

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What we can learn from nature about becoming adaptable to the unpredictable.  Highlights from my book, "Learning from the Octopus: How Secrets from Nature Can Help Us Fight Terrorism, Natural Disasters, and Disease" (2012 Basic Books).

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University of Washington Department of Psychology

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I laid the groundwork for studying cognition in this new model by consolidating a paradigm to deconstruct and characterize the behavior of Octopus rubescens, the Pacific red octopus, the smaller of the two species local to the Puget Sound (at an adult arm span of around 30 cm).

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http://www.inkart.net/proddetail.php?prod=Octopus-of-the-World-Print

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It's no surprise to regular ScienceAlert readers that octopuses (yes, that is the plural form of the word) are the geniuses of the ocean. Over recent years we've seen these cephalopods do everything from predicting the winners of the world cup and taking photos, to using a seashell as a weapon in a battle against its own kind.

Now the team over at Business Insider has put together an infographic to celebrate some lesser known, but equally amazing, facts about our eight-limbed friends. The list was taken from science journalist Katherine Harmon Courage's book and can we just say that it makes us feel a little inferior about our boring human abilities?

For starters, octopuses can grow back any lost limbs - suckers and all. They also have three, yes three, hearts, and they bleed blue because their blood is higher in copper than iron.

Not to mention the fact that certain octopuses can change the colour and texture of their skin to perfectly blend in with their surroundings in just 0.3 seconds, can kill a human adult with their neurotoxins and can open childproof bottles (something we haven't yet managed ourselves).

If it's any consolation, octopuses are colour blind, and they live alone in homes that they like to decorate with shiny trinkets. But who are we kidding? They're still infinitely cooler than we are. Check out the infographic below (higher res here) to get inspired.

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This Infographic Shows All The Reasons The Octopus Is The Coolest Animal Ever

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It's no surprise to regular ScienceAlert readers that octopuses (yes, that is the plural form of the word) are the geniuses of the ocean. Over recent years we've seen these cephalopods do everything from predicting the winners of the world cup and

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Nothing about the hundreds of octopus moms on the video feed from the submersible Alvin looked right.

"Those octopus shouldn't be there," Janet Voight, a marine biologist at the Field Museum in Chicago, said when she saw the footage.

The research vessel was exploring a rocky outcrop about 1.2 miles deep and 150 miles off Costa Rica's Pacific coast-far deeper than any other known octopus nursery, and (in theory) too warm.

"It was jaw-dropping," says Anne Hartwell, a research assistant at the University of Akron in Ohio, who led a new study on the 2014 footage of the octomoms guarding their precious eggs. ( See our most beautiful octopus pictures.)

With Voight's help, Hartwell identified the plentiful cephalopods as part of the genus Muusoctopus- andpossibly even a species new to science. These octopuses are solitary and occasionally cannibalistic.

But first, she had to figure out why they were there-and why had so many of them gathered in such a small area.

It's likely because the Dorado Outcrop is valuable egg-laying real estate, Hartwell discovered.

Most of the ocean bottom is covered with soft muck called marine snow, a collection of organic debris that drifts down to the bottom. Octopi can't brood in those conditions.

Although much of the ocean water around the outcrop is colder than normal, hot hydrothermal vents crisscross the region-and it's these warmer spots that attracted the octopi. ( Read about another deep-sea creature that lays its eggs on hydrothermal vents.)

"There were so many of them there that at first I thought they were all really happy," Hartwell says.

As Hartwell and Voight scrutinized the Alvin footage, however, they noticed something strange. None of the eggs were developing, and all the mothers showed signs of severe stress.

According to octopus expert Jennifer Mather, who wasn't involved in the study, the water in the crevices is likely just too hot for the deep-sea invertebrates.

But with so few places to lay their eggs, the mothers have little choice but to endure the sweltering conditions, Hartwell and colleagues conclude in their study, published recently in the journal Deep-Sea Research Part I.

"This study reminds us that the deep sea is not a uniform environment. There are lots of different microhabitats for life to exploit," says Mather, of Alberta's University of Lethbridge.

