Tell me, O Octopus, I begspage 228: sophisticated...behaviours. See, for example, this film of an octopus holding a shark at bay while wrestling three zip ties of a baited canister at the same time.
Is those things arms, or is they legs?
I marvel at thee, Octopus;
If I were thou, I'd call me Us.
The spread of the tentacle – a limb-type with no Gothic or traditional precedents (in ‘Western’ aesthetics) – from a situation of near total absence in Euro-American teratoculture up to the nineteenth century, to one of being the default monstrous appendage of today, signals the epochal shift to a Weird culture.page 235: Clues about the potential future of our species. See a sixth sense.
This aspect of childhood is the very essence of magic, optimism, creativity, and open invention of self and the world. It is the heart of tenderness and connection between people, of continuity between generations, of trust, play and mutuality. It is the time in life when we learn to use our imaginations without the constraints of life lessons. The bad is more obvious, and includes bullying, voracious irritability, and selfishness.
To meet a [Humboldt] squid in the wild is one of life's great pleasures. They follow your movements with intelligent, saucer eyes. Their emotions are written on their skin in quick-fire colour changes that pulse and ripple in incandescent waves across their bodies. The Humboldt's uncertain temper adds a little frisson to any encounter. Divers have been roughed up by squid or had their masks or gear tugged. After the adrenalin rush has passed, most divers feel the animals were more curious than aggressive. If they had really wanted to hurt them, with their huge strength they could have done far worse.-- Callum Roberts in Ocean of Life: How Our Seas Are Changing. [1]
* Only recently did scientists discover squid can hear. Now they're getting a better idea of how well, and what the impacts of anthropogenic noise on them are likely be.
* Cuttlefish use polarised light to communicate.
Athena’s suckers felt like an alien’s kiss—at once a probe and a caress. Although an octopus can taste with all of its skin, in the suckers both taste and touch are exquisitely developed. Athena was tasting me and feeling me at once, knowing my skin, and possibly the blood and bone beneath, in a way I could never fathom.-- Sy Montgomery
We hypothesize that the shonisaurs were killed and carried to the site by an enormous Triassic cephalopod, a 'kraken,' with estimated length of approximately 30 m, twice that of the modern Colossal Squid-- from here.
This 'Triassic kraken' has not been found; no fossils, no remains at all, no evidence of its existence. It is postulated to have been large enough to hunt and kill ichthyosaurs, which is remarkable—comparison to modern giant squid is invalid, since they are prey, not predator.P.S. 11 Oct: Microecos has some fun, but Nature does not dismiss the idea out of hand.
-- Pharyngula notes findings that ammonoids exploded in diversity and radiated rapidly after the Permian extinction, when 'life nearly died' (see also NYT report).One speculative explanation for the secret of their success is the ability of some members of the cephalopod clade to survive in cold, nearly anoxic conditions, like Vampyroteuthis infernalis. They were able to rebound quickly because of their dismal metabolism and the general fecundity of cephalopods. They restored some ecological webs faster than previously thought and provided an environment for further growth of more severely crippled clades.
It just goes to show you that our current episode of global warming is a relatively minor event. Life will go on. Fast-living organisms with high metabolic demands like, say, humans, might suffer and die from the environmental consequences of a high CO2 atmosphere, but don't worry — the cephalopods will live on. They might even get a happy surge in numbers from the changes.
As I was kneeling next to this squid and watching the colours pulse across it coming in waves off any little motion the animal made (which felt a lot like watching an I Tunes visualizer of its thoughts or something like that!), the squid was doing at least a couple of really unbelievable things at once. Not only was it opening and closing its chromatophores -- the cells that are filled with an already made pigment and simply get turned on and off -- but it was also actively fabricating entirely new colours from scratch, and it was synchornizing the two things with each other.
-- from CreatureCast Episode 1 from Casey Dunn on Vimeo.
Hat tip Deep Sea News and Pharyngula
The difficulties of imagining an intelligent mollusk are embodied in octopus websites, many of which alternate stories of octopus intelligence with recipes for cooking the animal.-- writes Eugene Linden. And the point gets a laugh (although many people I know who have actually spent time with live cephalapods refuse to eat them).
When Baber was ten years old, his father took him hunting with a .22 rifle. "My daddy made me shoot a little squirrel", he says. "That poor thing was sitting there, looking at me, and just fell over. I didn't hunt after that".Baber found a lucrative niche making precision bomb springs at the height of the Vietnam War:
"Everything that came out of airplanes -- timing and detonators -- came from us", [Baber] recalls. "We built two hundred and eighty-five thousand bomb fuses a month, with four or five springs in each one.
It's not clear why the wonderpus has such distinctive markings in the first place. Biologists have mostly assumed that octopuses, being solitary animals, have little need for the ability to recognise other individuals and no one has properly tested whether they can do so. It's not unfeasible - octopuses are intelligent animals with decent memories and excellent eyesight.-- from How to tell Wonderpus Joe from Wonderpus Bob by Ed Yong
