Creature FeatureFeed Drop! Secretly Incredibly Fascinating: Octopuses
Did you know Katie is the co-host on another show called Secretly Incredibly Fascinating? This week we're dropping an episode into the Creature Feature feed, because it's all about octopuses!!
Guest: Alex Schmidt
Octopuses known for being wiggly, famous for being eight wiggles, specifically, nobody thinks much about them. So let's have some fun. Let's find out why octopuses are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey they're folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode of podcast All about why being Alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone. I'm joined by my co host, Katie Golden. Katie, what is your relationship to or opinion of octopuses?
I love them. I love them one of my favorite animals.
I take your time to think about it. I know, I know it's difficult to figure out how you feel.
I love them. I love octopuses so much they are Yes, I really think they are one of my favorite animals. They're just so weird, so different from us, and yet so cute and cuddly except for some of them, which shouldn't touch because you'll die. But other than that, very cute and cuddly.
Yeah, they're really cool and generally they don't set off my phobia of sea creatures oddly. Oh good, even though they're pretty wiggly, like especially the biggest ones like the giant Pacific octopus. It just seems like a megafauna in a way where that doesn't bug me. Basically, all the huge sea creatures except maybe giant squids. I know that sounds similar, but basically all the huge sea creatures don't really bug me very much.
Ah, you don't like a giant squid. It's they're huge eyeballs, isn't it. Yeah?
That, and I feel like two of the tentacles are just too long, you.
Know what I mean.
Like there's smaller ones, and then there's two that are just way out there twice as long, like NBA player arms or something, but in a bad way.
Yeah, those are ship grabbing r.
Yeah, it feels like it feels like I'm gonna lose my crew. Yeah, exactly.
I do like octopuses more than I like squid. I like squids as well, but octopuses they hold a special place in my heart. They're cute, they're smart. They are just kind of spluty, which I like. I like a good splooty animal. Technically, a splute is sort of what a squirrel or animal does when they like flatten out on the pavement to kind of cool off. So it's a kind of pancaking motion a splute. So an animal to me that is somewhat gelatinous in either behavior or actual physiology and just sort of splutes out when you PLoP it on something. To me, that's a spluty animal. Something like a a cat is a spluty animal, But so is an octopus because it just kind of it pank it flattens that it pancakes out. A long time ago, I talked to Professor David Shiel, who's a professor of marine biology at Alaska Pacific University, and he kept an octopus in his living room for I think pretty much the octopus's entire lifespan like about a year, and just interacted with it daily, made friends with it and observed it. And it was really interesting because it would do things like play around. It seemed to do things like dream because it would change color while it was sleeping into sort of these patterns that are typically associated with hunting. So yeah, I would love to befriend and octopus, but their lifespans are a little bit short, so it'd be kind of heartbreaking. It'd be like getting a dog and having it only last a year. Just heartrending.
Yeah, I think that oddly leads us into the numbers for this topic. Numbers and by the way, thank you to Gannick ganame on the discord. Also to Jason Stash and other folks too for selecting this topic as you know supporters.
Sorry, that's like an action figure name like Jason Stash. Yeah, it's gonna be in Fast and Furious two thousand.
See. That's why if you join the discord, you get to give yourself a Lance Armstrong style name. Even though that's a real guy. I just always think he has a superhero name. Oddly, but yeah, okay.
The thing with Lance Armstrong is shouldn't be Lance leg Strong. Thank you, I'm here all week. All right, numbers, Alex, let's get get into them. Stop distracting us.
So every episode, our first fastening thing about the topic is a quick set of fastening numbers and statistics. This week that's in a segment called I Like to be statistically on an octave plus fact podcast with you.
Nice. Yeah.
That was submitted by Cleo Mancer teed it up for this. Thank you Cleo Mancer having a name for this every week. Please make a missillion making bed as possible. Submit through that discord where Jason Stash hangs out or to sippod at gmail dot com. The first number here is about five years, because about five years is the usual total lifespan of the giant Pacific species of octopus, and that's one of the longest octopus life spans in the world. As Katie was saying, these animals don't live a super long time, even though they're very intelligent, very advanced as an animal, and often very large.
It's so sad. I just you know, like, there is that other documentary called My Octopus Teacher, and it's I definitely recommend it. It's documentary, lovely film about a man in an octopus. But yeah, it is one of those things where it's it's very sad to us humans, I think because we put a lot of stock in a long lifespan, because you know, the idea of not having a future or only living five years is very sad. I wonder though, if that is too much of a human perspective, like it octopus maybe doesn't have any concept of longevity of tomorrow, so it's just kind of vibeing in the moment and enjoying itself and uh yeah, so I don't know, I mean, are we going to get into one of the interesting reasons why their live spans are so short.