It's also possibly not that surprising, considering making sacrifices is nothing new to octopuses. ( Read about fierce animal moms that go to extremes for their babies.)

In 2011, researchers began keeping tabs on a Graneledone boreopacifica female off central California that guarded her eggs for an astonishing 4.5 years. That's the longest known developmental period for any animal.

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Deepest Octopus Nursery Discovered, Holds Dark Secret

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Nothing about the hundreds of octopus moms on the video feed from the submersible Alvin looked right. "Those octopus shouldn't be there," Janet Voight, a marine biologist at the Field Museum in Chicago, said when she saw the footage.

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Photograph: Brandon Cole

ON AN UNSEASONABLY WARM day in the middle of March, I traveled from New Hampshire to the moist, dim sanctuary of the New England Aquarium, hoping to touch an alternate reality. I came to meet Athena, the aquarium's forty-pound, five-foot-long, two-and-a-half-year-old giant Pacific octopus.

For me, it was a momentous occasion. I have always loved octopuses. No sci-fi alien is so startlingly strange. Here is someone who, even if she grows to one hundred pounds and stretches more than eight feet long, could still squeeze her boneless body through an opening the size of an orange; an animal whose eight arms are covered with thousands of suckers that taste as well as feel; a mollusk with a beak like a parrot and venom like a snake and a tongue covered with teeth; a creature who can shape-shift, change color, and squirt ink. But most intriguing of all, recent research indicates that octopuses are remarkably intelligent.

Many times I have stood mesmerized by an aquarium tank, wondering, as I stared into the horizontal pupils of an octopus's large, prominent eyes, if she was staring back at me - and if so, what was she thinking?

Not long ago, a question like this would have seemed foolish, if not crazy. How can an octopus know anything, much less form an opinion? Octopuses are, after all, "only" invertebrates - they don't even belong with the insects, some of whom, like dragonflies and dung beetles, at least seem to show some smarts. Octopuses are classified within the invertebrates in the mollusk family, and many mollusks, like clams, have no brain.

Only recently have scientists accorded chimpanzees, so closely related to humans we can share blood transfusions, the dignity of having a mind. But now, increasingly, researchers who study octopuses are convinced that these boneless, alien animals - creatures whose ancestors diverged from the lineage that would lead to ours roughly 500 to 700 million years ago - have developed intelligence, emotions, and individual personalities. Their findings are challenging our understanding of consciousness itself.

I had always longed to meet an octopus. Now was my chance: senior aquarist Scott Dowd arranged an introduction. In a back room, he would open the top of Athena's tank. If she consented, I could touch her. The heavy lid covering her tank separated our two worlds. One world was mine and yours, the reality of air and land, where we lumber through life governed by a backbone and constrained by jointed limbs and gravity. The other world was hers, the reality of a nearly gelatinous being breathing water and moving weightlessly through it. We think of our world as the "real" one, but Athena's is realer still: after all, most of the world is ocean, and most animals live there. Regardless of whether they live on land or water, more than 95 percent of all animals are invertebrates, like Athena.

The moment the lid was off, we reached for each other. She had already oozed from the far corner of her lair, where she had been hiding, to the top of the tank to investigate her visitor. Her eight arms boiled up, twisting, slippery, to meet mine. I plunged both my arms elbow deep into the fifty-seven-degree water. Athena's melon-sized head bobbed to the surface. Her left eye (octopuses have one dominant eye like humans have a dominant hand) swiveled in its socket to meet mine. "She's looking at you," Dowd said.

As we gazed into each other's eyes, Athena encircled my arms with hers, latching on with first dozens, then hundreds of her sensitive, dexterous suckers. Each arm has more than two hundred of them. The famous naturalist and explorer William Beebe found the touch of the octopus repulsive. "I have always a struggle before I can make my hands do their duty and seize a tentacle," he confessed. But to me, Athena's suckers felt like an alien's kiss - at once a probe and a caress. Although an octopus can taste with all of its skin, in the suckers both taste and touch are exquisitely developed. Athena was tasting me and feeling me at once, knowing my skin, and possibly the blood and bone beneath, in a way I could never fathom.

