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The Octopus Is Smart as Heck, But Why?
- 11thEarlOfMar 8y agoIn case you missed it, this out-of-the-water predatory behavior of an octopus is astounding to us mid-west folks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5fZu-1bt6Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5fZu-1bt6Y
- antonvs 8y agoI hope the octopus went after the cameraman after that.
- mynameishere 8y agoAnother vicious attack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZbLFXqhbQM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZbLFXqhbQM
- tozeur 8y agoOh dear.
- nikofeyn 8y agothis is something a certain species in Australia does, as covered in the bbc's the hunt. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebeNeQFUMa0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebeNeQFUMa0 it's fascinating. they also filmed this in blue planet ii. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoTk5WofgoE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoTk5WofgoE that clip unfortunately cuts off the first part where the shark caught the octopus, but the octopus put its arms in the sharks gills so it couldn't breathe and got away.
- Animats 8y agoOctopi are interesting in that they evolved along their own path. The octopus eye has the wiring on the back, where it belongs, instead of on the front blocking some of the light, as most other animals with eyes do.
- yorwba 8y agoThey apparently also don't require crossing wires connecting each eye with the opposite brain hemisphere. Instead, the optic lobes are directly behind the eyes: http://cephalove.blogspot.com/2010/06/view-of-octopus-brain.html http://cephalove.blogspot.com/2010/06/view-of-octopus-brain....
- adolph 8y agoAlso, their eye cells only detect black and white but they can probably “see” color by using non-circular pupils. https://news.berkeley.edu/2016/07/05/weird-pupils-let-octopuses-see-their-colorful-gardens/ https://news.berkeley.edu/2016/07/05/weird-pupils-let-octopu...
- weinzierl 8y agoThe article you linked also speculates on the main topic of this thread: > Intriguingly, using chromatic aberration to detect color is more computationally intensive than other types of color vision, such as our own, and likely requires a lot of brainpower, Stubbs said. This may explain, in part, why cephalopods are the most intelligent invertebrates on Earth.
- namlem 8y agoThe visual system was often cited by proponents of intelligent design as evidence of god. But the mammalian visual system is an absolute mess. Anyone who designed that would have been fired on the spot. The octopus visual system, on the other hand, is quite elegant and efficient. If there really were an intelligent designer, the implications would be worrying.
- blattimwind 8y agoCuriously the same applies to imaging sensors. They used to be inverse (front-illuminated), for process reasons, but everse (back-illuminated) sensors have better sensitivity and lower noise (but are harder to manufacture). A notable advantage of everse eye construction is the complete absence of a blind spot, which is where all the wiring passes through the sensor surface. (Image sensors never had that problem because they are connected at the edges).
- gcb0 8y agobecause how else they would pilot their flying saucers to earth? https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/octopus-aliens-scientists-theory-meteors-space-earth-cambrian-explosion-a8358631.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/octopus-aliens-sc...
- starbeast 8y agoWhat we see as an octopus is only a three dimensional slice of their true form, obviously. They are actually a physical manifestation of the monster group.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- mirimir 8y agoYes, and that accounts for the apparently short lifetime.
- clubm8 8y agoIf life (microbes, spores etc) can be carried on interstellar comets/asteriods, maybe the distinction between "alien" and "terrestrial" is an artificial human construction.
- DanielleMolloy 8y agoWhy the downvotes? The article refers to this paper from August this year: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0079610718300798 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S007961071... Signed by 33 authors and published in a peer-reviewed, seemingly established journal. Thanks for the pointer!
- kevinmchugh 8y agoThe signatories have very poor reputations and their argument is at conflict with most very basic facts about octopus biology
- pishpash 8y agoThe getting coconut shell part doesn't impress much. Even snails or hermit crabs know to find abandoned shells to hide in. Seems pretty natural for that class of animals.
- phil248 8y agoI imagine the difference is that hermit crabs are exhibiting a rote, inborn behavior that is universal among the species. Cephalopods apparently figure this stuff out on the fly.