Yeah, I have one here also, as always, I'm so glad you here, Katie, but especially for animal episodes. You know so much. It's great and octopus. It seems like with many octopus species they just sort of opt to pass away after reproducing. One source this week is the book The Soul of an Octopus by naturalist and writer Si Montgomery, and she describes how in many species, the female octopus just sort of dedicates the rest of their life to tending and hatching eggs mm hm, because these are mollusks that lay eggs. But the male also will sort of just consider its life complete after mating. The female will consider its life pretty complete. After the eggs hatch, they'll both enter what's usually called senescence, which is a life stage where they stop feeding and maintaining themselves, and their reproductive hormone can also deactivate their bodies digestion. Another number this week is more than three hundred species. There's a lot of different kinds of octopus, but a lot of them just sort of stop living after they have completed their evolutionary reproductive task. They say, okay, camel set.
Yeah, there's simil paris, which means when you reproduce once and you die. And a lot of species of animals do this. What's interesting about the female octopuses, Yes, for so many species, she devotes so much of her energy into caretaking for her offspring, which while she's alive, there generally speaking, like egg sacs full of like little embryonic octopuses, and she'll do things like she gives up on eating and she just guards them and maintains a constant water flow over them because a flow of water is important to oxygenate the eggs, and she will pretty much just start to die at that point because, like you said, she's not eating, her hormones are kind of causing this senescence. Researchers were able to increase the female's lifespan by doing a surgery where they went into the brain. And the brain is kind of interesting in the octopus because it's we might talk about this more later, but it's not as central as a human brain is, where it's like kind of the tentacles even contain a lot of sort of neural matter in it, but they essentially turned off a gland that produces this reproductive hormone, and so when the female then would because like even if females don't breed necessarily, they still have this like short life span. But when they surgically turned off that hormone, even after the female laid eggs, it ignored the eggs completely and kept eating and kept living. So, man, I don't know if they've ever done a study to see how long the female can live in that circumstance, but they've at least established that it will continue eating and it can increase its sort of lifespan after that. What's interesting is that in theory, the male could continue living right, but for whatever reason, perhaps just due to the way in which octopuses develop, you know, the male has a similarly short lifespan as the female, and it ends up working out in terms of the species maintaining a healthy population size.
That's just astounding. I feel like if you could talk to an octopus as that scientist who turned off that land, you would be like, I've essentially discovered immortality for you, Like your body will wear out eventually, but what you thought was the end of your life span, No, you could live kind of forever by your standards. But what they.
Wanted, Like, that's the thing is, you know, is it would it be more fulfilling for an octopus to live out its short life doing all the things an octopus does and caring for its young and reproducing, or would it prefer a long life? But in terms of that long life, it has no interest in taking care of its offspring. So it's an interesting thing. We can't ask an octopus what it wants though, until we learn octopus sign language, which requires more arms than we have.
You just have to sign really fast, use your legs. Our greatest soccer players will be recruited for the Octopus Language project.
I just think of that squid Word episode where he's doing interpretive dancing and all his tentacles are wiggling. I know you have recently started getting into Spongebobs, so those.
Big news folks, I have not two episodes into SpongeBob SquarePants, and it's it turns out it might be the best show ever made. Very exciting. That's pretty good.
It all started when I was like, Alex, have you heard of this square yellow man? He's very funny.
I don't know, he'd better live in a pineapple under the sea. Otherwise I'm not interested. Also, it just turns out canonically squid Word is an octopus, not a squid. Is he From interviews with Stephen Hillenberg, Apparently it's more fun to draw like an octopus bulbous head. Yeah, but if you look at like the show Bible or whatever of SpongeBob, squid Word is an octopus.
But he's kind of the cross between an octopus and a squid because he's got a couple of squid tentacles, you know, sort of the long tentacles with the diamond shaped ends is something that you'll see in a squid, but not an octopus, whereas the rest of its tentacles, I guess there're someone octopus like. So he's the unholy mix between an octopus and a squid.
That's why he's so mad. Both societies have rejected him. These octopuses. The whole show could just be how they think and how we try to understand how they think. It's honestly, this happened with a few topics on the show before. Is this topic too interesting on its face? Right? Like, octopuses are very popular, very cool, and this is such an enormous and vast topic just the thinking could be the whole show. We'll talk about that and a bunch of mother stuff.
Yeah, I mean they are amazing creatures, I think, especially when you consider that they have evolved a brain and cognition and eyes and all these things pretty much independently, like parallel to our own development of a brain and eyes. Because when our last common ancestor between like mammals and octopuses and other fish was I think this little flatworm. It's sort of a nematoade like flatworm that was just very simple. It maybe had an eye spot, like a couple of photosensitive cells, but in like a few nerves, not really a brain. So all of these things like eyes and brain involved completely parallel to our own development, and so it's really fascinating that they exist in such complexity at all.
Absolutely, there's another number for that, which is five hundred million years ago, because that's the minimum amount of time ago when we diverged from octopuses evolutionarily octopuses in humans. Yes, and it was that thing. And I know all millions of years evolution numbers just see them giant and hard to follow it all. But for context, the extinction event that killed the dinosaurs was about sixty five million years ago. Five hundred million years ago is shortly after what's called the cam And explosion, where life on Earth rapidly diversified, So we're about as far away from octopuses as we can be in terms of life evolution. Yeah, and they also partly think they found this number by finding a similarity between human serotonin receptors and octopus serotonin receptors. And one study that helped find this was scientists taking two octopuses and dosing them with MDMA, which is a drug nicknamed ecstasy by the cool kids.