When I stroked her soft head with my fingertips, she changed color beneath my touch, her ruby-flecked skin going white and smooth. This, I learned, is a sign of a relaxed octopus. An agitated giant Pacific octopus turns red, its skin gets pimply, and it erects two papillae over the eyes, which some divers say look like horns. One name for the species is "devil fish." With sharp, parrotlike beaks, octopuses can bite, and most have neurotoxic, flesh-dissolving venom. The pressure from an octopus's suckers can tear flesh (one scientist calculated that to break the hold of the suckers of the much smaller common octopus would require a quarter ton of force). One volunteer who interacted with an octopus left the aquarium with arms covered in red hickeys.

Occasionally an octopus takes a dislike to someone. One of Athena's predecessors at the aquarium, Truman, felt this way about a female volunteer. Using his funnel, the siphon near the side of the head used to jet through the sea, Truman would shoot a soaking stream of salt water at this young woman whenever he got a chance. Later, she quit her volunteer position for college. But when she returned to visit several months later, Truman, who hadn't squirted anyone in the meanwhile, took one look at her and instantly soaked her again.

Athena was remarkably gentle with me - even as she began to transfer her grip from her smaller, outer suckers to the larger ones. She seemed to be slowly but steadily pulling me into her tank. Had it been big enough to accommodate my body, I would have gone in willingly. But at this point, I asked Dowd if perhaps I should try to detach from some of the suckers. With his help, Athena and I pulled gently apart.

I was honored that she appeared comfortable with me. But what did she know about me that informed her opinion? When Athena looked into my eyes, what was she thinking?

WHILE ALEXA WARBURTON was researching her senior thesis at Middlebury College's newly created octopus lab, "every day," she said, "was a disaster."

She was working with two species: the California two-spot, with a head the size of a clementine, and the smaller, Florida species, Octopus joubini. Her objective was to study the octopuses' behavior in a T-shaped maze. But her study subjects were constantly thwarting her.

The first problem was keeping the octopuses alive. The four-hundred-gallon tank was divided into separate compartments for each animal. But even though students hammered in dividers, the octopuses found ways to dig beneath them - and eat each other. Or they'd mate, which is equally lethal. Octopuses die after mating and laying eggs, but first they go senile, acting like a person with dementia. "They swim loop-the-loop in the tank, they look all googly-eyed, they won't look you in the eye or attack prey," Warburton said. One senile octopus crawled out of the tank, squeezed into a crack in the wall, dried up, and died.

It seemed to Warburton that some of the octopuses were purposely uncooperative. To run the T-maze, the pre-veterinary student had to scoop an animal from its tank with a net and transfer it to a bucket. With bucket firmly covered, octopus and researcher would take the elevator down to the room with the maze. Some octopuses did not like being removed from their tanks. They would hide. They would squeeze into a corner where they couldn't be pried out. They would hold on to some object with their arms and not let go.

Some would let themselves be captured, only to use the net as a trampoline. They'd leap off the mesh and onto the floor - and then run for it. Yes, run. "You'd chase them under the tank, back and forth, like you were chasing a cat," Warburton said. "It's so weird!"

Octopuses in captivity actually escape their watery enclosures with alarming frequency. While on the move, they have been discovered on carpets, along bookshelves, in a teapot, and inside the aquarium tanks of other fish - upon whom they have usually been dining.

Even though the Middlebury octopuses were disaster prone, Warburton liked certain individuals very much. Some, she said, "would lift their arms out of the water like dogs jump up to greet you." Though in their research papers the students refer to each octopus by a number, the students named them all. One of the joubini was such a problem they named her The Bitch. "Catching her for the maze always took twenty minutes," Warburton said. "She'd grip onto something and not let go. Once she got stuck in a filter and we couldn't get her out. It was awful!"

Then there was Wendy. Warburton used Wendy as part of her thesis presentation, a formal event that was videotaped. First Wendy squirted salt water at her, drenching her nice suit. Then, as Warburton tried to show how octopuses use the T-maze, Wendy scurried to the bottom of the tank and hid in the sand. Warburton says the whole debacle occurred because the octopus realized in advance what was going to happen. "Wendy," she said, "just didn't feel like being caught in the net."

