Transcript 6 | Octopuses and Intelligent Aliens from Space, What? with Jennifer Mather
Kate Armstrong
Okay, so welcome again to another Interspecies Conversations lecture. It's my pleasure to be here hosting another session. My name is Kate Armstrong and I'm the head of programming for Interspecies Internet. So the Interspecies Internet, for those of you who don't know, is a think tank looking at the different diversities, forms and functions of communications in other species. So this lecture series and conversation series is a forum in which we aim to showcase emerging ideas and new discoveries and host open discussions where you as the community can also join the conversation with ideas and feedback. So today we're going to hear from a very interesting and provocative lecture title which I think brought many of you here, which is Octopuses as Intelligent Aliens from space what? By Dr. Jennifer Mather. So we will hear from our lecture for about 30 minutes and then we'll have a Q and A. So if everybody can keep their questions until the end, that would be fantastic. And then we will moderate the Q and A through just using the hands up button here in Zoom. And if you can keep your mics closed during the session, that way we can get a clear. A clear lecture. Okay, so I'm going to hand it over, sorry, to our chair, Diana Reiss, who will introduce our lecturer and then we will start the session. So over to you, Diana.
Diana Reiss
Thank you so much, Kate. And I just like to welcome everybody again to this conversation today. And I'm just delighted that we have our next speaker with us. She asks the question, she's been asking the question, what's in the mind of an octopus? This is a question that Dr. Jennifer Mather has been interested in investigating for the past 40 years by studying the behavior and the intelligence of cephalopods. Jennifer is a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada where she received the Distinguished Teacher Award for Excellence in Teaching from Lethbridge. And I can tell you she's an incredibly dedicated teacher and the university's Ingrid Speaker Medal for research and or scholarship. Jennifer's published numerous and pioneering articles on cephalopod behavior and intelligence and is regarded as one of the prime authorities on ethics and welfare with regards to cephalopods. Her research has investigated squid reproductive and anti predator strategies, squid skin patterns and displays, cognition and behavior of cephalopods. Again, when I say cephalopods, it refers to octopus, squid and cuttlefish. She's conducted most of her studies in the cephalopods natural behavior. As Jennifer has mentioned to me on a number of occasions, she has really good taste in where she does these species, the field work with her students. She's done her work in field sites such as Hawaii, Bermuda and Bonaire in the Caribbean. Not bad, Jennifer. But Jennifer's also worked in lab and aquarium settings with Dr. Roland Anderson at the Seattle Aquarium. There they conducted pioneering work on octopus cognitive abilities and intelligence that focused on octopus personality, octopus play behavior, for example. Also looking at manipulative abilities to open glass jars for food inside side. Many of us have heard of those studies and their abilities to penetrate mollusk shells. And she's also been currently trying to understand how they control their arms. I also want to mention that Jennifer's been very concerned about octopus welfare and ethics. I mean not just welfare, but cephalopod welfare and ethics and has written several really impactful articles in journals on octopus and cognition and welfare that's had a real effect on raising awareness and concern about the welfare of these species. And she's co-editor of a volume on invertebrate welfare in Springer's Animal Welfare series.
Finally, Jennifer's written and theorized for so long now on the nature of octopus consciousness, intelligence, perception. Her background is also in perception. And we'll be speaking today not so much about her specific studies, but we'll have hopefully time at the end to ask questions about the specifics of her own research. But she's going to be giving a more theoretical and philosophical talk today, as we can see reflected in her title. So Jennifer is, I'm honestly thrilled because I'm currently doing a collaborative work with Jennifer and my colleague Marcello Magnasco at the Rockefeller University. We've just embarked on a collaborative project. Perhaps Jennifer will talk about that as well. But I can honestly say in having worked with Jennifer these past years, she is truly my octopus teacher. So with no further ado, Jennifer Mather.
[Evolutionaty Evidence of Cephalopods]
Jennifer Mather
Thanks, Diana. Kate, do you want to start the PowerPoint? I probably should start by explaining a little bit of why I'm tackling this topic because actually what happened is someone from the Canadian Astronomical Society asked me if I would do a zoom presentation at their annual conference, which was a month or two ago, and they had this title, octopuses Intelligent Aliens from Space. Now, well, it's true that I know a lot about octopuses. I really hadn't thought of what it meant to say, well, they're intelligent aliens from space. I'd heard some rumblings about this, but I put them down to “its social media”. Believe me, people in social media can think of pretty well anything. I happily said, yes, I'll look into it and I'll look at the evidence and I'll see what I can find. Kate, can you give me the next slide? What I found first startled me a little bit because I discovered that it wasn't just social media babbling. There was in fact a paper in progress and biology, physics and molecular biology and 33 authors. Now, they believe that somehow or other viruses came down from space and caused the Cambrian explosion. But along the way, they had a minor suggestion which is down there at the bottom of the slide. They believe that cryo preserved squid and octopus eggs arrived in icy boulder days. I think that's the equivalent of a comet. Now, I always thought that comets simply burned up in their entry to the Earth's atmosphere. And it didn't make sense to me that this would be what happened. But I thought, okay, so there's the challenge. This is what they say happened. It's a very, very unlikely event. If it were an unlikely event, it should be buttressed by very good evidence. So I thought, okay, for this presentation, I'll look at the evidence. Start with looking at whether they have enough evidence on their side to back up this assumption. So, Kate, next slide. Basically, their evidence is four pieces. First of all, somehow or other they believe that evolution should have gone from nautiluses to the coleoids are cephalopods, who are squid, cuttlefish and octopuses. The second thing they said is there's no particularly available fossil record of this transition. So this is one of the reasons I suggested that they came from space, because we can't find any sort of intermediates. The third reason they suggested was that monocephalopods, the colloids, can alter their RNA, which is something they can do apparently fairly easily and which is unusual in the animal kingdom. And the fourth reason was that octopuses are smart, as if somehow they shouldn't be smart. Next slide. Well, taking number one, they've got the wrong evolutionary route. If you look at the modern and if you look at genetic evidence from the modern animals, you find. Well, no, actually we all would knew all along their nautiluses aren't their ancestor. You could see that in the first line across. But it turns out that they did not evolve through squid to cuttlefish to octopuses. In fact, the octopuses are a fairly separate group from the squid and the cuttlefish. So they have their phylogeny wrong. Now, that doesn't mean that their idea is wrong, but it does cause pause. Next.