Can you imagine an octopus at a rave, just tinnagles going everywhere, flopping around.
We kind of don't have to imagine that. This study it was JOHNS Hopkins University and Woodshole Oceanographic Institute, so two very distinguished organizations. But they took two octopuses and gave them each a Star Wars action figure. And then octopuses are also not very social with each other in a way we'll talk about more later, Like they don't really live in groups very much or want to see each other. Right, So they had these two octopuses, each with their own action figure. They mostly played with their action figure, and then when dosed with MDMA, the octopuses got quote cozy with its pal wow and like kind of cuddle a bit of stuff.
That's interesting because, like I've heard this about MDMA and other sort of psychedelics in humans, where someone who's maybe a bigot or maybe sort of more buttoned up will take it and being like, well, I just want to love my fellow man. Man, I'm not saying that's exactly the same thing that's happening with these octopuses, but that there's some kind of neural expansion happening for the octopus that is making it behaviorally act in a way that is not, you know, typical, Like in nature, they will occasionally interact with each other, but they just it's not they're not a social species.
Yeah, And another one of these huge differences. The next number is nine, because that's the number of clusters of neurons and the bodies of some octopuses, like Katie, as you were saying, they have a distributed brain more or less, yes, And that's takeaway number one. In some octopus species, consciousness might be spread across the equivalent of nine brains, which is one central brain and then a brain in each arm, each of the eight arms.
Yeah, and the arms almost move and act like individual organisms, which is really weird. I mean, it'd be like having sort of brains in your arms and your fingers just kind of doing stuff and then reporting their behaviors back to your brain to some extent, Right, we have a cent nervous system, and we have a brain, but we do actually have some distribution of brain activity throughout the body. We have, you know, the spinal cord. We have actually a lot of feedback between our gut and our brain. That's one of the reasons that like you can get a tummy ache when you're anxious, or if you're getting a stomach ache, you can get anxious. So that's kind of this like feedback loop. Like you eat something a little off, you can feel a little more anxious, or if you're anxious, that can actually cause the stomach ache. You have kind of a gut brain, which is weird, and you have a lot of like sensory information that's coming from the rest of your body. Obviously, it's just not to the extent that octopuses probably experienced because octopuses have so much activity in their tentacles compared to say, like the distribution of neural activity and say a human body.
Yeah, there's occasionally enter headlines that claim octopuses or quote unquote aliens, and it usually just means this very different evolution, including having clusters of neurons that are brain like or fully brains in each of their arms. That's just not what we do as a different species humans. Yeah, and those those giant Pacific octopuses, the biggest kind, have about five hundred million neurons, but it's spread across their body. There are various studies of how this works. One found that octopuses can do what they call arm up decision making, where the arm senses something before the central brain and initiates a motor response without consulting with the central brain.
Right, and arm.
Up is the opposite of what we call brain down with humans and many of our other bodies up here on land and in the sea, where there's just one brain and related functions that are still at least somewhat tied to one brain is kind of our structure and plan. There's also there's a twenty twenty two study from the University of Chicago. They looked at another active with species and found that it's arm neurons linked to each other through intramuscular nerve cords, which also suggests that the arm neurons could connect to each other somewhat without necessarily going through the central brain, Like there might even be some ability to bypass it as needed, and this might just be sort of more of an interconnected web than the top down thing we're used.
To, which is amazing because when we think about our brain, like we do a lot of things with our bodies that feel like we're not thinking about right, But that's just because we're not consciously aware of thinking about it. Like when we're walking moving something, you're not really thinking like now I move this leg and now I move that leg. But that's just sort of your conscious experience. Like you know, you have this feedback between your brain and your leg muscles and your nerves. There's even sort of this proprioception, like these cells that communicate position in space to your brain. Wow, even if you're not consciously aware of it, your brain is still doing the work. And octopuses, it sounds like a lot of this stuff doesn't actually need to go to their central brain. It is just being processed in these sort of dispersed brains throughout its body, which is really interesting.
Yeah, it's that could be the whole one hundred puckcasts. That could be the whole thing. Like, how do they think? How do they feel? Do they feel like they have nine identities? Yet another number here is three, because it turns out octopuses have three hearts. New Scientist magazine says that there are two peripheral hearts that pump the octopus's blood past their gills to pick up oxygen from water through the gills, and then there's a third central heart to circulate that oxygenated blood. So not only do they not have brains structured the way we do, they also don't have hearts structured the way we do. So either the literal or figurative version of thinking and having a self, octopuses just do it differently. It's a whole different setup. It's why that internet headline framing you see sometimes of aliens is like a little bit fair, because that's different. Man, that's not from the earth where you ste up here on the land.
