Lusca Attacks

Frist they predict soccer matches. Now this!

Octopus on land.

Gotta love these guys....they've been scientifically proven to be adaptive learning creatures with significant intelligence and the capability to learn by empirical viewing.

Any creature that when it's trapped knows it's trapped and waits for an opportunity to escape rather than continue to struggle shows intelligence. This was done putting an octopus into continually smaller containers until it was impossible to escape without doing injury to itself. Genuine self-awareness.

And they're peaceful. Any human could handle an octopus fairly safely, if they allow themselves to be. Makes me look forward to their evolution or if we learn how to communicate with them.


S.

I love the little girl at the end who is like, "OK, are we done filming the stupid octopus walking on land? I wanna take a picture now!"

A long time ago, like the mid 70s when I was in 8th grade, I went on a school sponsored week long field trip to at the time the Bermuda Biological Station (now the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences or BIOS) to get exposed to marine biology. One of the things we did every day would be to go out, collect specimens, bring them back, study them (sketch, write up your observations) and release them back in a day or two.

One of our teachers snagged an octopus, main body no bigger than your fist, arm span of about two, two and half feet, for us to observe.

Now to do our work we had to remove the specimen from it's tank and put it in a smaller "fish bowl" for lack of a better description so we could bring it to our work area. Now it didn't object to the move to the much smaller tank however when I tried to put it back, well it had 6 more arms than I had and snagged the rim of the tank with a couple of it's tentacles. When I peeled them off would snag the rim with a couple of the ones I wasn't removing, rinse, repeat. It turned into a sitcom sketch.

I learned two things; one, they are stronger than they look and two, the main body feels like a bag of Jello. Now since I didn't want to hurt it by squeezing the body too hard it nearly escaped once it got four or five arms out of the tank, until a couple of my classmates helped getting ahead of it's tentacle deployment so we could get all of it back into it's tank and get the cover with blocks onto the tank.

Oh and by blocks I mean cinder blocks, three of them. Our teachers learned in previous years that an octopus of that size could shift the cover enough to escape when only two cinder blocks were used.

You do know, this is the beginning of the end.




I love you, Mom and Dad.

Well, the biggest thing that keeps octopi from advancing is that they have no grouping. And since they live alone, they have noone bringing them food.

See, after mating the mama octopus goes and makes a den and lays a bunch of eggs. Then the just sits there and protects the eggs. Yeah, it's a great show of maternal instinct. But by the time the eggs hatch, mama octopus has basically starved herself to death. At this point she dies. So, because nobody brought mama octopus food during this time, and since octopi don't have a group structure like orca, dolphins and such other sea animals, they cannot pass on what they learned to their offspring. Which means that each generation has to learn anew what is good and bad in the area around them.

So, until those most interesting animals can group together and start to teach their young, we have nothing to fear from an octopi invasion.

this presumes though that they dont pass information down genetically to the next generation.

Ive seen how smart these bloody things are myself. Had a seaworld trip once where they put an octopus into a maze which it got right on the first try, its reward was to trya nd figure out how to open a mason jar which it did in order to get at the shrimp inside it.

bloody thing beat the maze in under a minute, and took 3 minutes to figure out how to unscrew the mason jar lid for a shrimp lunch.

I for one, welcome our new ocean dwelling overlords.

They've been proven scientifically to be able to teach each other through observation with absolutely no familial relation. They had an experiment not dissimilar to the Seaworld experience where the object was to move through a series of spaces before opening a jar for food. The first octopus had worked out how to do so before, whilst the second was exposed to the environment for the first time and was not previously exposed to the other octopus.

It was shown (and is recorded on video) that the younger smaller octopus (seperated by a pane of glass) watches and studies the first octopus and then successfully replicates the actions taken. That is demonstrable learning behavior that doesn't rely on any genetic knowledge. Complex actions such as moving through the spaces and opening the jar aren't muscle memory actions, they're set to an organised form of thinking.

They can learn, and they don't need to be in social groups to do it. Individuals can show others how to do something, and so it goes.


S.

I knew there was a lot of evidence for how smart they were but I never knew they were willing or capable of crawling up out of the water and shuffling around like that on their own. Kind of cool and creepy at the same time.