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Octopuses Like to Punch Fish
- akudha 6y agoOctopus is a super interesting animal. There is a beautiful movie on Netflix called My Octopus Teacher, well worth your time.
- tcbawo 6y agoI was surprised to learn that as intelligent and resourceful as they are, common octopuses only live a couple years.
- axaxs 6y agoSame. But even more curious is that it's not as if they die of old age or anything typically...the parents both seem to commit suicide of sorts after having offspring. So that leaves the bigger question of why? Does reproduction doom them for death internally? Population control mechanism? Really interesting.
- mentalpiracy 6y agoIn some species at least, it’s not really suicide, more of an all-in reproductive strategy. In these species, a female will stop eating so that she can spend 100% of her life tending to the egg mass, protecting it from predators as well as using her arms to circulate water around the eggs for proper oxygenation (the mass is stationary, usually adhered to rock or an otherwise sheltered crevice). Unlike fish eggs, octopus eggs generally take several weeks to hatch once fertilized. Going this long without food basically starves the brood mother to death (or makes it exceedingly unlikely that she will be able to recuperate on her own). I realize you still could describe this as suicide with extra steps, per your comment.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago> octopus eggs generally take several weeks to hatch once fertilized. Going this long without food basically starves the brood mother to death Birds solve this problem by having the male bring food to the female.
- noisy_boy 6y agoOnly if they would stop eating the males; males sharing more caring attributes could have produced more offspring and furthered the trait
- elsonrodriguez 6y agoThere is a gland behind their eyes that helps kick off senescence as well. I vaguely remember that removing this gland increases life span.
- thaumasiotes 6y agoIt also prevents them from caring for their eggs.
- wahern 6y agoMost cephalopods and, I think, all octopoda are semelparous--they procreate once, and then usually die not longer after. I wonder if this is their Great Filter, preventing the emergence of more cooperative, social behaviors among themselves that could potentially put them on the path humans found themselves on. Certainly I think octopus and squid, along with covids and some other groups, show that intelligence is rather easy to come by so long as it's adaptive. Human-level intelligence is probably only adaptive given other factors that preceded leaps in our intelligence. For example, I bet nascent (but theretofore unseen) altruism and culture emerged and created an ecological environment into which our intelligence could profitably expand, after which the process probably accelerated and became more dynamic.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago> octopoda are semelparous--they procreate once, and then usually die not longer after. I wonder if this is their Great Filter, preventing the emergence of more cooperative, social behaviors among themselves that could potentially put them on the path humans found themselves on. The fact that they are solitary is a much, much bigger obstacle than the fact that they die quickly.
- wahern 6y agoRight, but my point is that the former might be a consequence of the latter.
- thaumasiotes 6y agoBees procreate and die immediately. (The males do.) They're social. The bees you see never procreate at all.
- PicassoCTs 6y agohttps://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180925140402.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180925140402.h...
- rishav_sharan 6y agoThere are two things holding back octopodes from world domination: their short lifespan and solitary nature. Both of which should be curable. If instead of curing cancer in mice every week, if we fixed these two issues in octopodes, we will probably have our own aliens in our oceans.
- faeyanpiraat 6y agoWhat could possibly go wrong?
- thaumasiotes 6y agohttps://www.goodreads.com/book/show/816440.War_with_the_Newts https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/816440.War_with_the_Newt...
- inglor_cz 6y agoSo nice to see a Czech SF classic mentioned here :-)
- rusanu 6y agohttps://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40376072-children-of-ruin https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40376072-children-of-rui...
- hardlianotion 6y agoYes, that's a good one. Always good to see a sci-fi author work hard on a different model of intelligence.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y agoAnd that's a good thing, because if they lived as long as we do and worked out how to get along with each other they'd be running the planet, and most likely farming us for food. They're really terrifyingly smart.
- riffraff 6y agothere is some pretty good sci-fi about intelligent octopuses[1], one of the coolest ideas is how a society might evolve in a way that reflects the animal's nervous system, i.e. more of a distributed thing than our centralized one. (Though one should put in the time to also read the novel of which this is a sequel, which is about intelligent spiders, and is also pretty nice.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Tchaikovsky#Children_of_Ruin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Tchaikovsky#Children_of...
- jgwil2 6y agoChildren of Time is awesome. I haven't read the sequel but the prospect of intelligent octopuses certainly whets the appetite.
- willis936 6y agoIt’s pretty hard to rule the land from the water. Even with all of our technological might, do you think we could wage war on an ocean-bound technologically advanced species? They have the same disadvantage. In all likelihood we would coexist.
- maxerickson 6y agoDo you get a technological society without air? Cooking and metallurgy are both pretty important, and we got them incrementally, starting from fire being pretty easy to do.
- willis936 6y agoI don’t have a good answer to “what does underwater technological progression look like?” I just want to point out that we are under a heavy survivorship bias. Just because we are where we are does not mean there aren’t other plausible histories.
- anonymfus 6y agoNot everybody thinks that this movie is beautiful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24788275 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24788275
- akudha 6y agoThat is valid criticism, for the most part. Thank you for the link.