No, I mean, I feel like that is an app thing. I think I've even said that on my podcast that if you want to know like the closest intelligent life form we have on Earth that is kind of like an alien I think would be an octopus because it's very distant from us evolutionarily and it's smart. So like, there are plenty of things that are extremely far from us in terms of evolution, but are maybe a bacteria, so they're not necessarily intelligent. But an octopus is intelligent, it's complex, and it developed these things almost entirely into evolutionary path which is really really interesting, and it's one of the pieces of evidence that I use sort of to argue that if there are planets that could support life, and you have the necessary ingredients for life, I think the chance that some form of intelligent life like an octopus developing eyes pretty pretty good.
That makes sense. Yeah, I guess that on crabs, right, there's the Earth evolution thing where stuff is crab shaped over time.
Crabs, crabs, crabs, crabs of crabs. Yes, Nature loves the shape of a crab, and things keep independently or in parallel evolution evolving to be crab shaped, from spiders to various crustacean species, various arthropods. Someday humans, maybe we're going to go crab.
This is This is also why SpongeBob is such a rich text, because the krusty krabs owner and first employee are the two most effective shapes of being right, Like, that's pretty cool, that's a good business choice.
Yes, yes, Scott, I can hear the scuttle of mister crabs right now, just in a loop in my little length going and they have that like scuttling soundtrack. I thought I'd never have to remember that again, but thank you, Alex. Now now it's stuck in my head.
These next couple numbers are about terminology stuff. Ooh, because it turns out there's two interesting things here with that and with how humans speaking English talk about them. One is that we'll probably use tentacles and arms pretty interchangeably about octopuses. But I think arms is the less famous name for these eight limbs that octopuses have. Yes, apparently, tentacles are usually a longer, thinner limb with suckers only near the end, and arms are the term for what octopus limbs are, which are shorter and stronger and suckers on most of the length of it. So a lot of like scientists and others will call them arms.
Turns out yeah, because like squid have both arms and tentacles, right.
Yeah, and the ones I don't like are the tentacles, I think.
Yeah, this is why squidword is a cross between an octopus and a squid, because he's got a pair of tentacles as well as arms.
Yeah, and it's usually depicted with six limbs, so you know, there's there's a lot going on there. Yeah.
Whereas octopuses, as their name implies, have eight arms.
And that brings us to the other terminology thing, because the number for that is four, and four is the number of different ways that modern English speakers say the plural form of the word octopus. And as folks have heard, I've pretty much stuck to octopuses.
That's me what I say, too good.
You know, you and me are great. And then there are some people on the internet.
Word objectively the best saying octopuses.
It turns out, like as I was looking in this topic learning about it, some people on the Internet are militant about how to say the plural form of the word octopus. And I don't want to emphasize how much we should all be nice to each other with a miniature takeaway number Two, do not let anybody be weird at you about your plural form of the word octopus, because everybody's drawing on some kind of Latin or Greek and putting it into English the best they can. There are four common ways people say it, and they're all at least a little bit valid, like they're all kind of drawing on a language thing. But the four ways you hear are octopuses, which we've been using, also octopi, and then two pronunciations of a word, either octopodes or octopities, depending on how they get to it.
Octopities is one I have not heard. I've heard octopodes, but topitys is that sounds like a Greek hero who has eight arms and punches Zeus with all of them.
Yeah, we should go right that later. It's awesome. But the reason there are so many ways English speakers say this plural is a weird mechanism with how the ancient Greek language also got adapted into Latin, and then how both of those got adapted into English. But all of it comes from an ancient compound word for eight foot. I know we're calling them arms and tentacles, but the ancient word called them feet. Oh, there's an animal with eight feet. That's where we get the word octopus.
It's also where we get the word millipedes, right, because that's a thousand.
Feet Yeah right, Yeah, it's these very similar connections between these two wiggly animals in our language.
Yeah, wiggly and squiggly. I used to not like millipedes because we had a lot of them in our backyard when I was growing up, and like, i'd feel a tickle on my leg and I'd look down and the marching of many little feats going up my leg, and I wasn't a huge fan of that. That upset me.
I'm glad I didn't live in a millipede region. I guess I'd never had that experience, since it would probably leave me with some stuff. Yeah, I like them.
I don't know if I want them on me.
Linco in a bunch of sources Merriam Webster's Dictionarydictionary, dot Com, the Ocean Conservancy, and some more about just how this word works. Octopus Octopus is a Latinized form of the Greek words for eight and for foot put together in a compound word. And so then what people speaking English have done is either used the usual way we translate Latin words, or the usual way we translate Greek words, or the usual way we translate Latinized Greek words. Yeah, and so, so that's why there's many plurals hanging out, And in most cases latinized forms of Greek words get pluralized with an es ending, which would be octopuses. And that's why I have opted for that one out of all the options, but an i ending is often used for Latin words. Also, apparently, octopi is the earliest printed version in English. Merriam Webster says that there's early eighteen hundreds examples of octopi and writing and then either octopodes or octopities, which are spelled the same. That is probably coming from English speakers trying to be overly correct about adapting Greek and kind of skipping the Latin part. So you know, all of these are broadly fine, especially because everybody knows what you're talking about whichever one you use, and so you know, I celebrate anyone who has a huge passion for one of these specifically, but you can let it go when other people use the other ones. It's fine. They're all just not me.
I'm I'm team octopuses, and I'm going to die on that hill.
