> Jean Boal, a cephalopod researcher at Millersville University in Pennsylvania, reported feeding octopuses in a row of tanks with thawed squid, not an octopus’s favourite food. Returning to the first tank, Boal found that the octopus in it hadn’t eaten the squid, but was instead holding it out in its arm; watching Boal, it slowly made its way across the tank and shoved the squid down the drain.
awesome creatures
I've seen octopus twice in the wild, both times while snorkelling.. the first time, it was less than a metre from me and I turned to beckon to my companion only a couple of metres away. When I turned back, it had vanished! The second time, there was one near our anchor at Folegandros. We stayed for a few days and it was usually there, near a rock which it seemed to live under Was fairly deep (8-9m) there, and reasonably busy so perhaps it was just ignoring us up above.
I especially like that Octopus' have a large proportion of their neurons distributed along their arms, and that their arms are semi-autonomous.
But that also suggests that the neuron-count for Octopus' is lower that the total figure might suggest: they do not work in unison, and it takes a while longer for the synapses to communicate with each other than if they were in a single contiguous brain-ball.
Does anyone's brain "work in unison"? As far as I know, it's a bunch of subsystems all sending their signals to each other, and some higher-level network that makes 'sense' of the torrent of information and directs the attention to the various subsystems' outputs as needed.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 10.1 ms ] threadThere's a decent-length section in the book about octopus lifespan.
I read this review and immediately ordered the book. Just finished reading it. I learned a lot. Worth a read. Thought provoking.
awesome creatures
I've seen octopus twice in the wild, both times while snorkelling.. the first time, it was less than a metre from me and I turned to beckon to my companion only a couple of metres away. When I turned back, it had vanished! The second time, there was one near our anchor at Folegandros. We stayed for a few days and it was usually there, near a rock which it seemed to live under Was fairly deep (8-9m) there, and reasonably busy so perhaps it was just ignoring us up above.
But that also suggests that the neuron-count for Octopus' is lower that the total figure might suggest: they do not work in unison, and it takes a while longer for the synapses to communicate with each other than if they were in a single contiguous brain-ball.