Now their next, and probably their most obvious argument was that there's no evidence of the evolution from the nautiloids and actually the belemnoids and the ammonoids, all of whom had these big external shells to the coleoids, who have either a tiny little internal shell or no shell at all. So they said, look, we found all this fossil evidence for these animals, and then we didn't find any fossil evidence. And then we have these animals. And the answer is really a very simple one: shell-less fossils, and if you have an animal without shells, you're not going to find very much evidence of the fossil record because the flesh decays, goes away, and you don't have the evidence. But it's not that there has been no transition, but rather that we have no evidence of it because it's a transition without of shells. So this is a really easy one to answer. Next.
The next argument is an interesting one, but it doesn't make much sense. It is fascinating to realize, and we're still trying to understand exactly what this means in terms of physiology, that coleoids can edit not their DNA, but their RNA. They can make small adjustments to their immediate environment that are nonetheless not transmitted to their offspring. Now, this is a fascinating thing to do, and it should make it easier for these animals to adapt to their micro environment. But there's no evidence that it's absolutely exclusive to the coleoids. In fact, it sometimes, but not much, happens to other animals. Besides, if you say, well, gee, these animals can do something that we mammals can't do, therefore they come from space, then you'd really end up with an awful lot of animals coming from space, because there's a great array of invertebrates, all of whom can specialize in one thing or another so that one doesn't hold. Next.
And then there's the idea that octopuses are smart and so they must have come from space because they're not us. One of the reasons you see this is that for the last couple of decades, science generally has espoused the idea that high intelligence comes with high social organization. So that rather than looking at intelligence as the result of adaptation to the external environment, an ecological theory, in fact, they argue that the social environment, who you live with, who you communicate with, all these nuances that we know that social animals have to do, these are the background for high intelligence. And, of course, the high intelligence is therefore found in mammals, particularly in primates, and we have the highest development of this lifestyle and intelligence. The argument has been that the pressure to solve social and not ecological problems is what leads to high intelligence. In fact, if you look phylogenetically, it works quite nicely with the primates. It also works fairly nicely with the cetaceans, which Diana could tell you about. And in fact, it's not the great big groups of cetaceans, it's the smaller 10, 20 or so, very socially organized, embedded in their social group. These are the ones that had developed the high intelligence. So the idea has come from this, that intelligence comes from animals with sociality, big brains, long life and parental care. This, of course, is the package in which the primates are highest. There has been a lot of research in this very idea of what I've called mind reading, because it doesn't really work to talk about it any other way, which is to say that figuring out what the other individual is thinking. And so there have been a lot of research looking at how we would tell that that was going on. So the reason, I would guess, is that octopuses are considered to be from somewhere else, is that they don't have this social intelligence. And they don't. They are not social. They're pretty well all solitary. I would say. They don't like each other. This is the biggest basis I can see for this particular from space hypothesis, and it doesn't work very well. Next slide.
Now, one of the problems that we're working at with this is that we're really anthropocentric. We are really focused on ourselves as the center of the universe. This is. Yes, Tim, I do mean theory of mind. Yes, this is based in Western society. And it really goes all the way back to Aristotle, who talked about the evolution of man. And he talked about the scala naturae, which you can see as sort of an ascent to goodness and intelligence. With, of course, the shellfish, which I guess is where the octopuses would be slaughtered. About halfway up this evolutionary scale that moved to monkeys and then to Homo sapiens and then to angels. Notice, this is Northern European theoretical background. So, for instance, if you look at the Plains Indians background, how they felt about animals, they did not feel that there was any sort of ascent to goodness for humans, but that every animal was complete in itself, was its own specialist, and it was important for its own living and important in the whole web of things, which sounds very ecological to me. But I would argue that this approach that Aristotle gave, even though we completely know it's wrong, it's still behind a lot of our thinking. So you look at Christian thinking, which of course picked it up and said that man has dominion over the Earth. And you can move through today, Carte if you want. One of the earlier philosophers, and he believed that animals were just automata, you could do anything you like to them because they didn't have souls and we had souls. So we humans were superior and should be the ones that were considered. And if you look at it, the social hypothesis fits quite nicely with our western assumptions of our dominance. Of course science is founded on facts and science believes in going out and looking at facts and having hypotheses supported by facts. But the assumptions kind of creepy and even behind and underneath it, and they're very hard to get rid of. Next slide.
Because when it comes right down to it, this is what the evolution looks like. And notice we're over there with the chordates at the far left. The cephalopods would be with the mollusks. It is true, you can tell from this that we are not related to the cephalopods, we're not related to octopuses. You have to go back to primitive flatworms to find a common ancestor. So clearly the intelligence has evolved separately. Next, Kate.
[Octopus Intelligence and Problem-Solving]
Okay, are octopuses intelligent? Definitely. I would think actually that the intelligence that they have comes from living in a complex and changing environment. And we find two different behavior sets in the natural world that help, that probably push them to have to cope with this to use their brains. And one is a great flexibility of anti predator tactics and another is a fairly flexible way of finding and consuming prey items. But they're mostly generalists. The second reason that we say octopuses are definitely intelligent is anytime we look for it, except perhaps social learning, we find that all the different kinds of learning have been mastered by octopuses in the lab. But past learning we also find that they're doing some very interesting manipulative things. They actually use water as a tool. They have the large muscular mantle which they use essentially for expansion, for inhaling and for contraction, for exhaling. The water exhales through a flexible muscular funnel. This funnel can aim. So the octopus have kind of like if you think about it, primarily the circulation is used for respiration and excretion. Secondarily it's used for jet propulsion. But tertiarily it's used for the octopus for a whole bunch of different things. So they use it to move sand and small pebbles and interesting things around the landscape to clean out a home so that they can hide in it. They use it to not particularly effectively repel scavenging fish usually, and I suppose we could call this fourthly, they tend to use it to aim at things that are I would describe as annoying them. And my favorite one for this is an anecdote from the Seattle Aquarium. They had a giant Pacific octopus, and the animal is nocturnal, so it likes to have dark at night. And this one individual had a light over its tank, and it was on 24 hours a day, of course, so the night people could see what was going on and make sure everything was working okay. And the octopus, for some reason or other, didn't like that. So it reached up out of the water, took a deep breath, and aimed a jet of water at light and shorted it out. And then it had darkness. Thank you. Works fine. But something I have discovered from watching the animals in the field, as well as studying them in the lab, is that they want to explore. They have, remember, these eight arms with suckers all down the length, so they can manipulate pretty well anything they like, any way they like, but they spend a lot of time exploring. This is something I've been thinking about recently, which is when you think about an animal living in its environment, solving problems, there are really two parts to it. There's exploration, which is figuring out what's out there, and it's exploitation, which is acting on the basis of the knowledge that you've gained. And the octopus has spent a lot of time in exploration, though it turns out that if we look at other animals, they also do. It's just that we've kind of. We haven't been able to see the reward for it. And so we haven't really understood how important exploration is anyway. So the list of things that octopuses can accomplish should make you see, yes, they're intelligent. Next slide, Kate.