Data from Warburton's experiments showed that the California two-spots quickly learned which side of a T-maze offered a terra-cotta pot to hide in. But Warburton learned far more than her experiments revealed. "Science," she says, "can only say so much. I know they watched me. I know they sometimes followed me. But they are so different from anything we normally study. How do you prove the intelligence of someone so different?"

MEASURING THE MINDS OF OTHER creatures is a perplexing problem. One yardstick scientists use is brain size, since humans have big brains. But size doesn't always match smarts. As is well known in electronics, anything can be miniaturized. Small brain size was the evidence once used to argue that birds were stupid - before some birds were proven intelligent enough to compose music, invent dance steps, ask questions, and do math.

Octopuses have the largest brains of any invertebrate. Athena's is the size of a walnut - as big as the brain of the famous African gray parrot, Alex, who learned to use more than one hundred spoken words meaningfully. That's proportionally bigger than the brains of most of the largest dinosaurs.

Another measure of intelligence: you can count neurons. The common octopus has about 130 million of them in its brain. A human has 100 billion. But this is where things get weird. Three-fifths of an octopus's neurons are not in the brain; they're in its arms.

"It is as if each arm has a mind of its own," says Peter Godfrey-Smith, a diver, professor of philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and an admirer of octopuses. For example, researchers who cut off an octopus's arm (which the octopus can regrow) discovered that not only does the arm crawl away on its own, but if the arm meets a food item, it seizes it - and tries to pass it to where the mouth would be if the arm were still connected to its body.

"Meeting an octopus," writes Godfrey-Smith, "is like meeting an intelligent alien." Their intelligence sometimes even involves changing colors and shapes. One video online shows a mimic octopus alternately morphing into a flatfish, several sea snakes, and a lionfish by changing color, altering the texture of its skin, and shifting the position of its body. Another video shows an octopus materializing from a clump of algae. Its skin exactly matches the algae from which it seems to bloom - until it swims away.

For its color palette, the octopus uses three layers of three different types of cells near the skin's surface. The deepest layer passively reflects background light. The topmost may contain the colors yellow, red, brown, and black. The middle layer shows an array of glittering blues, greens, and golds. But how does an octopus decide what animal to mimic, what colors to turn? Scientists have no idea, especially given that octopuses are likely colorblind.

But new evidence suggests a breathtaking possibility. Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory and University of Washington researchers found that the skin of the cuttlefish Sepia officinalis, a color-changing cousin of octopuses, contains gene sequences usually expressed only in the light-sensing retina of the eye. In other words, cephalopods - octopuses, cuttlefish, and squid - may be able to see with their skin.

The American philosopher Thomas Nagel once wrote a famous paper titled "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" Bats can see with sound. Like dolphins, they can locate their prey using echoes. Nagel concluded it was impossible to know what it's like to be a bat. And a bat is a fellow mammal like us - not someone who tastes with its suckers, sees with its skin, and whose severed arms can wander about, each with a mind of its own. Nevertheless, there are researchers still working diligently to understand what it's like to be an octopus.

JENNIFER MATHER SPENT MOST of her time in Bermuda floating facedown on the surface of the water at the edge of the sea. Breathing through a snorkel, she was watching Octopus vulgaris - the common octopus. Although indeed common (they are found in tropical and temperate waters worldwide), at the time of her study in the mid-1980s, "nobody knew what they were doing."

In a relay with other students from six-thirty in the morning till six-thirty at night, Mather worked to find out. Sometimes she'd see an octopus hunting. A hunting expedition could take five minutes or three hours. The octopus would capture something, inject it with venom, and carry it home to eat. "Home," Mather found, is where octopuses spend most of their time. A home, or den, which an octopus may occupy only a few days before switching to a new one, is a place where the shell-less octopus can safely hide: a hole in a rock, a discarded shell, or a cubbyhole in a sunken ship. One species, the Pacific red octopus, particularly likes to den in stubby, brown, glass beer bottles.