- rectangletangle 8y agoThis, the octopus is choosing its shelter based of fluid reasoning, while the arthropods are doing it in a reflexive instinctual manner.
- pishpash 8y agoI honestly don't see where the distinction is. What do you call fluid reasoning? As the article says, cephalopods' ancestors used to have shells, like snails. Finding a replacement when it is available seems pretty instinctual to me, if only as a vestigial behavior.
- rectangletangle 8y agoDon't know why you're getting down votes, this is a reasonable question. For instance, if you have a container full of hermit crabs, shells, and other debris, nearly 100% of the crabs will adorn themselves with a shell, because of the instinctual drive to protect their carapace. While if you were to repeat the same exercise, but with octopuses instead of crabs, the octopuses will find shelter in many different and creative ways. Some will find crevasses, while others will wear a shell like their ancestors (though this isn't likely instinct, since ancient cephalopods grew their shells, instead of hunting for them). Some will even live in a shell, and then find a "door" to cover the entrance with. Combine with evidence of mechanical aptitude, from experiments where octupus are given food in locked containers, it's pretty clear they have a deep understanding of the world around them. For example you can give an octopus a meal in a threaded jar, and after some initial experimentation, they will reliably get to the food. The second time, it will immediately unthread the jar without experimentation, suggesting that it learned the "trick." Keep in mind, very few animals physically capable of opening a jar are actually smart enough to figure out how jars work, so this is very impressive. Another interesting example, wild octopuses favorite food is crab, they will seek out fisherman's crab traps in the wild, open the latch mechanism, then gorge themselves on all the trapped crab inside. They are the only animal I know of that will do this.
- tambourine_man 8y agoPerhaps more interestingly than why is how. Smarts are always useful but how do they manage with such diferente and disperse nervouse system.
- mirimir 8y agoYes, that is interesting. Their nervous systems are more like spiders than vertebrates.
- user982 8y agoNot that spiders sre necessarily unintelligent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portia_(spider)#Intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portia_(spider)#Intelligence
- mirimir 8y agoI didn't mean to imply that. Indeed, Portia! So if you love Portia, I recommend Peter Watts' Echopraxia and (for a full-length focus) Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time.
- finnh 8y agoDon’t forget A Deepness In The Sky!
- mirimir 8y agoWait. That has Portia? [digs up his copy] Edit: Doh. I last read that so long ago that I'd forgotten that they were large spider-like beings :) ... and yes, they hop, so maybe Portia. But I don't recall that Vinge ever says so.
- matt-snider 8y agoJust went hunting for a goodreads link to post the same, then found your comment. Really great book!
- stjohnswarts 8y agoI would like to keep one for a pet but they only live a few years. Been through that with a rat, won't do it again; even kits and pups only last 15 years or so. too soon
- user982 8y agoIf you want an intelligent pet that will likely outlive you, get a parrot.
- ams6110 8y agoActually, please don't. If you want a pet, adopt a dog or cat from the local shelter. At least they have been domesticated long enough that they are better off under human care. Don't keep an animal that had to be captured and removed from its natural habitat.
- foundart 8y agoYes and please don’t get a pet that will outlive you unless you are willing to make sure it is cared for after you die.
- ethbro 8y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hachik%C5%8D https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hachik%C5%8D
- SAI_Peregrinus 8y agoDon't get a wild-caught parrot. There are plenty of parrots that need new homes. Get one from a rescue. Or if that won't work (none close enough) get a captive bred bird. Also be very, very sure you can take care of the bird for the rest of your life, and will have someone that can take over when you die who the bird will already know and be friendly with. Birds are more work than dogs, they need a whole room in your house (at least) to be made safe to fly around in / shred things in, etc. Don't leave a parrot alone with anything you want intact. All that said they can be very friendly & great companions.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- mirimir 8y ago> But Why? Arguably, there is no "why". You could say that they're an evolutionary dead end. But that's just speculation.