But does that mean they're really a different model of intelligence? How does it stack up against what we were thinking about for the mammals? Mammals have big brains. Well, it turns out by mammalian standards, octopuses actually have very big brains. And we tend to think of the frontal cortex or its analogs in mammals as being a control center. And it turns out that the octopus also has the vertical lobe, which is the control and coordination center. But in terms of a different model, we have to say no. Mammals live 10, 20, 50, maybe 100 years. And octopuses in general live about six months to a year. The giant Pacific octopus might live two to four, but that's the longest. We tend to think of gathering information from the environment as being something that we used for years and years and years. So think of the elephant matriarch, who knows where to find water when there's an extreme drought. Okay, but that's not what we've got with octopuses. And of course, they are not social. Most of the species that we know of actually are solitary. There are a few that we know enough about that seem to be less solitary. And let's face it, you're not going to get a lot of social cooperation if there's cannibalism. And I've sometimes described the octopus as having casual cannibalism. They don't deliberately go out to eat one another. But if there's a big octopus and there's a smaller one, maybe, that certainly doesn't promote cooperation. Now, interestingly enough, if they're going to be a model of intelligence, probably their neural system should be not the same as ours. And there are interesting ways in which they are indeed different from us. The one important one, I think is they have far less centralized control. Three fifths of their neurons are out in all those eight arms. Next.
[Evolution of Octopus Intelligence]
Now, I probably have a little bit of time to spend on this. The way in which they differ from mammals has a lot to do with less centralization of control. So the brain is definitely the seat for much sensory processing, learning, and for motor commands. But there's not as much command area to the arms as there is for, say, Homo sapiens, okay? And along these arms there is a series of ganglia. So they have dorsal nerve cord, but it's actually dorsal series of ganglia. I think it's probably a couple of hundred per arm. One of each of these ganglia is situated above a sucker and is the control center for a sucker. Now, the ganglia have to be fair about this. There's a lot of control in the ganglia. The ganglia have neurons for motor control for the sucker and for the area around themselves, but they also have sensory neurons. So they have tactile and chemical sensory neurons which are picking up information from the suckers. And the result of this is, for instance, that if you were to be unethical and chop an arm off an octopus, the arm could actually move down a moist surface because it wouldn't work on a dry surface. The arm could exert motor control and the suckers could pick things up. I've never seen this, but apparently someone says that if you offer a separated arm a piece of food at the tip, that it will actually pass the food from sucker to sucker towards the mouth that isn't there. So there's a very great deal of local motor control, but not a brain. I get this out of social media. Makes my skin crawl. There is not a brain in the arm. A good way to look at it is the very complex subroutines. Also, I should mention for a while, the idea was being posited that the brain didn't know what the arms are doing. And the answer is, no, that's not true. The brain does know what the arms are doing. On the other hand, it leaves a lot of lower level decision making to the arms, to the ganglia. I think of it in terms of subroutines and in some ways might be a useful routine better than we have because they leave a lot of lower level processing to the arms themselves. Now, we tend, when we're thinking of ourselves, to believe that the brain actually has a lot more control than it does, because it turns out the spinal cord, in addition to relaying information, also has some interneurons and there's a lot of reflex adjustment that we do in the spinal cord. And one tiny little thing to think about is imagine that you are going to stand on one foot. Before you do that, you adjust your expectations and your input for balance. And when you walk, you're keeping your balance all the time. You don't think about it until you hurt a foot and then suddenly go, oops, I can't do things properly anymore. It's not true that we don't have any peripheral control, but it's certainly true that the octopus has much more peripheral control. The other thing that I could talk about forever and I won't be able to is that the octopus and the squid and the cuttlefish have this fantastic skin display system. They don't have color vision, but they can adjust color to camouflage against their background. And we don't know how they can do it, and we wish we could, okay? But this complex system doesn't seem to be getting feedback via the eyes. It seems to be open loop. The octopus simply looks like what it wants it to have to look like and goes about its business. We don't know enough about that monitoring and we don't know enough about how the animal decides what it's doing in terms of appearance. And we really would like to, but it's very easy to say, well, we know what we look like. Now, I want to mention just for a minute that this is one of the reasons that the octopus has failed the mirror test. Because of course, the mirror test says if I have a spot on the skin and I can see it, but presumably not feel it, then I know that this is me because I'm monitoring myself visually. The octopus fails the neurotrans because it doesn't monitor itself visually. In fact, I think Graziano Fiorito just had a small preliminary study where he looked at whether the octopus could monitor a spot on the skin. It turned out that it could, but it also turned out that it could just fine without vision. When I participated in the study several years ago with Claudio Carrera, we found that when they see a mirror, the octopus knows there's something going on there, and it may indeed mistake what it sees in the mirror for a conspecific, which is what a lot of animals do, but it doesn't see the image in the mirror as itself. We have to realize that the octopus nervous system and control system is not as centralized as the mammalian one. We have to realize that even though the eyes of the octopus and the higher mammals are a beautiful example of convergent evolution in their structure, they're not used and vision is not used in exactly the same way. It's perfectly reasonable that it shouldn't be. But we have a tendency to believe that the way that we encounter the world is the way that other animals encounter the world. And we have to prove differently before we really see that. Kate, next slide.