One octopus Mather was watching had just returned home and was cleaning the front of the den with its arms. Then, suddenly, it left the den, crawled a meter away, picked up one particular rock and placed the rock in front of the den. Two minutes later, the octopus ventured forth to select a second rock. Then it chose a third. Attaching suckers to all the rocks, the octopus carried the load home, slid through the den opening, and carefully arranged the three objects in front. Then it went to sleep. What the octopus was thinking seemed obvious: "Three rocks are enough. Good night!"

The scene has stayed with Mather. The octopus "must have had some concept," she said, "of what it wanted to make itself feel safe enough to go to sleep." And the octopus knew how to get what it wanted: by employing foresight, planning - and perhaps even tool use. Mather is the lead author of Octopus: The Ocean's Intelligent Invertebrate, which includes observations of octopuses who dismantle Lego sets and open screw-top jars. Coauthor Roland Anderson reports that octopuses even learned to open the childproof caps on Extra Strength Tylenol pill bottles - a feat that eludes many humans with university degrees.

In another experiment, Anderson gave octopuses plastic pill bottles painted different shades and with different textures to see which evoked more interest. Usually each octopus would grasp a bottle to see if it were edible and then cast it off. But to his astonishment, Anderson saw one of the octopuses doing something striking: she was blowing carefully modulated jets of water from her funnel to send the bottle to the other end of her aquarium, where the water flow sent it back to her. She repeated the action twenty times. By the eighteenth time, Anderson was already on the phone with Mather with the news: "She's bouncing the ball!"

This octopus wasn't the only one to use the bottle as a toy. Another octopus in the study also shot water at the bottle, sending it back and forth across the water's surface, rather than circling the tank. Anderson's observations were reported in the Journal of Comparative Psychology. "This fit all the criteria for play behavior," said Anderson. "Only intelligent animals play - animals like crows and chimps, dogs and humans."

Aquarists who care for octopuses feel that not only can these animals play with toys, but they may need to play with toys. An Octopus Enrichment Handbook has been developed by Cincinnati's Newport Aquarium, with ideas of how to keep these creatures entertained. One suggestion is to hide food inside Mr. Potato Head and let your octopus dismantle it. At the Seattle Aquarium, giant Pacific octopuses play with a baseball-sized plastic ball that can be screwed together by twisting the two halves. Sometimes the mollusks screw the halves back together after eating the prey inside.

At the New England Aquarium, it took an engineer who worked on the design of cubic zirconium to devise a puzzle worthy of a brain like Athena's. Wilson Menashi, who began volunteering at the aquarium weekly after retiring from the Arthur D. Little Corporation sixteen years ago, devised a series of three Plexiglas cubes, each with a different latch. The smallest cube has a sliding latch that twists to lock down, like the bolt on a horse stall. Aquarist Bill Murphy puts a crab inside the clear cube and leaves the lid open. Later he lets the octopus lift open the lid. Finally he locks the lid, and invariably the octopus figures out how to open it.

Next he locks the first cube within a second one. The new latch slides counterclockwise to catch on a bracket. The third box is the largest, with two different locks: a bolt that slides into position to lock down, and a second one like a lever arm, sealing the lid much like the top of an old-fashioned glass canning jar.

All the octopuses Murphy has known learned fast. They typically master a box within two or three once-a-week tries. "Once they 'get it,'" he says, "they can open it very fast" - within three or four minutes. But each may use a different strategy.

George, a calm octopus, opened the boxes methodically. The impetuous Gwenevere squeezed the second-largest box so hard she broke it, leaving a hole two inches wide. Truman, Murphy said, was "an opportunist." One day, inside the smaller of the two boxes, Murphy put two crabs, who started to fight. Truman was too excited to bother with locks. He poured his seven-foot-long body through the two-inch crack Gwenevere had made, and visitors looked into his exhibit to find the giant octopus squeezed, suckers flattened, into the tiny space between the walls of the fourteen-cubic-inch box outside and the six-cubic-inch one inside it. Truman stayed inside half an hour. He never opened the inner box - probably he was too cramped.