What if I'm saying all this be cool stuff as a trick so we can spring a surprise attack on the octopi people like they let their card down, you know, we strike it down, and then everyone waves eight weapons.
You know, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's much like an octopus's arms, just kind of coming in from the side, like a pincer movement. Oh, we're back to crabs.
Oh no, it's.
Everything is crabs.
That's the gist of this, especially internet thing about plurals. This is also oddly one of my favorite stories about English being a living language. Right, the language we are speaking taping this podcast a language. You probably understand English is a living language. If people use a word a lot, it pretty much just becomes part of English. There's no quote unquote right or wrong when it comes to the language. One of my favorite linguists is McCullough, who hosts the podcast Enthusiasm and has written extensively about modern and Internet English. She says, quote, I think that it can come as a tremendous relief to realize that you don't have to be angry about language. You don't have to be annoyed about people doing something different from you. End quote. Yes, and also it turns out the ancient world is just amazingly connected to octopuses. You know, the ancient world gave us these words. But I'm also going to link a digital resource from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England, because they obtained a large jar made by the Mycenaean civilization on the modern island of Crete. It's a jar next number nearly three thousand, five hundred years old, three thousand, five hundred year old jar with amazing octopus art on it. And yeah, it speaks to how long humans have been connected to these animals that are usually deep under the ocean and being weird, we've still met them and been fascinated by them.
I'm looking at the jar and it's a typical jar, but the octopus art is adorable. I mean, there are some very very cute species of octopuses. One of the cutest, the blue ring octopus, is something you absolutely don't want to touch because it'll kill you dead.
Yeah, they're weirdly incredibly deadly, those guys. There's even a number here, more than one thousand times because the blue ring octopus has saliva that is more than one thousand times more toxic than a similar quantity of cyanide. Yeah, so look out, don't let them bite you.
Look out. The thing that makes my butt pucker. The most seeing on the internet is someone taking a photo of them holding a blue ring octopus because they think it looks cool. And they do look very cool. They're bright yellow with these blue rings. They're very very pretty, and they're little, so they seem harmless, right, like they fit in the palm of your hand. But yeah, it if it bites you, I don't know, man, I think that's it. I think it's very hard to get you to the hospital on time. Basically, the treatment for it, as far as I know, is just like replace your fluids, try to keep you alive. There's not really an anti toxin that I'm aware of.
That's right, And it turns out people often get good care. But it seems like also there are probably unrecorded deaths from this because according to Newsweek, another number here is three. Allegedly, there are three confirmed human deaths due to the blue ringed octopus's toxin. But there's no anti venom or anti toxin. There's just keeping an eye on you, supplying you with oxygen and making sure you keep breathing while you pass this through. The toxin is called tetrototoxin, very toxic. But also this animal is so small. Apparently most adults will receive an amount where if there's medical intervention right away, they'll be Okay, it's just a horrible experience and you have to get that intervention. And also these live in the waters near Australia, the blue ring octopus, so that's the specific region to watch out for them.
Yeah.
Again, there's hundreds of these octopus species, and like the blue ring octopus is very small. It's the adults are about twenty two centimeters long, or less than nine inches, and apparently other species that are not so toxic can be as small as less than one inch across. In the case of a small adult in the starsucker pigmy octopus species.
It's so cute, you know, and tiny.
Yeah, there's internet pictures of it on a fingertip, the human fingertip, you know, so it's pretty good. That's really cool.
Yeah. A thing about like, don't I don't want people to be super afraid of the blue ring octopus though, because like they are not going to like seek you out and bite you for no reason. They generally don't want to spin their toksin if they don't have to, because it's, you know, it is a resource that they want to conserve. So if you don't handle them, you're you're gonna be fine.
Yeah, that's right, and it's yeah, it's a rare thing. Enjoy yourself in the ocean and everything. It's good.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Just leave them alone and they will most likely leave you alone.
Yeah. And another number here is two, because that is the number of parts of an octopus beak. Yes, most species have a beak, and it's underneath those famous eight arms on their underside, and it can be two sharp hooking points, sort of like the beak of a parrot, which is also very strange. And it also led me to a very adorable Google result where people ask if octopuses are related to birds, and the result just kindly walked people through. Absolutely not just octopuses and parrots both came up with this beak. They are otherwise mega differ. They're not related at all.
I mean, another amazing instance of independent evolution of the beak in the parrot or other bird species. And then in octopuses, I mean it's you know, it's definitely different in its structure and sort of the mechanism of action in terms of the muscles, but very similar, weirdly similar.
That's right. And also it's strong enough to crunch apart prey like crabs and clams, and octopuses also will often use paralyzing saliva to catch prey, and so that's why the blue ring octopus has this toxic saliva. It's not out to get you. It's just living in the ocean hunting stuff. And it's one of many octopus species that toxify an animal in order to then eat it with its beak.
Yeah, especially something little like the blue ring octopus, it is beneficial to be able to incapacitate prey that might otherwise be a little too strong for it to do.
So now I'm just rooting practicuses.
This feels great, Go little guy, go use that neurotoxin.
