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I was surprised to learn that as intelligent and resourceful as they are, common octopuses only live a couple years.
by tcbawo 6y ago
I 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.