Don't these people watch any movies? They should know that this kind of thing never turns out well in the end. Yes, as CNN reports, today the German scientists are only training octopuses to open jars of shrimp. But we already know what is going to happen in the third reel...
Posted by DeLong at February 26, 2003 11:07 AM | TrackBackCNN.com - Octopus gets in a twist over shrimp - Feb. 24, 2003: MUNICH, Germany (Reuters) --An octopus in a German zoo has learned to open jars of shrimp by watching zoo attendants perform the act underwater.
Frida, a five-month-old female octopus, opens the jars by pressing her body on the lid and grasping the sides with the suckers on her eight tentacles. With a succession of body twists she unscrews the lid.
"Depending on how tight the lid is, it takes her anything from 10 seconds to an hour to get it off," said Frank Mueller, head of the aquarium at the Hellabrunn Zoo. Frida opens shrimp jars before the public at feeding time twice a week.
Mueller said he taught Frida the trick after he remembered seeing octopuses showing remarkable dexterity off the coast of Morocco, where he went diving when he was younger. Frida was imported from Morocco.
"We just did it in the tank a few times and eventually she cottoned on," he said. "You won't see any other marine creatures do this. She's been at it about a month now."
yeah, you start by teaching an octopus to open jars and you end up teaching the Arab world to make the best of its oil... ;-)
Posted by: Jean-Philippe Stijns on February 26, 2003 11:13 AMthe third reel of a pr0n movie that is :D ba-da-dum!
Posted by: kenny on February 26, 2003 11:25 AMNow now. There are all sorts of instances of an octopus in an aquarium showing astonishing adaptation or learning ability. A truly remarkable and varied species. We really do need to attend carefully and with appreciation to animal behaviors.
Posted by: anne on February 26, 2003 11:31 AMDear Brad -
There is a wonderful PBS Nature feature on the Octopus. Watch an octupus crawl from an aquarium tank to a tank of crabs half a room away to lunch. Wonderful.
Anne
Posted by: anne on February 26, 2003 11:58 AMThis is a list of the estimated number of neurons in varios animal brains. Be very carefull what you teach those Octopi!
Octopus 250,000,000,000
Dolphin 110,000,000,000
Rob 100,000,000,000
Gorilla 35,000,000,000
Cat 2,000,000,000
Hamster 100,000,000
Goldfish 7,000,000
Ant 250,000
Worm (Nematode) 300
This is a list of the estimated number of neurons in varios animal brains. Be very carefull what you teach those Octopi!
Octopus 250,000,000,000
Dolphin 110,000,000,000
Rob 100,000,000,000
Gorilla 35,000,000,000
Cat 2,000,000,000
Hamster 100,000,000
Goldfish 7,000,000
Ant 250,000
Worm (Nematode) 300
How many do humans have?
"Rob" is a human in that list...
But I thought octopuses had only 300,000,000 neurons--not 300,000,000,000? (I could, however, be wrong. In which case, let me say that I, for one, am glad to be among the very first to welcome our Invertebrate Overlords...)
Posted by: Brad DeLong on February 26, 2003 04:44 PMOh, great! Another secret leaked to the Penguin-Octupus Alliance!
Posted by: RonK, Seattle on February 26, 2003 04:50 PMOctupi and squid are molluscs like clams. There's quite a range of behavior and intelligence in that order (family, whatever), ranging from virtually none of either to quite a lot of both.
Most of what I know is about squid, but much will be true of octopi.
They have the fastest reflexes of any animate being -- their nerves are thicker which supposedly the key variable. The squid eye is formed comparably to the mammalian eye, without descent from a common ancestor. To me this is evidence for Stuart Kaufmann's idea that evolving species "find" possibilities that are there in nature relatively easily to be found, rather than constructing them bit by bit by a long series of random mutations.
Their problem-solving abilities have been known for a long time. It has also been said that they have a malicious sense of humor.
The ink secreted by an octopus does not blind the predator, but distracts it by seeming to be the octopus moving in one direction while the octupus is really moving very quickly by jet propulsion in the other direction.
The giant squid exists and nobody really knows much about it.
When I was married my wife and I agreed that squid and octopi resembled genitalia, but we could not agree as to whether they were male or female genitalia. This is not really a fact about the squid and octopi, however.
Posted by: zizka on February 26, 2003 05:53 PMBig deal. Can it open a bottle of cocktail sauce and put toothpicks in the shrimp?
There's a squid on the mantlepiece
Posted by: Melcher on February 26, 2003 07:30 PMIntelligent octopi? Can they outhit Barry Bonds?
Posted by: Dan on February 26, 2003 08:42 PMThis is kind of a pedantic point, but the plural of "octopus" is not "octopi". The plural in Latin is just "octopus"; in English one normally sees "octopuses." (But I have no idea what the accepted plural among marine biologists is. Perhaps they use "octopi," which I suppose would legitimate the form.)
I'm currently reading Terry Pratchett's "The Science of Discworld", which is actually a pop-science exposition of the history of the earth (and a very good one, Pratchett is a superb writer)
One of the things mentioned in it is thing called a mantis shrimp that can be trained to open boxes with food inside.
Posted by: Alan Little on February 26, 2003 11:38 PMLab Safety Tip #34: Never put an octopus on your head. It might try to unscrew it.
Posted by: Jon H on February 27, 2003 01:26 PMThis story may be apocryphal, but it is said that once there was an experiment that caused an octopus in captivity to be shocked by an experimenter outside the pool in which resided said Octopus. And after the third shock for pushing the wrong button the Octopus climbed out of the tank and squirted the researcher.
Posted by: Ian Welsh on March 1, 2003 07:21 AM