Yeah, and folks, that's a heck of a lot of numbers and a few takeaways. So we're going to take a short break and come back with some more about this eight armed, nine brained animal. And folks, we are back with a mystery. Ooh, mystery fun ooh, because the next number here is one hundred six.
That's a specific number.
Yeah, what happened is a few years ago there was a research team that sent an underwater camera fourteen thousand feet into the ocean's depths and it reached the bottom of the fram Strait, which is an Arctic sea passage between Greenland and Svalbard, and their camera observed one hundred and six matching octagon shapes drawn into the floor of the.
Ocean aliens underwater aliens.
That's right, internet headline underwater aliens aka octopuses. Because it turns out they said, hey, what's going on with this? And then a German university research team new study in June twenty twenty three. They shared observations and camera footage of an octopus species making these octagon shapes.
And go, that's very on the nose for them. Are they just kind of like sitting and then like sweeping each of their legs into the sand or something? Why is it seems too good to be true for an octagon to be made by an octopus.
Exactly like octopuses and people who make stop signs are the famous octagon things? In the world that it was one of them.
Yeah.
This is from an amazing piece by Sabrina Imbler at defector dot com. They say that there is a serrated species of octopus called Syratouthus mule. It's one of the only ones that lives in Arctic waters, and the octopuses are usually in warmer waters, but they are octopus species in every ocean, and this Arctic water's octopus syra Toothyus muleri. It is gelatinous, it is inkless, and so the way they hunt for food is they sort of descend all the way to the bottom of the ocean, plant their eight arms, which have webbing between them, like plant their eight arms on the floor of the ocean and then just sort of suck up anything that's on the ground right there. And then this leaves behind an octagon print on the floor of the ocean.
So it's like the rumba technique, but it's kind of a stationary rumba. Yeah, it's like it couldn't be just that, like a little octagon shaped thing suckered itself to the bottom of the ocean. And yes, that is what it is. That's it.
Yeah, that's it.
That's so cute. Just this little guy just going and then sucking things up from the bottom of the ocean.
Yeah, just like the funniest straightforward behavior you could Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, it just it seems like something from a cartoon. Octopuses are one of the wackier animals, aren't they. It's the it's the arms that like wiggle around their uh, the inflatable wacky arms of the ocean, just with even more arms to be wacky. But yeah, it's interesting because some some octopuses have like very distinct arms that are all separate, but this one seems like it's kind of it's almost like a membranous skirt connects all the arms.
That's right. It turns out there's a set of octopus species where it's a set of webbed arms and sort of a gelatinous body and no ink sack and I guess a little bit like jellyfish, but also like they have a dress on. You know. It's it's a very specific and willowy, wafty kind of octopus.
I want to see them twirl like Maria in the Sound of Music with their little little membrane skirt. It's very very cute.
Wow, that's really the vibe. I was thinking of Maria a West Side story as well. A lot of Maria's out here are a very Maria.
I guess this the name for a real squirrel twirling' lady.
That's right.
Did I say squirrel twirling lady? I meant to say skirt twirling lady, but I can't say words.
Look, we're trying to do biology and musical theater. We're spinning a lot of plates. We're doing great.
Maybe they also twirl squirrels. I don't know. That's what I'd do if I had a squirrel.
She's like, the hills are alive, and the squirrels just like meet meet meep, meet me and more. Octopuses being fun underwater. At the next number here is three forty seven BC, because in three forty seven BC, the Greek thinker Aristotle recorded an observation of the male octopus's sexual organ. And you know, often Aristotle is just guessing that stuff, but this was more or less correct. He observed a specialized arm that we now call a hectocatalyus, because it turns out, in most male octopuses of their species, one of their arms has the organs for sperm production. And they reproduce by reaching that into a part of the female octopus to fertilize thousands of eggs all at once.
That's kind of interesting. It's like a handshake, but a lot more than a handshake, I guess for octopuses. It really is true that if you hold hands you can get pregnant.
Wow. Then I guess the one way it's more iNTS than that nineteen fifties concept is that in one set of octopus species called the argonaut, the male can detach that arm and sort of leave it behind and.
Throws it like towards the female because he's afraid of getting eaten. It's really funny. It's like, yeah, here's what I's firm. Bye.
Yeah.
Some octopus species are also cannibalistic, which is part of the not being so social element of octopus. Slice. You might get eaten by another octopus.
Look. I mean it is a type of going out to dinner, just one that only one person goes home for.
I would be so mad if I was a waiter and I seated a couple and then one of them started eating the other, I'd be like, well, I'm not going to get any Like the check's gonna be a dollar for iced tea. I'm not gonna get any tip man.
Yeah, don't fill up on bread and don't fill up on your date.
Yeah yeah, like I work for tips man. Come on, just chomp, chump.
Chump, here's a tip and then you throw your reproductive organ at them.
And then related to all that, there's another number here. July third, twenty twenty three, So a couple weeks ago, July third, twenty twenty three, that's when researchers announce the third ever discovery of an undersea octopus nursery. Ooh, because another takeaway here. Takeaway number three. Octopuses are pretty antisocial, but we've discovered a few undersea octopus breeding colonies and that this is probably not an example of octopuses being more social than we expected, but they are tolerating each other at specific advantageous locations for laying eggs and breeding.