Three weeks after I had first met Athena, I returned to the aquarium to meet the man who had designed the cubes. Menashi, a quiet grandfather with a dark moustache, volunteers every Tuesday. "He has a real way with octopuses," Dowd and Murphy told me. I was eager to see how Athena behaved with him.

Murphy opened the lid of her tank, and Athena rose to the surface eagerly. A bucket with a handful of fish sat nearby. Did she rise so eagerly sensing the food? Or was it the sight of her friend that attracted her? "She knows me," Menashi answered softly.

Anderson's experiments with giant Pacific octopuses in Seattle prove Menashi is right. The study exposed eight octopuses to two unfamiliar humans, dressed identically in blue aquarium shirts. One person consistently fed a particular octopus, and another always touched it with a bristly stick. Within a week, at first sight of the people, most octopuses moved toward the feeders and away from the irritators, at whom they occasionally aimed their water-shooting funnels.

Upon seeing Menashi, Athena reached up gently and grasped his hands and arms. She flipped upside down, and he placed a capelin in some of the suckers near her mouth, at the center of her arms. The fish vanished. After she had eaten, Athena floated in the tank upside down, like a puppy asking for a belly rub. Her arms twisted lazily. I took one in my hand to feel the suckers - did that arm know it had hold of a different person than the other arms did? Her grip felt calm, relaxed. With me, earlier, she seemed playful, exploratory, excited. The way she held Menashi with her suckers seemed to me like the way a long-married couple holds hands at the movies.

I leaned over the tank to look again into her eyes, and she bobbed up to return my gaze. "She has eyelids like a person does," Menashi said. He gently slid his hand near one of her eyes, causing her to slowly wink.

BIOLOGISTS HAVE LONG NOTED the similarities between the eyes of an octopus and the eyes of a human. Canadian zoologist N. J. Berrill called it "the single most startling feature of the whole animal kingdom" that these organs are nearly identical: both animals' eyes have transparent corneas, regulate light with iris diaphragms, and focus lenses with a ring of muscle.

Scientists are currently debating whether we and octopuses evolved eyes separately, or whether a common ancestor had the makings of the eye. But intelligence is another matter. "The same thing that got them their smarts isn't the same thing that got us our smarts," says Mather, "because our two ancestors didn't have any smarts." Half a billion years ago, the brainiest thing on the planet had only a few neurons. Octopus and human intelligence evolved independently.

"Octopuses," writes philosopher Godfrey-Smith, "are a separate experiment in the evolution of the mind." And that, he feels, is what makes the study of the octopus mind so philosophically interesting.

The octopus mind and the human mind probably evolved for different reasons. Humans - like other vertebrates whose intelligence we recognize (parrots, elephants, and whales) - are long-lived, social beings. Most scientists agree that an important event that drove the flowering of our intelligence was when our ancestors began to live in social groups. Decoding and developing the many subtle relationships among our fellows, and keeping track of these changing relationships over the course of the many decades of a typical human lifespan, was surely a major force shaping our minds.

But octopuses are neither long-lived nor social. Athena, to my sorrow, may live only a few more months - the natural lifespan of a giant Pacific octopus is only three years. If the aquarium added another octopus to her tank, one might eat the other. Except to mate, most octopuses have little to do with others of their kind.

So why is the octopus so intelligent? What is its mind for? Mather thinks she has the answer. She believes the event driving the octopus toward intelligence was the loss of the ancestral shell. Losing the shell freed the octopus for mobility. Now they didn't need to wait for food to find them; they could hunt like tigers. And while most octopuses love crab best, they hunt and eat dozens of other species - each of which demands a different hunting strategy. Each animal you hunt may demand a different skill set: Will you camouflage yourself for a stalk-and-ambush attack? Shoot through the sea for a fast chase? Or crawl out of the water to capture escaping prey?

Losing the protective shell was a trade-off. Just about anything big enough to eat an octopus will do so. Each species of predator also demands a different evasion strategy - from flashing warning coloration if your attacker is vulnerable to venom, to changing color and shape to camouflage, to fortifying the door to your home with rocks.