- mensetmanusman 8y agoNot sure why you got down voted. The ‘why’ does prejudice a creator :) It also assumes free will in asking the quesiton.
- mirimir 8y agoI wasn't thinking about the question of a creator, per se. I was thinking generally about the fallacy of seeking intentionality in evolution. There is a point to analyzing what happened, of course. It's just that too much "why" is dangerous.
- otabdeveloper2 8y ago> It's just that too much "why" is dangerous. You're totally right. Asking questions and thinking about things might lead you to dangerous places. You might even (gasp) eventually start believing in God. That would be doubleplus ungood crimethink!
- icebraining 8y agoAh, but which one? You might start believing in the wrong god.
- mirimir 8y agoI'm a fundamentalist. To the extent that I consider the possibility of deities, it's the fundamental active/aggressive and passive/receptive principles that appeal most. Plus some casual animism, I guess. Although I've always been agnostic, experience with psychedelics has affected me. Plus, of course, all the fantasy and SF.
- 8y ago
- Shivetya 8y agoInteresting they say they are solo in this article yet we had articles posted here about nurseries found where hundreds were together https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18335536 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18335536
- kevinmchugh 8y agoThere's been a couple reports of this happening (I think I've heard of exactly 2) and only in the last few years. They live very solitary lives, even if they're occasionally alone together.
- wavefunction 8y agoA couple of reports in the past few years and then you extrapolate that backwards given that it's statistically unlikely to be a recent development and you've got a pretty remarkable situation of communal nurseries over millions of years.
- rland 8y agoOctopuses are really incredible creatures. They diverged from humans in the evolutionary tree hundreds of millions of years ago. Our common ancestor would have been a very dumb animal. Their brain structure is so different: 8 semi-autonomous tentacles, with one sort of central coordinating body. What could it possibly be like to experience the world that way? They're probably the "peak" of intelligence with the most prominence, along with humans and intelligent swarming insects like bees and termites. I think it's really interesting. Is is it really possible to measure this kind of intelligence? Can we ever know just how smart they are? And, of course, they're just interesting creatures regardless. Their bodies is flexible, yet strong, like one continuous muscle. Each tentacle has a slightly different "personality;" for a single octopus, some of its tentacles are more adventurous while others are more shy. They can change the color of their entire body, and do, for reasons we haven't figured out yet. They mate once, after which the female guards the egg cache without moving from the spot until she withers away. Everything I read about them absolutely floors me. They're the closest thing we have to an intelligent alien species.
- Latteland 8y agoI don't understand what the peak of intelligence means if that is termites, bees, humans? What about dolphins, dogs, not to mention chimpanzees, other great apes are likely smarter then them, but it will take some clever tests and clever categorization of intelligence to understand their sense.
- rland 8y agoThe prominence of the peak. Like how Denali is taller than the mountains around it, but Everest is still the tallest. We're quite close to dolphins and killer whales, so the essence of their intelligence is easier for us to understand, because they are more like us. Bees, termites, ants, etc. are really interesting because any individual is pretty stupid, but the entire swarm is complex and intelligent.
- arcticfox 8y agolocal maxima, in other words. Humans being the global maximum, on Earth at least.
- baddox 8y agoI’ve heard the same question asked about humans.
- hyperpallium 8y agoHow much of an impediment to technological progress would not have being able to tame fire have been? You probably don't need the warmth underwater, but cooking facilitates nutrient absorption ("exodigestion"?), wards off predators, post-sunset light, and (later) smithing, smelting, steam power etc.
- jlawson 8y agoI think the lack of thrown weapons would be more basic than fire. Maybe even held weapons for striking enemies. You can't swing a club underwater due to water resistance, and spears are hard to use well because you don't have feet planted to transmit the force, so you just go backwards if you try to stab something. Not to mention the lack of trees and branches with straight poles. Meanwhile stone tools and weapons are too heavy to carry. You'll sink. In fact every tool would either sink or float, and incur huge drag. Which makes tool use much harder overall.
