I don’t usually post videos for the Friday Cephalopod, but you’ve got to see it in motion to appreciate the cuddliness.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
I don’t usually post videos for the Friday Cephalopod, but you’ve got to see it in motion to appreciate the cuddliness.
That’s cool. I’ve been meaning to write a cephalopod post of my own and this just reminds me to get off my backside.
That naughty boy is leaving hickies on his human friend!
Hmmm. Squishy.
Octopus:
“Give me another 20 seconds and I would have had her for dinner …”
Have you even gone to bed yet, PZ?
I’m startled and pleased to see you posted the link I sent you.
And oh, huzzah, I can post, for now! The registration page refuses to send me a confirmation email.
They are intelligent beings who can problem solve, have emotions (ever see the vidio of the angry one?) obviously show affection and a whole lot more that we don’t know because we are too intent on eating them. Every time I see a dead octopus in a store I mourn for the loss of an intelligent being.
Why is it that so many people see animals as “food” or “not food”? You miss so much of the miracle around us called Life. And, NO, I’m not talking about God. I mean the incredible evolution and millions of years of change gene by gene. I’d rather appreciate it than kill it.
What an adorable pet. I don’t think the kittehs would like one, though.
Yay, Friday! Yay, bank holidays!
And yet these extraordinary animals have such brief lifespans.
@janegael: Yet the great irony is, the prime motivator for that incredible evolution is largely to eat or be eaten. So, you know, by eating them, we’re encouraging them to evolve into better forms! Your soft-heartedness is DOOMING them to an evolutionary dead end! How CRUEL can you be?
Now off to prove white is black and get myself killed at the next zebra crossing…
I could never own such a creature. I can’t imagine they find small, captive environments particularily stimulating. More importantly, I couldn’t bear to bond with such an intelligent, social creature, knowing it would shortly die. At least cats stick around for twenty years.
Wouldn’t it be fun to come home from work and be greeted with such tentacular affection?
#8
The problem is, sooner or later, you HAVE to kill in order to keep appreciating life.
I was expecting this to happen.
It’s one thing to anthropomorphize your dog or cat. They have brains just like yours but scaled down some.
Anthropomorphizing octopuses, on the other hand, is a rube’s game. We have no idea whatsoever what goes on in those ganglia.
How can we know that the ocky’s intentions are ‘affectionate’?! For all we know, he likes the way she tastes (unsalty?). Or just enjoys having a solid structure to support him when he’s reaching out of the water. Or maybe he’s worshipping his cult’s deity. Maybe he’s trying to communicate “This tank tastes like rotting Herring.” Pretending to interpret the intentions of a creature so far removed from us is the epitome of hubris.
Is it true that giant octopuses can communicate using the Vulcan mind meld?
He reminds me of myself when I was four.
@#13 “Wouldn’t it be fun to come home from work and be greeted with such tentacular affection?”
I watched the video.
I knew the context of the discussion.
I knew generally what to expect in the comments.
Yet I STILL had to read your comment twice to be sure it didn’t say what I thought it said.
Sorry, PZ, but the only animals that are truly cuddly are mammals.
Better be careful. Those zebras will run you over in a heartbeat.
Seems that we all agree on at least a couple things:
1) Respect for intelligent life.
2) Dubiousness of our own ability to judge the mental process of an octopus.
Seems to me that the only logical thing to do is to refrain from eating them, since it is entirely possible you’d be consuming an intelligent being.
@Insightful Ape #21:
Mammalian Chauvinist! You’ve just never met the right cephalopod!
Love is slimy.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
That’s only logical if you can get from “potentially intelligent being” to “shouldn’t be eaten” via logic.
On a sliding scale of comparative “intelligence,” where do you draw your line? pigs? lobsters? chickens? swordfish? rutabagas?
Sven Dimilio, #26 writes: On a sliding scale of comparative “intelligence,” where do you draw your line? pigs? lobsters? chickens? swordfish? rutabagas?
For me, the line is drawn at “can it recognize itself as a distinct entity in a mirror”. If it can’t, it’s for the dinner table with no qualms.
#27
Why bother with the criteria at all?
A mirror is a fairly arbitrary object to use for setting the distinction, and the use of it as the meter shows a bias towards brain development that “mirrors” our own.
What if a creature is blind or comes from an environment where there has been no need for the brain to process reflections in that way?
Our brains do some very interesting things, but they also don’t do things that other brains do.
HorsePheathers, #27:
I read an interesting book recently, Becoming a Tiger, about animal learning, and there was some discussion of this. Apparently very few animals can do this. Most primates do, but possibly in some species, only the more intelligent members do (would you eat a dull gibbon but not a clever one? what about a retarded human child? I’m sure you wouldn’t, which is why I think the mirror test is a strange one for this purpose). Cats and dogs do not. Dolphins do, but killer whales do not.
Aside: I used to be a sort of vegan, although most vegans I knew insisted I wasn’t. I abstained from eating members of Chordata or any squids or octopuses. I was trying to base it on capacity to experience suffering. I gave it up for three reasons: one, it was really hard, two, I’m getting married to an omnivore, whom I don’t expect to change, and besides, it will be weird to have kids growing up trying to understand why I don’t eat what they do, and three, after reading Guns, Germs, and Steel, I thought about how much of civilization we owe to eating domesticated animals and their eggs and milk.
When we brought our first cat home many years ago, she saw herself in a full length mirror and got all excited that she had a playmate. Now, all the grrrls know better. But our Betta gets very excited and doesn’t seem to learn from the experience.
