Scientists recently discovered an underwater site built entirely by octopuses off the east coast of Australia. Here’s a look at the intelligent invertebrate
Two legs good, eight legs better?
“No sci-fi alien is so startlingly strange” as an octopus, according to naturalist and author Sy Montgomery. The eight-armed mollusc, which can fit through an opening an inch wide, has half a billion neurons, the majority of which exist outside its brain and on its arms
Aquarium break
Octopuses frustrate the neat division between clever vertebrates and simple-minded invertebrates. “Octopuses have flooded laboratories by deliberately plugging valves in their tanks with their arms.
At the University of Otago, an octopus short-circuited the electricity supply—by shooting jets of water at the aquarium lightbulbs—so often it had to be released back into the wild,” writes Oxford philosopher Amia Srinivasan in the London Review of Books
Serial shark killer
In 2000, the Seattle Aquarium made the risky decision of housing a giant Pacific octopus in its 400,000-gallon tank with several dogfish sharks, believing the octopus would hide when threatened, writes Montgomery in her book The Soul of an Octopus
“To their astonishment, the octopus instead began systematically murdering the sharks. The sharks were not missing, but were found dead, uneaten, in the tank,” she adds. According to news reports, the shark-killing spree comprised a series of preemptive strikes, with the octopus taking out potential predators before the sharks even had a chance to threaten it