- insulanus 8y agoYou could fire projectiles, like a blow gun. A poison-tipped dart could be made to work underwater.
- jlawson 8y agoDart will stop within a few centimeters due to water resistance (unless it is very long and dense, like a metal harpoon, but you can't make such a thing). Poison will dissolve and drift away within moments of applying to a projectile. Nothing to make the tube out of. You don't have lungs (water respiration doesn't work this way in any creature I know of), so you can't "blow" anything.
- pandaman 8y ago>You don't have lungs (water respiration doesn't work this way in any creature I know of), so you can't "blow" anything. You might have heard about mantle, an organ that distinguishes mollusks. Many of them use it to circulate water around the gills and some are so good with it that they can create a water jet and shoot it with such a force that they swim in the opposite direction.
- jaggednad 8y agoOne theory why primates evolved big brains is because they had hands. Big brains for an animal like a gazelle don’t pay off because, without hands, there isn’t much a gazelle can do with that big brain. Better it use that energy for bigger leg muscles. Primates evolves hands so they could better grasp branches, but, once they had hands, there was a lot more they could do with them, like make tools. A bigger brain for a creature with hands is an evolutionary advantage, because that bigger brain allows complex behaviors that can be carried out with hands. I bet octopuses are intelligent for a similar reason. Its body is like one big hand, and there are lots of complex behaviors it can carry out with those tentacles. Similar for its color changing skin. There are many complex and useful ways that skin can be used, so it pays to have a big brain. The important point is that the bodily appendages came first, and those appendages made it actually useful to have a big brain. I find it more surprising that dolphins became intelligent, but the article is right that living in groups capable of communication and cooperation can similarly make big brains pay off, because the animal can engage in complex group behaviors.
- adzm 8y agoDolphins are also very social creatures which certainly goes alongside their intelligence as an evolutionary pressure — especially with regards to their group hunting strategies, like humans and wolves.
- warent 8y agoWhen you're saying "Big brains" I assume you mean a higher level of cognition and awareness in some general sense, not a physically larger brain. First I think you're getting the cause/effect of evolution backwards. For example, primates did not evolve hands so they could better grasp branches, but rather they better grasp branches because they evolved hands and so had a higher rate of survival. So the question isn't so much "what causes complex intelligence" (your proposal being hands) but rather "why hasn't complex intelligence appeared for something like the gazelle family tree?" It's an interesting hypothesis to say that perhaps it's because they don't have hands, but there are innumerable other factors that could also be an influence, I doubt it comes down to a lack of hands. I'm not a biologist though so take what I'm saying here with a gigantic grain of salt.
- nine_k 8y agoThis is what a failed alien invasion / colonization attempt might look like. A succesful splashdown, reasonable adaptation to the local conditions — and a fatal flaw speeds up development enormously, bodies replicate and die long before their brains mature. The culture is lost, the invaders turned into animals doing primitive hunting.
- stewbrew 8y agoMaybe they came from a gas planet and they came to invade the deep sea because that's what home looks like. Unfortunately, these super intelligent beings failed to understand that, on Earth, most of the fun happens on land.
- Yetanfou 8y agoDoes it? For us, certainly, but put all land-life on a scales and all sea-life on the other side and it'd most certainly tip to the sea-side.
- stewbrew 8y agoYou're probably right if you look at the mere amount of bio mass. I'd wager you're wrong if you look at the complexity & general level of activity of life forms. Unless you find a way to efficiently get the oxygen out of the water and to deal with water pressure, I think most life forms are better off on land.
- Yetanfou 8y agoIt is easier to extract oxygen from water and there is plenty of it - notice the difference in size between a fish' gills and a mammal's lungs. Pressure is only a problem if you try to fight it, keep your body at the same pressure as the surrounding water and you're fine.