- flanbiscuit 6y agoI've never heard of this youtuber but I'm really digging her videos. I'm now on my 4th video of hers. They are long and I cut out about half/quarter-way in but thoroughly enjoying her reviews.
- dmix 6y agoGizmodo is an ad riddled mess on mobile. Is there a better link for this? Edit: found two original sources, no good summary article yet though https://twitter.com/octoeduardo/status/1340076579108646913?s=21 https://twitter.com/octoeduardo/status/1340076579108646913?s... https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecy.3266 https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecy.... Edit 2: the original study PDF is only 8 pages and is an easy read; dunno the policy on linking to scihub here but here you go, I’ll delete if needed https://sci-hub.se/downloads/2020-12-19/fd/10.1002@ecy.3266.pdf https://sci-hub.se/downloads/2020-12-19/fd/10.1002@ecy.3266....
- baxtr 6y agoIt’s absurd how some pages can’t be consumed any more, because of the insane number of ads.
- JKCalhoun 6y agoDoubly absurd that they tend to be near the top when I "google" a thing as well.
- hobby-coder-guy 6y agoRead it, don’t eat it.
- semi-extrinsic 6y agoCheck out the supporting information on your second link, some very nice videos there, freely available.
- dmix 6y agoThanks I missed those the first go-around.
- LilBytes 6y agoIt's a lot better using a DNS based ad blocker but we still see large pieces of white space where ads should be.
- tictac0429 6y agooh.
- rembicilious 6y agoIf these videos are real-time and not slowed down, I think the word “punch” is a little hyperbolic. It’s more like a push or a nudge. Saying that “octopuses punch fish” makes it sound violent, but it doesn’t look like the octopus intends to harm the fish at all.
- 867-5309 6y agoagreed. they don't even have fists. it's more like a human involuntarily batting a fly out of its field of view
- tdy721 6y agoA chance to use the word Octopi squandered... punches fish
- agurk 6y agoI'm not sure if there is a deeper meaning in your comment I'm missing, but octopi, whilst being a word that people use, is strictly speaking wrong (in a prescriptive sense). Octopus is a 3rd declension noun in Latin coming from Greek. If one believes nouns should be pluralised according to their origin - which someone using the second declension latin -i plural would likely be - then it follows that one should say octopodes. [0] Of course this can be solved in a rational way by using the English plurals as they used in the article to both avoid unusual sounding words and technical incorrectness. [0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/octopus https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/octopus
- tdy721 6y agoToday I learned. The 3rd declension, sure; But right around the second one you lost me. Octopodes? That’s even cooler! this site is awesome. Your style of party poopin is why problems like me can’t stay away.
- graderjs 6y agoI heard of an octopus in a marine biology lab that was able to work out that the feeder was controlled by an app on the postdoc's phone, and the cephalopod was able to sneak the phone out of the postdocs pocket, unlock it, and activate the feeder, then place the phone back, multiple times before the postdocs wised up.
- slyfocks 6y agoAnd then everyone stood up and clapped.
- luma 6y agoThat sounds pretty fantastical. Any chance you have a source?
- webmobdev 6y agoI saw that in a cartoon.
- thatguy0900 6y agoThis doesn't even make sense. Even if it connected the phone and the food it also figured out how to navigate an unfamiliar operating system? A good portion of humans get stuck on that
- mattkrause 6y agoI can believe it’d learn to associate the phone with rewards—-and maybe try to grab it but the rest seems like a legend (how would it see the screen, which was presumably faced the human user). That said, I worked with a macaque that learned how to trip a treat dispenser by shorting it out. Took me and an EE nearly two days to figure out how he was doing it.
- mistersquid 6y agoKnocking at door Woman, alone, at door: Who’s there? Voice, behind door: Candygram…
- hackeraccount 6y ago
- joshxyz 6y agoDo we call it octopunch
- Finnucane 6y agoSure, who hasn’t wanted to punch a fish from time to time?
- goatherders 6y agoOctopuses are the best animal. Punching fish out of spite is hilarious.
- dade_ 6y agoThese videos may be out of context. Some fish behave perfectly nice while eating, but are obnoxious most other times. The person recording this may have never seen the fish before, but an octopus has incredible memory and may have a hate on for something it did before. They certainly remember humans.
- sitkack 6y agoSo you are saying that octopus wasn't just punch some fish, but it was punching Jeff, that guy that won't stop doing that one thing.
- cheaprentalyeti 6y agoAll octupi are bastards!
- makz 6y agoI’ve kept ornamental fish for many years and certainly octopuses are not fish but it looks to me that it’s only keeping others away from its territory like many fish do.
- dukeofdoom 6y agoThese punches are thrown to “prevent exploitation and ensure collaboration." Best quote from from the article. Reminded me of "The Three Stooges" The world would be a better place if you could slap a selfish idiot when they are doing something idiotic. Or maybe not.
- dghughes 6y agoThis is the best thing I've seen all year.