Okay, so if they evolved on Earth, why did the octopus evolve intelligence? I think it's basically because they lost the lost the shell. So they are a mollusk. Mollusks are equipped with shells. The octopus has a couple of teeny little remnants in the middle of the mantle, but it essentially doesn't have a shell. Living in the marine near shore, they're living in a complex and a changing environment. And intelligence is clearly one way to cope with. You don't know what's coming next, but you better figure out fast. And I should say, by the way, that the coral reef where we find octopuses is the most complex environment in the Earth. People say, well, the rainforest is the more complex environment. It's the most complex land environment, but it's nowhere near as complicated as the coral reef. But the octopus has given up protection. Mostly. They have no repellent chemical, Metasepia does, but that's pretty well the only one. They have no shell, they have no spines, they have no automatic way to keep predators away except their brains. Now, when they evolved the cold yards, the bony fishes were in fact undergoing an explosive development, I guess you could call it. And the bony fishes now are rivals in the ocean. In fact, the bony fishes to some extent dominate the ocean. So the evolutionary pressure of this environment, plus these predators, plus not having any other way to repel these predators is probably what pushed the coleoids cephalopods to their present life history and their present high intelligence. Next slide.
Okay, so if we decide, yes, the octopuses have high intelligence, this high intelligence does not have any evolutionary route that is in any way come from anything that are mammalian intelligence. Does that mean we can decide what extraterrestrial intelligence might look like by saying, oh, we don't just have to think about the mammals, we can think about the octopuses too? Maybe.
I have the suspicion that we've evolved on Earth, the octopuses evolved on Earth, and that we have an awful lot in common. Even though the model looks somewhat different, still got the same big brains, still got the same complex nervous system, still got the similar ecology to adapt to. I suspect that if we find extraterrestrial intelligence, it'll be really, really, really different. So, so different that it'll be hard for us to actually grasp what it's like. But what I think is important about realizing that this is a separately involved, complex intelligence on the same planet as us, that we can stop saying the social intelligence hypothesis is the only explanation. We have to say, no, it's not. And if we free ourselves from saying, okay, social intelligence is not the be all and the end all, then we can say, oh, okay, so there's this other model. Well, are there any others? And since we have had the tendency to dismiss intelligence in other animals, and since we don't really know much about most of the invertebrates, it's difficult to tell. And it will mostly be things that we will find in the future. One of the things that I have begun to think about is the social insects. We have tended to dismiss the insects as being just automata, but it turns out that many of the behaviors, many of the capacities that we take for granted in the mammals and that we also find in the cephalopods are developed to some extent in the social insects. Yes, they have routines, but if you think of it this way, we do too. We have language, and the bees have language, the bee dances. But obviously we evolved with different capacities behind it. And it's been interesting to look at some of the research in social insects, particularly bees, because they turn out to have quite a bit of learning capacity, quite a bit of intelligence. And so I think what realizing that we see intelligence in the quality of cephalopods is going to do for us is it is going to free us to be able to say, well, okay, let's look at the social insect. What kind of model will they make? And how will looking for many different models of the evolution of intelligence help us to understand the capacity itself. Next slide. Kate.
[Comparative Intelligence Among Species]
I like this octopus as a thinker now, when I was doing this for the Astronomical Society, I thought, boy, I should look for some, some animals that really look different. So I went down and got a bunch from animals from the deep sea, just so I could say, look, there really are animals there on the planet that were completely, utterly different from us. And I had fun doing this and I put a couple of these up. I think the one at the top left is a crustacean larvae. One on the bottom left is surely a snidery, and it's related to the jellyfish. The two on the top right are fish. And the one on the bottom right, by the way, is a hollow flurry. And it's a sea cucumber. Boy, it doesn't look anything like the sea cucumbers I'm used to, because it actually floats in the open ocean. There's a huge array of animals out there for us to look at, the different capacities of which, of course, intelligence is only one of them. And I think as the decades come along, we'll look more at other animals and we will be fascinated in the kinds of things that we discover. So thank you, and I'd be happy to take questions.
Kate Armstrong
Fantastic. Thank you very much. I see lots of hands clapping there. I think everybody is very, very pleased to have had that, that very provocative question answered. I think we're very, very interesting. Any questions coming from the audience we can. To start us off, there are a few comments. Steve, hello.
Steve Crocker
Thank you. Boy, this is intriguing. I'm not a biologist, so what I'm going to say may be way off the mark, but the comet, about three fifths of the neurons, I guess, caught my attention. I don't know what the numbers are precisely for the humans, but there's a huge amount of the brain real estate, so to speak, that's devoted to hand eye coordination and muscle control and so forth. My naive understanding of it is that it amounts to a huge table lookup mechanism. That's where the table is filled in by coordination and experience. It strikes me as more similar than different to the situation that you're describing with the cephalopods. It's just the placement of that real estate. And down in the arms, instead of, you know, the lower part of the brain in the head is maybe less important rather than more important. And so I'd be inclined to say maybe there's more similarity instead of less.
Jennifer Mather
Well, it's interesting to think about, you know, when you said hand eye coordination. I don't think the octopus knows what that means. It's working. And I should say, by the way, that there's also suprabrachial tract running around the base of the arms. So you can get coordination between arm and arm without for sure having to get the brain to control it. One of the things that we made a lot of fuss about, I guess, 10, 15 years ago was finding out that the area of the brain that controls visual recognition is not the area of our brain that controls these kind of hand, eye coordination, motor adjustments. And it's true that in our human brain there are several different areas which are devoted to using visual information and controlling it for different tasks. But it looks as if for the octopus, this lower level coordination really isn't in the brain. You're right. We just don't have a brainstem. It doesn't have a brainstem that does that. The arms themselves do that in some ways. It would be very efficient. It would be nice to be able to say to my hand, okay, go pick up that coffee mug, swing over to the sink, dump it and put it back empty on the counter. If you could just say, oh, arm, I want to get rid of the coffee. Just do it. It's just a different system.
Jennifer Mather
Someone else had a question.
Kate Armstrong
Ken, go ahead.
We don't hear you yet. If you on mute.
Ken Rinaldo
Yes, thank you very much. My apologies for coming into your talk a little bit late. So. So perhaps this is something you've already covered, but I'm particularly interested in human intelligence in its relation to the microbiome. And I'm curious if there was any discussion about the bacteriological spaces of the octopus in relation to intelligence and its microbiome itself.
Jennifer Mather
That's a fascinating question.
Ken Rinaldo
Thank you.
