Octopus

A recent news story about an almost-escaped octopus in Santa Monica caught my eye. The octopus managed to unscrew and disassemble the recycling system's valve above his tank, managing to flood the ground floor of the aquarium with 200 gallons of seawater. It's not the first such story I've read, either. Octopuses are known as escape artists. One named Sid managed to elude his keepers for five days at the Portobello aquarium in New Zealand. He was eventually discovered when a staff member spotted him in the middle of his escape run for the door. He had, quite cleverly, been hiding in the drain that supplied fresh seawater to the aquarium. Ten years earlier another octopus, this one named Harry Houdini after another escape artist, managed to escape his tank; they found him half way up a flight of stairs. The Portobello aquarium released Sid, thinking that he was likely ready to hunt for a mate; Cephalopods, as octopuses are known by biologists, only live briefly, mate, then die. Some species live only a year or so; others, like the giant Pacific Octopus may live four years. They are, however, much more serious about courtship rituals than previously thought.

There's a reason that octopuses are known as escape artists; they are extremely intelligent, able to solve problems, and have demonstrated short and long term memory, and an interest in play. Scientists have, for years, tested and studied the abilities of octopuses to successfully navigate mazes, learn visual and vocal cues, and remember solutions to previous problems, and even employ them to solve new, more complicated problems. Plus, an octopus, since it is a true invertebrate, can flatten and compress its body until it can escape through a one inch hole. I've embedded a video showing an adult octopus collapsing its body and slipping through just such a hole.

They also have amazing camouflage abilities, or at lest some species do. I've linked to a video here showing just how astonishing octopus camouflage is.

Dr. Jennifer Mather has been researching octopus intelligence for years. At a presentation at the TED conference earlier this month in Long Beach, CA, Dr. Mather noted that while standard definitions of intelligence are built around the ability to reason, understand, and learn, there are other factors worth considering as well; principally evidence of individual personality, play, and problem-solving. Mather talks about one particular octopus who discovered that she could play catch, using her siphon, with a water bottle Mather added to the tank; the octopus would use water from her siphon to push the bottle towards a water jet in the tank, which would then force the bottle back to her. Recently, Mather, a comparative psychologist, has been collaborating with Roland Anderson, a biologist at the Seattle Aquarium.

An octopus in a German aquarium learned to open up bottles with shrimp inside them. Five months old Frieda discovered that by pressing her body on the lid, and then gripping the sides with her arms, she could remove the lid, and consume the shrimp. The head of the aquarium, Frank Mueller, said that they demonstrated opening a bottle a few times, and Frieda managed to emulate them. Here's a video of an octopus doing something very similar; opening a jar with a crab inside.

Although they are first cousins to mollusks, Octopus have eyes that are remarkably similar to ours, and their eight arms are engineering masterpieces. They are made of a number of muscles;—in fact they are almost all muscle, and both incredibly strong, and incredibly flexible. What's more, each arm is essentially an extension of the octopus brain—each seems to have a separate neural processor, that executes orders from the central cerebral cortex. The cortex issues a basic order, but the sub-processor in the arm determines the method. It is, in other words, an example of distributed neural network.

Octopuses natural abilities are impressive; one of the more fascinating abilities some octopus species have, is that of camouflage. One technique involves masquerading as a rock—then slowly inching forward in a ploy to avoid danger. They are not, however, defenseless; witness this video of an octopus eating a shark. Nor are they the man-eating giants of popular myth. While there are very large octopus (The North Pacific Giant Octopus, or the Giant Pacific Octopus usually weigh approximately 33 pounds, with an arm length of as much as 14 ft.) they are not known for eating people. I should also not that the so-called Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus ("Octopus paxarbolis" (which means, not surprisingly, "Pacific tree octopus") is a charming but completely fictive hoax, created by 1998 by Lyle Zapato. According to Zapato, the Pacific Tree Octopus lives on both land and water, roosting in trees in the Olympic National Forest, and returning to the Hood Canal to lay eggs. The Pacific Tree octopus' natural predators include the Sasquatch.