Such intelligence is not always evident in the laboratory. "In the lab, you give the animals this situation, and they react," points out Mather. But in the wild, "the octopus is actively discovering his environment, not waiting for it to hit him. The animal makes the decision to go out and get information, figures out how to get the information, gathers it, uses it, stores it. This has a great deal to do with consciousness."

So what does it feel like to be an octopus? Philosopher Godfrey-Smith has given this a great deal of thought, especially when he meets octopuses and their relatives, giant cuttlefish, on dives in his native Australia. "They come forward and look at you. They reach out to touch you with their arms," he said. "It's remarkable how little is known about them . . . but I could see it turning out that we have to change the way we think of the nature of the mind itself to take into account minds with less of a centralized self."

"I think consciousness comes in different flavors," agrees Mather. "Some may have consciousness in a way we may not be able to imagine."

IN MAY, I VISITED Athena a third time. I wanted to see if she recognized me. But how could I tell? Scott Dowd opened the top of her tank for me. Athena had been in a back corner but floated immediately to the top, arms outstretched, upside down.

This time I offered her only one arm. I had injured a knee and, feeling wobbly, used my right hand to steady me while I stood on the stool to lean over the tank. Athena in turn gripped me with only one of her arms, and very few of her suckers. Her hold on me was remarkably gentle.

I was struck by this, since Murphy and others had first described Athena's personality to me as "feisty." "They earn their names," Murphy had told me. Athena is named for the Greek goddess of wisdom, war, and strategy. She is not usually a laid-back octopus, like George had been. "Athena could pull you into the tank," Murphy had warned. "She's curious about what you are."

Was she less curious now? Did she remember me? I was disappointed that she did not bob her head up to look at me. But perhaps she didn't need to. She may have known from the taste of my skin who I was. But why was this feisty octopus hanging in front of me in the water, upside down?

Then I thought I might know what she wanted from me. She was begging. Dowd asked around and learned that Athena hadn't eaten in a couple of days, then allowed me the thrilling privilege of handing her a capelin.

Perhaps I had understood something basic about what it felt like to be Athena at that moment: she was hungry. I handed a fish to one of her larger suckers, and she began to move it toward her mouth. But soon she brought more arms to the task, and covered the fish with many suckers - as if she were licking her fingers, savoring the meal.

A WEEK AFTER I LAST VISITED ATHENA, I was shocked to receive this e-mail from Scott Dowd: "Sorry to write with some sad news. Athena appears to be in her final days, or even hours. She will live on, though, through your conveyance." Later that same day, Dowd wrote to tell me that she had died. To my surprise, I found myself in tears.

Why such sorrow? I had understood from the start that octopuses don't live very long. I also knew that while Athena did seem to recognize me, I was not by any means her special friend. But she was very significant to me, both as an individual and as a representative from her octopodan world. She had given me a great gift: a deeper understanding of what it means to think, to feel, and to know. I was eager to meet more of her kind.

And so, it was with some excitement that I read this e-mail from Dowd a few weeks later: "There is a young pup octopus headed to Boston from the Pacific Northwest. Come shake hands (x8) when you can."

This article, along with other landmark Orion essays about our connection to the animal world, are collected in a new anthology, Animals & People. Order your copy here. The article also became the basis for the author's 2015 book, The Soul of an Octopus.

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ON AN UNSEASONABLY WARM day in the middle of March, I traveled from New Hampshire to the moist, dim sanctuary of the New England Aquarium, hoping to touch an alternate reality. I came to meet Athena, the aquarium's forty-pound, five-foot-long, two-and-a-half-year-old giant Pacific octopus. For me, it was a momentous occasion.

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The figure below-and the smaller version that appears in the right sidebar on each page-provide a quick way to access the main features of the Ocean Literacy Framework.