Jennifer Mather
And I would say that we don't know very much about the octopus's microbiome. Now, one of the reasons we don't know much about parasites and octopuses is they have such lovely dexterity. So if a parasite comes along and tries to inhabit the octopus, it'll just pick it up and throw it away because it has such good control of anything that's going on with the arms. As far as I know, we have not understood the microbiome as doing control of specific actions. It's more a kind of a tonic control, long term levels of motivation. Okay, so it's not the same kind of control that you get if you're talking about the octopus, us in the arm. We tend to ignore these kinds of things. With humans, we tend to pretend that the microbiome doesn't actually influence our long term processing. I think we've been very good at trying to understand short term motor control and short term processing, and we're not very good yet in exploring the long term. Does that help somewhat Modulation, let's call it not control.
Jennifer Mather
Someone else had a hand up.
Kate Armstrong
Steve, did you have another question? I just see you're unmuted, maybe?
Jennifer Mather
No, no, no.
Kate Armstrong
Okay, no problem. Anybody? Anybody else with a question? If not I actually have a question. Oh yes, Diana, go ahead.
Jennifer Mather
You could go first.
Diana Reiss
Kate, go ahead.
Kate Armstrong
I actually was going to ask you. I was very intrigued at the start when you discussed the fact that you and Jennifer were going were embarking on some research together. And I was actually intrigued about what that is. If you can talk at all about it or any of the other research that you're getting into. I don't know if you can talk about it.
Jennifer Mather
Do you want to do it, Diana, or shall I?
Diana Reiss
I think you should.
[Interactive Environments for Octopuses]
Jennifer Mather
Okay. In the Interspecies Internet, you are particularly interested, of course, in whether we can communicate with the animals, but also how animals can control their environment. Diana got in touch with me and said, do you think we could devise something so that octopuses could control their environment? I said, duck soup. That's what they do all the time. They have all these eight arms and they completely manipulate and manage the environment around them with these arms. Then we started thinking about how could we do this in the lab. I've actually come up with a design of something called ‘The Wall’. Because when an octopus is exploring the landscape for food in particular, it often doesn't use vision. Now you won't see that in the research in the lab. And it's very frustrating to me because people bring octopuses into the lab and they drop crabs into the tank and of course the crabs. The octopus sees the crab and grabs it. But if you look at what's happening in the natural environment, they go out. And again, you have to have been, say a skin diver snorkeler or a scuba diver to know. But if you go out in the marine environment, everything's in hiding. There's a reason for that, because there's a guild of fishes that are scavenging and predating and that will get anything that's out in the open. The result is, if you're looking for animals, especially in the rocky environment, you have to look in niches underneath rocks, in places that you can't immediately see them. What the Octopus does when it goes hunting is it simply extends its arms into all these places. It hunts by chemical and tactile feeling around the landscape. Diana it would be great fun and no problem to set up a wall in the octopus's tank and to have different holes in the wall so that the animal could penetrate into these to set up some kind of system so that the animal could simply stick an arm in and it would indicate that the arm had been put in there and something would happen. Maybe some food would be delivered, maybe there would be an opportunity to do something else. It's kind of modeled on the way that Diana had the dolphins interacting with the wall. Except you used vision for that, right, Diana?
Diana Reiss
Yes, vision and acoustics. Vision and. Yeah, sound and vision.
Jennifer Mather
But the octopus would use chemical and tactile sensing. It would be really easy. We would like to get to the point that we would say, well, it would be easy to say, you have an array of nine different holes. So we could easily train an octopus to stick one of them. The question would be, could we? And I think we probably could train them to stick in number one and number three and number eight, for instance, at once and not get a reward until it did all three again. And there's some evidence in cuttlefish that they can learn what and where and when to do something to get a reward. So I think we could probably say, well, they could probably learn to stick an arm in number one, at which point they could stick an arm in number three, and then after that they put a say in number nine and get a reward. Then they should be able to solve the problem of manipulating the environment sequentially and also spatially. I don't know if that's easy to imagine.
Diana Reiss
I think one of the fascinating aspects of this is asking the question beyond that, what happens when we give them choice and control over a system? It's always, I think, fascinating to step back a bit and find the appropriate interface. I think it's one of the things we've been talking about within Interspecies of finding toolkits, interfaces for different species. I think Jennifer brings a very different perspective, as we can see, to this issue. I'm really excited about this prospect. And we have a new octopus lab at Rockefeller University now. Marcelo Magnasco is our other collab is our collaborator who has the lab itself. So hopefully we'll have more to report in the future. Jennifer, we're just getting started.
Jennifer Mather
Yes, but it's also true, it's so hard for us because we are so visual. So it's hard for us to conceive of animals that use other senses predominantly. And I think that's one of the big problems we've had with invertebrates in general, that we don't understand what could be called the animals umwelt the sensory and motor world, but particularly the sensory world of the animals. And Diana, this must be true as well for dolphins, is it not, that vision isn't particularly important?
Diana Reiss
Well, I think we've underestimated their visual capabilities. There were many studies done back in, I shouldn't say many, some done in the 60s where they did show the ability to learn visual problems and be able to solve problems when it was just based on vision. But because they live in this environment where obviously acoustics is important when they're separated for keeping the animals together. And they're often in environments where they can't see each other. And they have really large, complex acoustic areas of their brain. So they're superb at acoustic processing. I think we underestimate sometimes their visual abilities. We just have some new data that we're actually presenting this week at the Marine Mammal Conference on vision in dolphins and visual laterality. I think sometimes we tend to underestimate lots of animals a lot based on our own biases, too.
Jennifer Mather
Yes, it's hard to pick up our own biases and see them as biases and throw them out. I think the reason it's easier for me is an octopus just doesn't look anything like me. I can't pretend that I should know how it works by knowing how I work, because it's clearly so tremendously different.
Diana Reiss
I just was going to say something along that line.
Jennifer Mather
I'll just mention this. I've recently been reading a book by Lucy Cook with a thoroughly provocative title, Bitch, which is actually looking at Darwin's preconception of male dominance in terms of evolutionary theory. She points out very clearly that he was a product of his time and his place, Victorian England, when it was presumed that males were dominant over females, period. Women were just passive. And she goes through a great deal of evidence of how this simply isn't the case in the animal kingdom. She talks about communication and she talks about matriarchs and social organization. And she talks about the extent to which, for instance, lemurs, female lemurs, completely dominate males. And she talks to about other kinds of situations, like we presume that the chimpanzees are our close ancestor and therefore we are like them, but the bonobo is just as close to us ancestrally. And the bonobo a good way to put it is they make love, not war. And so the kind of social organization and the kind of male dominance that we assume based on these preconceptions are not true. Ken, you're nodding. Have you read the book?