Yeah. It's really interesting because it's almost like you could see this as maybe a step in evolution towards being more social. But they're not there yet. They're still very introverted. They're still all just like busy playing Diablo for on their little octopus computers, not paying attention to each other, but they don't, you know, they kind of they might have these sort of brief interactions and then they get really shy and like move away.
That's the next time I lose at Diablo, for I'm going to claim my opponent had eight arms or seven if they reproduced recently their mail. But yeah, yeah, they There's some headlines that have called these locations Octopolis or Actlantis, you know, fun stuff about an ocopas city under the sea. It's like, we say, this is octopus is finding a space where they all want to be, and this new discovery. The key sources NPR. They're also covering research from a nonprofit called the Schmidt Ocean Institute. Hey, folks, the former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt and his wife Wendy are fun in a bunch of research and I'm going to feel like it's from me. The Schmidt Ocean Institute is going on now.
So a Schmidt with a wife named Wendy and you're a Schmidt with a wife named Brenda. Mm hmm, yeah, it's all comment. It's too m are you are you? Did you try to like ditch your old identity as a Google co founder?
He he was like the CEO who worked with the two co founders. Yeah, he's like the third guy who made all the money.
You're really good at speaking in the third person there.
I didn't say this on the recent Name Alex episode, but consistently, if people miss here my name Alex, they think I said Eric, and I kind of get it. But it's surprising, you know, that that's not the name I would think they would hear.
I would think that they would hear Lex Luthor or something.
Like that and run screaming ya Wenda. The Schmidt team. They announced the discovery in July twenty twenty three of a giant breeding group of a deep sea octopus species called mus octopus, and they breed near a warm hydrothermal vent on the Dorado outcrop near Costa Rica. That's a big discovery because the previous two octopus groups were in a different place and a different species. In two thousand and nine and again in twenty seventeen, researchers found the gloomy octopus species yet another fund name, the gloomy octopus congregating and breeding in a location in Jervis Bay near Sydney, Australia. The first find was on a piece of discarded metal, and they just thought that was a fluke thing. But then they found a whole other group of octopuses elsewhere in Jervis Bay, and the group was ten to fifteen octopuses at a time, so not a atlantis or something, but they were finding that these octopuses only live about three years, and each successive generation would leave behind burrows or piles of shells, and then the next generation would use those to build their own homes and burrows. And it's vaguely social, vaguely urban in a way we didn't think octopuses did.
I mean, it's interesting because when you look at social species of terrestrial animals a lot of time, it is limited resources that draws them together. So even there's a theory for you social animals, which are animals like ants or prairie dogs, where it's like you have this hierarchy and you have sort of the soldiers or the sisters kind of working together for the good of the colony, and you have like a breeding pair. The idea behind that is that if you have conditions where resources are scarce, it's actually more advantageous to like pool resources and even if you're not the one breeding a lot of these genes that you actually have into getting passed down and so it'll result in someone like you who is more use social being in the next generation. So it's cool. Octopuses have been around a really long time. It doesn't mean just because we see some of these proto social behaviors and octopuses where it's like, especially like at the bottom of the ocean, when you're near hydrothermal vents, you have limited area that is either not too cold and desolate and not too hot, so you have kind of these like goldilocks areas around these hydrothermal vents, and so it would make sense that they would kind of congregate in an area that is because basically real estate is limited down there where you can live. But you know, it doesn't mean they would necessarily ever evolve into the next stage of being social, but it you know, give them another few million years. And maybe I.
Like that because so many of them are highly intelligent as much as we can rate animal intelligence, Like they have the mental horsepower to hang out if they just really aren't choosing to and sometimes eat each other. But if they're gathering in these same advantageous spots, maybe they get there.
The key is you would need some evolutionary pressure on them to be social, so you need some kind of advantage for their offspring for them to be more pro social. Yeah, I mean it is. It is interesting to see such an intelligent animal that seems to do behaviors that you see in more social animals like playing, you know, potentially dreaming, have being curious, Like they seem very curious about like humans and stuff. And so you'd think it has all the markings of an animal that you would think would be more social, but it's it just doesn't have the necessity to be social. It doesn't have the motivation to be evolutionary motivation that is, to be social, and so it generally isn't unless it's on MDMA, right, unless it is high out of its nine minds.
It is strange that one team is like, we can make octopuses love, and another team is like, we can make octopuses want to live forever. You know, there's a lot of scientists out there who.
Are and if you combine them, you create a new God.
Right, Like we are so close to making these are co super animals of Earth, you know, like we're so close if we want to do it.
I would love an all knowing, all loving super being octopus. I would probably become religious if that were the case.
There's one last takeaway for the band show, and it is fun in the context of that idea because takeaway number four octopuses punch fish and possibly for no reason.
Yeah, for funsies. You know, I've heard about octopuses punching fish. I think actually from our one of our sister podcasts, Just the Zoo of Us, we talked about octopuses punching fish. Shout out to them.
