Another Path to Intelligence

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Original Article: Another Path to Intelligence Convert your long form article to podcast? Visit SendToPod Follow me on Twitter to find out more. ---- It turns out there are many ways of “doing” intelligence, and this is evident even in the apes and monkeys who perch close to us on the evolutionary tree. This awareness takes on a whole new character when we think about those non-human intelligences which are very different to us. Because there are other highly evolved, intelligent, and boisterous creatures on this planet that are so distant and so different from us that researchers consider them to be the closest things to aliens we have ever encountered: cephalopods.Cephalopods—the family of creatures which contains octopuses, squids, and cuttlefish—are one of nature’s most intriguing creations. They are all soft-­bodied, containing no skeleton, only a hardened beak. They are aquatic, although they can survive for some time in the air; some are even capable of short flight, propelled by the same jets of water that move them through the ocean. They do strange things with their limbs. And they are highly intelligent, easily the most intel­ligent of the invertebrates, by any measure.Octopuses in particular seem to enjoy demonstrating their intelli­gence when we try to capture, detain, or study them. In zoos and aquariums they are notorious for their indefatigable and often suc­cessful attempts at escape. A New Zealand octopus named Inky made headlines around the world when he escaped from the National Aquarium in Napier by climbing through his tank’s overflow valve, scampering eight feet across the floor, and sliding down a narrow, 106-­foot drainpipe into the ocean. At another aquarium near Dun­edin, an octopus called Sid made so many escape attempts, including hiding in buckets, opening doors, and climbing stairs, that he was eventually released into the ocean. They’ve also been accused of flood­ing aquariums and stealing fish from other tanks: Such tales go back to some of the first octopuses kept in captivity in Britain in the 19th century and are still being repeated today.ESCAPE ARTISTS: Inky the octopus objected to his captivity, and escaped through a narrow drainpipe one night. Here, he’s pictured in footage taken before his great escape. Video still courtesy of Inside Edition / YouTube.Otto, an octopus living in the Sea­Star Aquarium in Coburg, Germany, first attracted media attention when he was caught juggling hermit crabs. Another time he smashed rocks against the side of his tank, and from time to time would completely rearrange the contents of his tank “to make it suit his own taste better,” according to the aquar­ium’s director. One time, the electricity in the aquarium kept shorting out, which threatened the lives of other animals as filtration pumps ground to a halt. On the third night of the blackouts, the staff started taking night shifts sleeping on the floor to discover the source of the trouble—and found that Otto was swinging himself to the top of his tank, and squirting water at a low­-hanging bulb that seemed to be annoying him. He’d figured out how to turn the lights off.Octopuses are no less difficult in the lab. They don’t seem to like being experimented on and try to make things as difficult as possible for researchers. At a lab at the University of Otago in New Zealand, one octopus discovered the same trick as Otto: It would squirt water at light bulbs to turn them off. Eventually it became so frustrating to have to continually replace the bulbs that the culprit was released back into the wild. Another octopus at the same lab took a personal dislike to one of the researchers, who would receive half a gallon of water down the back of the neck whenever they came near its tank. At Dal­housie University in Canada, a cuttlefish took the same attitude to all new visitors to the lab but left the regular researchers alone. In 2010, two biologists at the Seattle Aquarium dressed in the same clothes and pla...