It's just recently out, and I got to review it for the Library Journal Choice. But I do recommend it because I think that one of the things that stands in our way of understanding exactly how the animals work is our preconception of how they ought to work.
Yes, go ahead.
Ken Rinaldo
Thank you. Yeah. Another question. I thought I heard you say that you felt that with the use of the chromatophores in the body, which are fascinating, you know, fascinating abilities to manipulate color, that the octopus wasn't looking with its eye in order to know how to camouflage itself. I've seen, you know, whatever, an octopus in front of moving grasses, and the shimmering of those grasses will appear over the octopus's body, which is extraordinary, of course, when you see the actual mechanism of the chromatophores. But I'm particularly curious about the cuttlefish in relation to that because I've heard that sometimes very small male cuttlefish in particular will signal to other larger or to a female cuttlefish that it's a female, but they're also signaling to the male that they're a female, but in fact, they're a male. That's basically because of their very small size. They will convince the male that they're a female using their signaling abilities and then sort of quickly go in and mate and then leave before, I guess, they're somewhat beat up by the bigger cuttlefish male.
Jennifer Mather
Okay. There's two parts to this.
Ken Rinaldo
I'm sorry.
Jennifer Mather
And you actually have them slightly separate. Okay. The first is that definitely it's true if they're in a mating aggregation, a small male cuttlefish may assume the color pattern of a female so that the larger male who may be guarding the female, will not challenge him and he will be able to mate with the female. That's one of them. The other thing, which in some ways I think is much more interesting and which I encountered when I was studying the Caribbean reef squid, is that they can assume. Assume one pattern with one half of their body, and they can assume another pattern with the other half.
Ken Rinaldo
Yeah.
Jennifer Mather
They can talk out of both sides of their mouth at once.
Ken Rinaldo
Yes. Amazing.
Jennifer Mather
I think it's wonderful. I can't do it. But in fact, I saw situations where an animal, a male, would be guarding a female. Okay. And he would be giving a display pattern to the female, which was sexual at the same time that he was doing a display pattern on the other side to another squid, which was agonistic. We don't know how they do it. We can't do that. Yeah.
Ken Rinaldo
Especially given that isn't a cuttlefish's life maybe only six months long or something?
Jennifer Mather
It's about six months, a year, maybe a year and a half. It is just as short as the octopuses.
Ken Rinaldo
Yeah. So it's hard to.
Jennifer Mather
I love this ability. I'm glad you brought it up. Absolutely love it. Imagine being able to signal two different things with different sides of your body completely separately. Two different motivational bases. I absolutely love it. I wish I could do it.
Kate Armstrong
Jennifer, we have another question that is in that I was sent in the chat, so I'm going to read it out to you. Okay. It's about when you were discussing play and this viewer has seen you discuss play before in another one of your videos. And you talked about how octopuses play when they are bored. How do octopuses like to play? And what are we learning or what could we learn from this that most interests you?
Jennifer Mather
Okay. When we picked, we actually, Ronald and I set up a particular situation in the lab where we were hoping to find motor play. Okay. You can't find social play in an animal that isn't social. That's easy. Okay. And we set up a situation where there was. This has always been one of my favorite studies because its total cost was zero. I like that. We had a floating pill bottle in the aquarium with the octopus. And it turned out that accidentally the octopus was at one end of the aquarium and the water inflow was at the other. There wasn't a strong inflow, but there was a current for window from the known octopus end to the octopus end. And what happened is this pill bottle would come floating gently down along the length of the aquarium towards the octopus. And they went through a series. We gave them, I think, 10 trials. And on the first trial or two, they simply grabbed the bottle and brought it to their mouth and tasted it and chewed at it and let it go. And gradually they habituated and they left it alone. Two of the eight animals, I think it was by the sort of the fifth of the sixth trial, they shot a jet of water at the bottle, sent it towards the inflow, where it returned to them and they shot another jet of water. Now, play should be repetition of fragments of behavior. And you wouldn't count it for one or two. I think one of them did 12 and another did eight. So it was clearly the case that they were repeating a behavior that was giving them results. And by about the seventh or eighth trial, they quit that, too. So this is a case where, as you would see in a mammal that's playing, initially there's investigation, and then the animal forgets about it. And then they figure out, as someone said, you move from exploration to play. If you move from what does this item do? To what can I do with this item? I suspect my graduate student actually looked at it in terms of moving objects from arm to arm or extending an object and then pulling it back in. There have been anecdotal reports of a floating object with an octopus that pulls it down to the bottom of the tank and lets it go. So it floats back up and then it pulls it back down again. I suspect they don't do that very much because you're not likely to play unless you're safe. And so I'm not sure that octopuses ever feel safe in their normal environment. One thing I have, actually, I think I've said, and I may have said in print, is that I think that if you wanted to know the fundamentals of octopus life, I think they have to balance curiosity and fear. Curiosity trying to figure out what's around the environment and what they can do with it, and fear having to watch out at whatever it is that wants to eat you, including, some of the time, your own species. So I'm not sure that we would have a lot of play in the natural environment, but that they have the capacity for play when we bring it into the lab is very interesting. Did I answer that okay? It was hard to tell.
[Octopus sensitivity to sound]
Diana Reiss
Kate. I just had a quick. I'm just noticing a question by Tom Thomas. Tom, about another sensory system. Maybe we could squeeze this one in. It says, is there any evidence that octopuses respond to sound or vibrations thereof, such as those made by fish? We haven't actually talked about acoustics with them.
Jennifer Mather
I got to think about that.
What we have to realize, by the way, we have to look at it as sound is mechano, okay? Hearing is mechanical reception. Okay? So we have, of course, elaborate adaptations in our inner ear. When we moved, when our ancestors, our long distant ancestors, moved from the water to land, we had to elaborately adapt the ear to pick up vibrations. Water is a very good medium for transmitting vibrations.
