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I've seen Octopus using tools. I'm from south-west Australia (where these dolphins were observed) and grew up swimming along the coast, scuba and snorkelling t
by mmjaa 10y ago
I've seen Octopus using tools.
I'm from south-west Australia (where these dolphins were observed) and grew up swimming along the coast, scuba and snorkelling to much delight.
Once, in a little sand hole near Yanchep, I was floating around on a particularly hot day, when I thought I saw a crayfish just lolling around on the ocean floor. Diving deeper to get a closer look, I realised it was just the head of the crayfish, long-since hollowed out, albeit with a bit of flesh still onboard.
I took an even closer look, and what I thought was a bit of weed attached to it was actually a long, slender tentacle, which I followed back to a minuscule hole in the rocky sand, and therein I spotted the rest of the octopus.
Delighted, I stuck around for a while to watch.
The octopus was fishing! It held out the cray corpse just a little, out in the currents, waiting patiently for the stupid little white fish to come and try to nail a bite!
When a particularly dumb little fish got its fangs in, BAM! Out came another tentacle, fast as light, and snatched that dumb fish into the hole. All the while, the original bait tentacle continued to just lull about, swinging and swaying, getting those dumb fish even closer and closer, ever more tantalising.
I stayed and watched it all day - it apparently had a nearly-insatiable hunger, or maybe it was just really enjoying itself. To my dying days, I'll never forget that clever little cephalopod ..
- max_ 10y agoMay be zoologists have been underestimating the intelligence of mollusks
- macintux 10y agoWe've known for a while that octopuses are surprisingly intelligent. Great read: https://orionmagazine.org/article/deep-intellect/ https://orionmagazine.org/article/deep-intellect/ (tl;dr: don't eat octopus!)
- TuringTest 10y agoI was wary of eating octopus, but fell relieved now, knowing that dolphins also love them as delicatessen. :-P
- phpnode 10y agodelicacy - a delicatessen is somewhere you'd buy delicacies
- drumttocs8 10y agoIt's both...
- phpnode 10y agoNot in English as far as I'm aware.
- TuringTest 10y agoDunno, Merriam-Webster list it as both,[1] though from your comment I get that it is most commonly understood as the store. Thanks for the tip though, I was only aware of the food meaning. [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/delicatessen https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/delicatessen
- phpnode 10y agoPerhaps it depends where you are, Oxford English Dictionary only mentions the shop meaning.
- TuringTest 10y agoWeird! :-O This is what I get: 1: ready-to-eat food products (as cooked meats and prepared salads) 2: sing, pl delicatessens [delicatessen (store)] : a store where delicatessen are sold
- roywiggins 10y agoIt's fine as a modifier ("it's a delicatessen salad") but not on its own ("it's a delicatessen")
- personjerry 10y agoHaha, now my next deep learning project will be named octopus :P
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- TuringTest 10y agoI doubt that. There are huge batches experiments (performed by zoologists) experimenting the limits of octopus intelligence. Some have demonstrated that their tentacles have some limited brain power on their own, being able to perform some limited reasoning and problem-solving when isolated from the central brain.
- clort 10y ago> when isolated from the central brain. does that mean "cut off" ?
- TuringTest 10y agoNo, in the experiment I read about they forced the tentacles to go out of the water to reach some hidden area, which apparently somehow disconnects the tentacle sensitivity and reasoning from the "central unit".
- oh_sigh 10y agoI dunno...gastropods do seem pretty dumb. Cephalopods are where the money is at. Cuttlefish!
- semi-extrinsic 10y agoSpeaking of cuttlefish, there was a cool paper in Science last year about how they actually exploit chromatic aberration in the pupil to see colors - it's been an open problem for years in biology how cuttlefish can obviously react to color, yet their retina only has one type of cell so their vision should be monochromatic. http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/07/how-colorblind-cuttlefish-may-see-living-color http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/07/how-colorblind-cuttle...
- kkylin 10y agoHN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13084534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13084534
- bsder 10y agoOr perhaps we overestimate the intelligence of mammals.