I, For One, Welcome Our New Cephalopod Masters....

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

Mostly, I just want an excuse to post a brutally cool video:

Watch on YouTube

However, it does raise a few interesting questions -- the octopus under study doesn't merely make use of the coconut shell as a hermit crab uses another shell for shelter. The octopus actually selects shells, cleans them out and then carries them with them in anticipation of an abstract need for protection from a not yet present threat.

Pretty damned sophisticated behavior and likely learned recently rather than programmed into instinct.

So a few questions:

1) Is this definite indication of sentience and intelligence?
2) What IS intelligence in the sense that we use it to describe ourselves as unique animals?
3) Does the existence of an invertebrate that demonstrates problem solving intelligence complicate our general relationship with animals?

Amendment: Question 3A: Does the recognition of problem-solving intelligence that thinks abstractly about time and space in another species give additional creedence to the arguments of the animal rights movement?

And for the science fiction fans in the audience:

What are the chances that human beings may some day be "out evolved" by another species of animal?

Bonus question: Am I in big karmic trouble for my love of takoyaki?

Comments

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

I don't really see how they can prove yet that this isn't biologically adaptive behavior opposed to something it learned.

But don't worry, we're descended from apes, we'll go to war with an exterminate any animal that starts getting too smart long before it poses a threat.

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

I think the question is that they've never witnessed this behavior before, so if it is functioning off of instinct, it's the emergence of a new one.

Odds are this is learned which means some really smart ass octopus figured this out first.

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

Unless other information is given, I don't see how those assertions can be made.

Octopi have always hidden in crevices and cracks. They've always grabbed things randomly with their tentacles. You just don't see octopi around lightweight covers very often. The octopi looks like it did as they always do: try to climb into a dark hiding place, it just so happens this dark hiding place isn't attached to anything.

You know squid will take things out of pockets if they think it might be shiny or edible.

The thing is, I want to point out that I think the distinction between animals using tools and this behavior is not a very large one at all. I don't think it's actually as impressive an indicator as people try to make it out to be. All sorts of animals 'use tools', just in a much less sophisticated way than we'd notice.

The cat craps in a litterbox and rakes the sand, it's manipulating its environment for its own benefit with something artificial. Birds build nests as shelters, if they could figure out how to carry the nests around to shelter them while flying they probably would. They carry sticks around with the purpose of having protection at a later time.

I'm just not convinced that this is any more sophisticated behavior than normal octopi behavior without more information.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

We are not so much descended from chimpanzees as we are a close cousin to them. A close cousin that eradicated our closest relatives from existence which makes us the last of our genus and of our evolutionary lineage, for that matter. But still....we did not evolve from any living ape, the one we did evolve from has been extinct for at least 200,000 years.

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

I said apes, not chimpanzees. :P I didn't say living apes either.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Well, if you'd specified that you weren't referring to the living quadrumanal apes that would be a little more accurate.

/pedant hat off.

[sgiffy.livejournal.com]

One key arguement for it being learned is that the shells come from human settlements on the coast. The octopuses cannot open them by themselves and its unlikely that enough cracked ones would wind up in the sea to spur a biological adaptation.

That makes me think that they learned it. Now they may have some wiring to seek defense, but that does not make the whole thing instinctual any more a general desire for food makes any attempt to get that instinctual.

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

Yeah but the thing is, the octopus is using it in the way it learned to use any dark crevice. I mean if a bird happens to put a piece of twist tie in its nest, we don't say it's learned a new way of doing things, it just happened to find a different material, but it doesn't know it's a different material.

In the same way, the octopus is doing what it knows to do with anything that looks like that. It's not recognizing this as a new different thing and doing new and different things with it.

[sgiffy.livejournal.com]

Octopuses don't carry around dark crevices nor use two of them to make a ball. This is more analogous to a crow using a twist tie to grab something out of reach.

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen actual evidence that the octopi carries it around anymore than it pulls on it like it pulls on rock, this just happens to move.

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

No, the actual reports from the scientists and the videos definitely show the octopus carrying the coconut shell with it to use later.