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Ocean Literacy | Understanding the Ocean‵s influence on you and your influence on the Ocean | Ocean Literacy

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http://symontgomery.com/soul-of-an-octopus/

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http://annbradenbooks.com/books/

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Exploring off the coast of Côte d'Azur in the 1960s, Jacques Cousteau felt there was something strange about the way an octopus eyed him. Octopuses seemed to recognize individual divers who brought them food, and some, to his surprise, could be petted and tested like cats. An octopus is a mollusk-albeit a naked one-that shuns its own kind except to mate. Yet Cousteau noticed that it shared certain complex behaviors with social mammals. Octopuses could open corked jars to get at a crab, and early lab experiments showed they were able to learn-they would repeatedly touch a black disk that earned them food, and avoid a...

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Exploring off the coast of Côte d'Azur in the 1960s, Jacques Cousteau felt there was something strange about the way an octopus eyed him. Octopuses seemed to recognize individual divers who brought them food, and some, to his surprise, could be petted and tested like cats.

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In her book "How to Be a Good Creature," Sy Montgomery gains rare insight into her late mother after a wild ermine rips the head off one of the author's chickens.

"She was, in her way, as fierce as that ermine," Ms. Montgomery writes in her memoir about lessons she has learned from 13 different animals. After seeing the voracious creature, she writes, her heart "flooded with the balm of forgiveness" for her mother.

"Marley...

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My Beloved Octopus: Animal Memoirs Move Way Beyond Cats and Dogs

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In her book "How to Be a Good Creature," Sy Montgomery gains rare insight into her late mother after a wild ermine rips the head off one of the author's chickens. "She was, in her way, as fierce as that ermine," Ms. Montgomery writes in her memoir about lessons she has learned from 13 different animals.

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Octopus tentacles still react up to an hour after being severed from their dead owner, and even try to pick up food and feed a phantom mouth

smithsonian.com

Octopuses are renowned for their smarts (they can open jars!), and most of their 130 million IQ-raising neurons are located not in their brains but along their eight tentacles. Researchers think this allows octopuses to become the ultimate multi-taskers, Katherine Harmon, who's got a book on octopi coming out soon, writes at Scientific American, since each of their arms can busily work away at some pesky mollusk shell or feel around in some new corner of habitat, nearly independent of the brain.

And these arms can continue reacting to stimuli even after they are no longer connected to the main brain; in fact, they remain responsive even after the octopus has been euthanized and the arms severed.

In one experiment, researchers chopped off euthanized octopuses' tentacles, chilled them in water for an hour, and then still managed to get a split-second response when they probed the severed limbs. Other research found that, when encountering a piece of food, a severed limb will snatch it up and try to move it in the direction of a phantom octopus mouth.

If an octopus' arm is cut off without the poor guy being euthanized, it's no sweat for the cephalopod. While cut-off limbs do not regrow a new octopus, à la starfish, the octopus can regenerate tentacles with a far superior quality than, say, a lizard's oftentimes gimpy replacement tail, Harmon writes.

To do this, octopus use a protein called protein acetylcholinesterase, or AChE. Humans have this protein, too, but our store of the molecule is much less active than an octopus'. Harmon describes what happens when an octopus loses its leg:

Within three days, some cascade of chemical signals cued the formation of a "knob," covered with undifferentiated cells, where the cut had been made. And further molecular signals were responsible for the "hook-like structure" that was visible at the end of the arm in the second week. Around that time, a mass of stem cells and a hefty amount of blood vessels have arrived at the site. Yet by day 28, these features disappeared. And for the next hundred days or so, the arm tip grew back in to resemble the original one.

AChE rose, peaked and dipped throughout this process, conducting a regrowth orchestra of tissues, nerves and structures until the arm was good as new. The ultimate hope, of course, is to harness the AChE trick for human limb regeneration, although that's still a distant vision. On the other hand, we probably don't want to start implanting neurons in our arms: imagine a severed human hand crawling across the floor, creating a real-life Addams Family moment.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Fish Mimics Fish-Mimicking Octopus
How an Octopus Eats

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Severed Octopus Arms Have a Mind of Their Own

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smithsonian.com Octopuses are renowned for their smarts (they can open jars!), and most of their 130 million IQ-raising neurons are located not in their brains but along their eight tentacles.