- caf 8y agoThis paper has some information: http://www.pnas.org/content/115/25/6506 http://www.pnas.org/content/115/25/6506 (see "The Distribution of Biomass Across Environments and Trophic Modes"). They divide biomass up into three environments, with 6 Gt C in "marine", 70 Gt C in "deep subsurface" and 470 Gt C in "terrestrial". You can also see in their analysis that the huge biomass bias towards the land is due to plants and fungi, which overwhelmingly favour the land; among animals there is actually more biomass in the oceans.
- steven2012 8y agoHow does an octopus know how to match its body with its background? All video I've seen have been with the octopus eyes up, it's not even looking at the background, so how does it know a) what the background color is, and 2) that its body is matching the background, since it's not looking at itself either.
- qwerty456127 8y agoLet me suggest a rather weird idea (I'm not really serious, but who knows...): perhaps they have evolved to this not from more primitive species but from less primitive actually. Even humans don't really need strong hardcover bodies and strong limbs any more as now we enclose our bodies in all kinds of environment suits, structures, and vehicles, all kinds of physical work can be automated, all we really need is a brain and perhaps we can evolve into some sort of cephalopods occasionally as some hundreds millions years (I'm not really sure about the order of magnitude) pass if we don't go extinct and we can also start loosing some intelligence once too. BTW this direction (to the point of a rather-primitive amphibia) of human evolution as been suggested in the 15th episode of the second season of the StarTrek:VoyagerTV show (an episode popularly named among the worst although I find it being one of the most intriguing). The Guild navigators from the David Lynch movie are another clue, who knows what this weirdly evolved kind of human species could evolve into to adapt when there is no spice any more...
- fegu 8y agoFor anyone looking for that movie, it is Dune. Worth the watch.
- deytempo 8y ago3 hearts...It sounds like cell from dragonball
- tim333 8y agoThere must be a lot of luck involved in getting the right DNA sequence to produce the right neural structures to get a smart creature. I mean lots of dedicated computer scientists are trying to hook up artificial neural networks to make them smart and are yet to get something with the general problem solving ability of an octopus I think. Maybe evolution only hits on a working sequence occasionally by chance and certain species get lucky such as octopuses, african greys and humans and others like cuttlefish, turkeys and cows were less lucky? I sometimes think the account of evolution of man you tend to get in popular science writing may have things backwards - it tend to be our ancestors got good at hunting which allowed us to evolve larger brains but I'd imagine it was quite likely that a random mutation made our ancestors smarter first, then there were behaviour changes then we evolved some superficial changes such as changes in size and shape of some parts.
- speedplane 8y agoIt's not luck, it's time. Evolution occurs so extraordinarily slowly, it's hard to comprehend. People are trying to create intelligence a million times faster than evolution did.
- tim333 8y agoWell that's the usual view but it's based on random mutations so there must be some luck involved. A change of the make this muscle a bit bigger type may involve the equivalent of one bit flipping and so happen all the time but the mechanisms of intelligence may involve a much harder sequence to come up with. It's hard enough to program neural networks using code and tensor flow. Imagine having to do it by giving the DNA code to make some proteins that then have to construct an intricate 100bn neurone brain for you.
- rwmj 8y agoEven a tiny bit of intelligence is useful if your competitors are all dumb. It starts from there.
- speedplane 8y ago
- bePoliteAlways 8y agoAnother interesting ted talk on human brain vs others: https://www.ted.com/talks/suzana_herculano_houzel_what_is_so_special_about_the_human_brain/transcript https://www.ted.com/talks/suzana_herculano_houzel_what_is_so... It talks about number of neuron and why cooked food helps us in giving the energy required for the large number of neurons. Also cooked food gives us free time to think. (edited for clarity)
- 95 8y agoThis scientific journal article suggests that "The evolution from squid to octopus is compatible with a suite of genes inserted by extraterrestrial viruses. An alternative extraterrestrial scenario discussed is that a population of cryopreserved octopus embryos soft-landed en mass from space 275 million years ago." https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0079610718300798 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S007961071...