Yeah, Alana Christian are so great. And and also I love the people are studying this observing this. I feel like it's mostly a product of good video cameras that we are now understanding that just through some recent observations, we've seen octopuses following fish around, which we knew they did, but then also using one of their arms to suddenly punch them. Yes, it's another human like behavior, but also weird. That's octopus stuff. It's sometimes human like and also really weird.
Yeah, there's one theory that like, when they're with these fish that sometimes they do kind of like co hunting behaviors with fish. So there will be like a reef, right, and you have little fish trying to escape in the reef. And then if you have one fish hunting that is like blocking one entrance, and then the octopus who's like squeezing its tentacles into all the knicks and crannies, the fish and the octopus can kind of it's a friendship of convenience, like in badgers and coyotes, where you have a burrow, you have some prairie dogs or groundhogs in these burrows, and then if you have a coyote on one end of the burrow and then a badger digging up the other entrance or exit to the burrow, then at least one of them is gonna get a tasty snack. Theory with octopus and the fish is that if the octopus is annoyed that the fish is maybe like eating more than it should, maybe it gives it a punch. But it's unclear if that's actually what's going on, because sometimes it just seems to punch it randomly, so we're not really sure why it does that, if it's just doing it for fun, if it just gets annoyed with the fish, if it's like trying to put the fish in its place. Like, Remember, I could punch you at any time, so don't get too cocky here. It's hard to know exactly what is going through the octopus's mind. I would definitely buy it if the octopus just thinks it's funny, because octopus is also like, there's octopuses in like tanks and aquariums will sometimes play so like they take like an empty pill bottle that's buoyant and then they toss it into like this stream, like the water filter has kind of a jet stream, and they'll like basically play fetch with themselves where they toss it over and over. So they seem to enjoy stimulation like that. So yeah, maybe they just think it's fun, or maybe they're punishing the fish. Who knows.
Yeah, that's all exactly it and what a quote a researcher here at Duardo Sempio of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany, who yeah, observed all those possible reasons for it, and also says there are different octopus punching styles. He says, quote, some punches are almost like a small boot, and the other ones that even the whole arm curls up and uncurls afterwards, you know, like the motion of a boxer doing a punch. End quote, and yeah, he says like exactly what he said. It could be to guide fish hunting. It could be to punish a fish and get the food first. But in some cases the octopus punches the fish quote with no discernible insensive. So they could just be playing whack a mole at an arcade. You know, they could just be bullying. It could be just goofing around.
Just doesn't like the way the fish is looking at it. It's like, what are you looking at? The punch?
And who can blame them? Basically, every fish face is freaky.
You know, I've got it too it Yeah, unblinking.
It's Walleye to literally forget it.
Yeah. The lesson we've learned on today's show is that Alex is pro punching fish again.
Bring us back to the rich text of SpongeBob. The anchovies are very funny, but also that's a flat face. There's not a lot going on there. And if I was an octopus, so I'd just be like, get out of here.
The.
Folks. That's the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro with fun features for you, such as help remembering this episode with a runback through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, In some octopus species, consciousness might be spread across the equivalent of nine brains. Takeaway number two, do not let anybody be weird at you about your plural form of the word octopus. Takeaway number three. Octopuses are pretty antisocial and sometimes cannibals, but we're also discovering some undersea octopus pre colonies. Takeaway number four octopuses punch fish and possibly for no reason. Plus a ton of numbers about octopus hearts, beaks, toxins, mysteries, and you know, enough stuff to get us up to what's eight takeaways basically right, perfectly on theme for octopus. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now. If you support this show at maximum fun dot org, members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is a slew of amazing octopus lore, either from mythology or from modern security cameras. Visit sifpod dot fun for that bonus show, for a library of almost thirteen dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows, and a catalog of all sorts of max Fun bonus shows. It's special audio. It is just for members. Thank you for being somebody who backs this podcast operation additional fun things check out our research sources on this episode's page at maximum fund dot org. Key sources this week include digital resources from Professor Gretchen Rollwagen Bowlands of Washington State University. For the resources from NPR London's Natural History Museum, the South Carolina Aquarium, the Ashmolean Museum. Also the book The Soul of an Octopus by naturalists and writer Si Montgomery, and hey the podcast Creature feature by the great Katie Golden. That page also features resources such as Native dash Land dot c A. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this on the traditional land of the Canarsi and Lenape peoples. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location, in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, native people are are very much still here. That feels worth doing. On each episode, and hey, join the Free Sift discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about Native people and life. There's a link in this episode's description to join the discord. We're also talking about this episode on the discord and hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode twenty one that is about the topic of musk oxen. It's me and Katie Golden and Elliott Klin, our buddy from the Flophouse to discover that fun fact some scientists studying musk oxen do it wearing full body polar bear costumes, so I recommend that episode. I course recommend Creature, feature, Katie Golden's weekly podcast about animals and science and more. Our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by the Buddos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton durand special thanks to Chris SUSA for audio mastering on this episode. Extra extra special thanks go to our members and thank you to all our listeners. I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating, So how about that.
Talk to you then, Maximum.
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