Sure, the octopus receives them, but we don't know of any special receptive system that does receive them. This is not true, by the way, in the squid. The squid actually has a set of receptors down the side of the mantle, which has been described as an analog to the lateral line of fish. And in fact, it is very, very sensitive to vibrations in the water, which makes an awful lot of sense because it's off in the open ocean and that's it's surrounded by the water. So they can apparently, I think they can sense a deviation of something like 1cm at 1 meter, which is pretty good. I wouldn't be surprised to find that the dolphins are better. But I don't know and I'd love to hear it. Diana, how good are the dolphins?
Diana Reiss
I'm sorry, I was designing an experiment to test acoustics in the octopus. As you were talking. I just lost that part. It just seemed like that was an open question and we could do that pretty easily. I'm sorry, could you just repeat that last part?
Jennifer Mather
Well, the squid are very sensitive to vibrations. They have this lateral line analog and the fish are very sensitive to vibrations. The dolphins have a slightly more difficult problem because they have this thick skin. And so their perception of vibration has to be perceived through a specialized system, correct?
Diana Reiss
Yeah, they have a incredibly sensitive auditory system and they receive sound in different parts of their body. They have internal ears, they don't have external ears. So they'll send sound out through the melon, the bulbous part of their head, but they receive it in their jaw. They even receive sound. Their areas behind their pectoral fins, they've shown areas of sensitivity, but they have an extraordinarily wide frequency range that they receive sound through way outside of our systems. They hear ultrasonically, even as high as up to 250 kHz. So, no, they have a beautifully sensitive system.
Jennifer Mather
Yes. I mean evolutionary, it makes extremely good sense to say that an animal that lives in the open ocean, whether it's the dolphin, whether it's the squid, whether it's say, a fish like a tuna, they must depend on mechanoreception. And the thing with the dolphin is it's had to develop these special, you see, that we forget. But the dolphin came back from land, so it had to readapt the hearing system for it to be efficient in.
Diana Reiss
Water and using this acoustics to navigate, they've developed this exquisite biosonar system, as have bats, you know, for air, but they also have that. So, yeah, they're pretty extraordinary in that respect. Jen, I just real quick. No one's tested sound perception in the octopus.
Jennifer Mather
I don't think so. You see, they have very, extremely good tactile perception in the suckers and around the mouth. And I have no doubt that they pick up water movement on all their skin surface. But it's more likely to be a general perception. By the way, they have a balance system which is the equivalent of our semicircular canals.
But I used to teach human perception, which makes it easier for me to see this from the sort of the cross species viewpoint. So they all these things are mechanical deformation. And in many animals, and most animals, I would guess, there are different loci for perception of different kinds of mechanical deformation. It gets complicated. But the fish and the squid in fact have this lateral line analog and they're very, very good at picking up water movement. I suspect octopuses are, but it's not so important to them.
Kate Armstrong
We have a question from Sonja and Sonia. You also have your hand up. Did you want to ask the question? That way we can.
Jennifer Mather
What's interesting about the pulse of water to push the bottle away is that we found that it wasn't so much repetitions. It was six to eight trials. And they did ignore it. On the other hand, that's a very, very simple situation. If we set up a situation such that an octopus could play with different things in its environment and that when it did play things changed, then I think we would see a much more complex reaction. So in a way, you see in the lab, we set up very, very simplistic situations because we're asking a very, very specific thing. But Diana, that would be a nice challenge for us. When we had the wall, could we figure out some way in which an octopus played with an item such that the situation changed around it? Would it then play differently? Octopuses are very good at taking things apart, by the way. Unfortunately, they can't put them back together.
Kate Armstrong
Oh, go ahead.
Jennifer Mather
Could we find something to do with the wall that would involve play?
Diana Reiss
Yeah, I think that's one of the things we had discussed even giving them puzzle boxes so they get contingencies that are somehow rewarding for them. That's the challenge of trying to figure out what's going to be sufficiently rewarding for them so they may continue to use it again. It's a means of control. We develop a self reinforcing system for them.
Jennifer Mather
Yes, because people have provided octopuses in the lab with what you might call puzzle boxes. Recall, there's one octopus specialist who said that he spent half a day designing one of these things where you do this and this and this and this and put a little bit of food in the middle. And it took two days to make it and it gave it to the octopus and it solved it in two minutes. But it kept manipulating it after it got the food reward. It was clear that manipulation itself is rewarding to the octopus, which is very interesting.
Ken Rinaldo
Has anybody ever tried scanning an octopus's body and, or brain with any form of FMRI during any of these tasks?
Jennifer Mather
Not as far as I know and it would be very interesting. Recording from an octopus's brain turns out to have two practical problems. Practical problem number one is that with these manipulative arms, if they don't want something in their body, they'll pick it up and throw it off.
They have different, they've been able to put different kinds of receivers inside the mantle cavity. It turns out that doesn't seem to be quite so repulsive. The other problem we have is that octopuses have voluntary control of the blood flow. So if you stick something into the brain, the octopus receives information that that part of the brain is damaged and it chokes off the blood flow to that part of the brain. So you've got about another couple of minutes of recording before that part of the brain dies and you don't have it anymore. They also, by the way, can shoot jets of water at experimenters who are doing things they don't like or pieces of lab equipment. This is not very popular with people with complex electronic lab equipment. If the octopus is going to shoot a jet of water and short it out, score one for the octopus.
Kate Armstrong
In the interest of time. So we're 15 minutes past the hour, but I do think there are a couple more, more questions that are burning to be asked. So if Jennifer, if you don't mind, could we, could we have a few more minutes of your time to ask a few more questions?
Jennifer Mather
How about if I answer Sonia’s last question?
Kate Armstrong
Yeah, Sonia. And then we have a really. Ali had an interesting discussion to bring up about some. Or maybe this is also a self indulgent question because it's about the octopus cities discovered off the coast of Australia. So maybe we can ask that one after as well.
Jennifer Mather
Well, I, I can answer Sonia's question quite quickly.
Kate Armstrong
Okay, go ahead.
Jennifer Mather
Which is that we do not fully understand the problem of how the octopus and the cuttlefish camouflage themselves in the natural environment without possibly, we don't know for sure, any visual feedback. Okay, that helps. Sonia?
Jennifer Mather
So Kate, what was the question that you were asking?
Diana Reiss
The question that I was interested in was the octopus being interested in an object caught in a water jet. And I wonder if you could manipulate water jets so that you could get some kind of an interaction with an octopus and then not just until they were bored or until they had experienced.
You know, experienced it to the to a point where they stopped, but on subsequent occasions because for it to be play, it seems to me you would have to have not just a repeated action until they're bored, but a repeated action that is taken up at a later time and done again and again. In other words, where the animal is engaged on multiple occasions in multi level repetition.
Jennifer Mather
So actually I can't just having. I think it would be perfectly reasonable to say that the octopus could learn to manipulate objects on a board by aiming jets of water at it. Yeah, I just think they'd be better with their arms.
Diana Reiss
Okay, I totally defer to you, Jennifer. You're the expert.
Jennifer Mather
Well, they could do it. I just. As I said, I think they're so good with the arms that we can start with what they're really good at and secondarily we can get to something that they're not so good at. Kate, you had a question, something about Australia?
Kate Armstrong
Yes, Ally, did you want to read the question or make this provocation?
Jennifer Mather
Sure.
Ally Bisshop
No, it wasn't. Yeah, it was really just around these underwater octopus cities that were discovered, I think off Nelson Bay. And I think they gave them lovely names like Octopolis and Atlantis. And I mean, I think obviously to call them cities is taking a bit of liberty there. But I think it's interesting just given that, you know, how primarily asocial creatures, you know, whether it's environmental pressures or other, can find ways to live in close proximity. I don't know whether we can call them social arrangements, but how that shifts and what sort of impact that has on behavior and perhaps even intelligence. I know that also with spiders, for instance, that there is another very solitary creature. I know that there were, for instance, observations in lab environments where these solitary spiders, being forced to live together in close proximity because of the laboratory, began to tolerate each other's presence more and the behavior shifted a little. So I wonder if you had any thoughts about that with regard to the octopus cities.
Jennifer Mather
Yes, I reviewed one paper that they put out and I am in the process of reviewing another paper. So I'm well aware of the information. It looks to me from all the information that I've been able to gather, that octopuses need shelter. Literally, if they have no place to hide, they will die. What this Octopolis ended up being is the only shelter for some distance around. It attracted octopuses, from what I can see, they tolerate one another, but they don't like one another. They will… And there is absolutely no such thing as cooperation. They're still very individualistic. I haven't seen any competition, interestingly enough, the kind of behavior that they show to one another is very tentative and very simple. So they kind of reach an arm out or they'll generate a red color, which we assume, but we don't know for sure, is a mark of dominance. So it's a very simplistic interaction. I think what we're looking at is exactly the kind of thing, as you said, that happens when we crowd them in the lab, which is that they tolerate one another, they don't like one another. It's kind of like it would be for us if we were all crowded into a small waiting room at the airport and we had to tolerate one one another and the plane was late and everybody was getting irritated and we get by nonetheless. It's an interesting situation, but I think it showed. Well, actually, to be fair, I have a paper in 1980, ages and ages ago, on pygmy octopuses. I can find them in a 1 meter square tank. And the pygmy octopus is about 15 to 20 grams. So they were tiny. And what they did is they set up a dominance hierarchy. And if you look in the literature, you find that animals that are presumed to be solitary, when you crowd them, this is generally what they do. They set up a dominance hierarchy. So if you put them in an abnormal situation, they cope, but they don't show any signs of liking it. Does that help, Ellie?
Ally Bisshop
Yeah, that's very helpful, thank you. And I'm interested in now searching out that paper on pygmy octopuses from 1980.
Jennifer Mather
Sure. You can always email me and I'll send you anything you like. I've got quite a few papers.
Ally Bisshop
wonderful, thank you, I'll do that.
Jennifer Mather
Good. I look forward to hearing from you.
Kate Armstrong
Excellent. I think we have time for just one more question. And I wanted to just bring one because I'm also quite curious about this. Another self indulgent question. This one is about the lifespan being so short. So Muller asked this. Why is the life. Why is the lifespan so short and why the mother dies after giving birth? Their intelligence would be superior if they could transmit their knowledge.
Jennifer Mather
It's simply an alternate reproductive strategy from their competitors. And if you think of it this way, the bony fishes grow over a long period, do not mature until say 6, 8, 10, years of life. Okay. During that time the octopus can have raised, given birth to and let out in the landscape three or four generations. So it's a good evolutionary strategy to coping with the changing environment. Whereas the Fisher strategy of living for a long time and reproducing later on is good for living in a stable environment. So it's just a different way of passing on your genes. Does that make sense?
Kate Armstrong
Indeed it certainly does. Thank you very much. I think this has been really eye opening. I don't know if there's any, you know, final thoughts that you wanted to give before we, before we close off, Jennifer.
Jennifer Mather
How about pay attention to the invertebrates?
Kate Armstrong
This is a great message. I think it's, I think it's very, very interesting, especially inside our context in which we are speaking about, you know, the interspecies or the potential of the interspecies world. And that indeed is, what is it, 90 something percent, 99% of the animals.
Jennifer Mather
On the planet and such wonderful array. They do a fascinating bunch of things and we're just beginning to learn about them.
Kate Armstrong
Fantastic. And if anyone does have any papers, as we were talking about before, or any links that they find fascinating about invertebrates or indeed the octopus, you can always share them in the Slack group that we have. So Mark's very kindly shared that in, in the chat here you can go into interspecies.io Slack group and you can join there and you can kind of continue the discussion but also share interesting things that you find. And we always like to share upcoming events which we do have. So I would like to let you know that we will be taking a holiday in August because this is obviously one of those sleepy, sleepy moments of the year. We all go under the rock with the octopus. And then in September we will be having a special event on 21st September in collaboration with some of our long term partners, including Fluent Pet. So we will be doing a online event that's going to be looking at interfaces between humans and their pets and then looking at the data coming from this and what we can do with that by visualizations and other and other things. So we'll be releasing some information about that in the next week or so before we go on holiday. So I think that'll be really fascinating and I hope to see you all there. I think this is it for today. Thank you very, very much for joining us. To everyone, thank you Jennifer for a fascinating talk and very inspiring discussion. But I think everybody's going to be taking that to dinner table conversations for the weekend for, for sure and Diana, thank you very much again for joining us.
Jennifer Mather
My pleasure.
Diana Reiss
Thanks, everybody for joining us.
Jennifer Mather
It was fun. Thank you.
Kate Armstrong
Thanks, everyone.