PZ, are you going to blog on the Tazzie facial cancer story? Evolution is doomed! (Ha, ha, would be funny to see them spin that one.) It’s like scifi, a single individual’s cancer spreading to all. (Remember “The Establishment” with the man whose cancer took over when he died and tried to infect the entire human race? Er, neither does anyone else, that comic didn’t sell well. But it was good, I swear it.)
And those silly primates, trying to save a species bound on a one-way train (due to its behavior) to destruction. Wi’ li’l fences acrosst the lan’scape’n such.
What I think is hilarious is that the news article said that cancers that spread from individual to individual are rare! Ha! I bet they’re not! I bet they only SEEM rare because they wipe out whole populations, leaving precious little evidence behind. Put THAT in your bubble wand and blow it!
Yeah, Betta splendens is such a narcissist.
Here’s another way to express the “sentience” line as I see it: if it demonstrably has an idea of self and is smart enough to be able to deduce that this thing it sees in the mirror is not, in fact, another member of its species but conforms so closely to its own actions that it must be a manifestation of “self”, it is too smart for me to eat in good conscience. The mirror test isn’t the end-all and be-all (I was being a little flip) — it’s just the clearest demonstration of the level of intelligence I’m talking about. Things like seeing octopii learn how to open jars to extract shrimp from watching other octopii put them high enough up the “sentience” scale that I don’t know I could eat one without wondering if I was crossing the line.
And to clarify, if some gibbons are smart enough to pass the test, then the whole gibbon species gets a pass from my dinner table — there’s too much chance of accidentally eating something sentient.
Of course it was being affectionate. Look at all the love-heart-shaped welts on the girl’s arm. Octy must think they’re lovely as they look kinda like suckers of her own,
As for eating things or otherwise; I’ve always been puzzled that the ‘sliding scale’ seems to mapped onto relatedness to humans. vltava said they used to avoid chordata and such is a prime example. As far as I can see, trees and grass are equally advanced along their own evolution and humans and indeed other animals.
Maybe there will be a cult that only consumes prokaryotes or other primitive forms.
I’m just happy to see people actually talking and thinking about this for once, instead of dropping the usual “it tastes good with butter” comments. As for the usual comments about carrots and trees also being living things, I can only offer that I also have respect for human life (including my own) and don’t see how this respect can be maintained by allowing myself to starve to death. Arguing about this sort of nonsense isn’t much different than arguing about global warming– all you need to know is that using resources more efficiently and polluting less is ALWAYS a good thing, and should be a goal regardless of whether we’re in crisis or not. There’s no need for a human to eat an octopus, even if they turned out to be the stupidest and ugliest creatures on the planet– so why not err on the side of good and keep them off your plate?
a question for the knowlegable biologists here: There is a science-fiction staple, a “food factory” type of technology where a specific type of tissue (say for instance, chicken breast muscle tissue) can be cultured and caused to grow and thrive without the rest of the chicken. Is this on the horizon?
Is this on the horizon?
In fact…
Obviously the woman “has a flavor”.
The comments about what is intelligent and what isn’t here are arbitrary and based on the idea that being human-like is the defining characteristic of intelligence. We are the top predators so, of course, we write the rules. That’s being very species-centristic.
Attributing emotions to animals is NOT anthropomorphizing them! Scientists are writing more and more articles on animal emotions and intelligence. We share the earth with more intelligent life than we’d like to think about. It’s much easier to exterminate wolves from a helicopter if you don’t understand that they have a family structure and culture. Seeing intelligence in other species inconveniences us, so we laugh and ignore it.
I eat chicken because I raised them and they are the closest thing to a walking plant that there is. I loved watching them but honestly Mike pretty much shows what thought processes they have:
Mike the Headless Chicken
And remember: The question, as Bentham wrote, is not “Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”
So let’s say you harvest the octopus only after it has entered its post-reproductive senesence. Or you go even a step further than that, and wait until it dies before fishing it out of the water.
Does that change the moral metric regarding eating it?
Cephalopods, with their short life cycles and one-time reproduction, particularly those squid species that gather en masse to mate and lay eggs and then immediately die en masse, seem to me ideal species to build a sustainable, ethical fishery out of.
>Octopus:
“Give me another 20 seconds and I would have had her for dinner …”
Researcher.
‘give me another 20 seconds and I would have had her for dinner…”
Testing 1 2 3
eddie #34:
I don’t think that it is. I based my criteria on capacity to experience suffering, which is why I carved out exceptions for cephalopods, based on their nervous systems.
Capacity to suffer has little to do with the question of “can I ethically eat it” — my assumption has been that the potential food will be treated humanely at all points along the way to reaching my plate. To needlessly cause anything inordinate suffering is unethical regardless of its relative intelligence.
And yes, my standards are arbitrary and based off of my understanding of what makes humans different from the majority of critters on the planet. Those critters that share this difference with us don’t make the menu.
Ha! I was at the Cal Academy yesterday and couldn’t find the giant octopus in it’s display. At least I can now see what I couldn’t find! They have several very nice displays on or connected to evolution and in listening to the crowd around me, I didn’t hear a single creotard comment. Very much worth the visit!
@Horsefeathers #44:
I think that if you investigate how cows, pigs and chickens (even so-called “free range”) live, you will discover that is not a safe assumption. This is a good reason why I’m not a capitalist absolutist. It had to be taken to a public vote to give them decent living standards in California (last year’s proposition 2).
However, my position is much like yours – I wouldn’t eat dolphins or primates. I’m a heterotroph like any other animal. And while I recognize that lions don’t mass produce antelope in factory farms, I’m sure the former would also say, given the opportunity, that the latter goes good with butter.
See http://abstract.desktopnexus.com/get/106785
I love octopods, but why do they have to taste so damn good?
Pulpo a la Gallega, anyone? Nom. Nom. Nom.
While fondling your favorite cephalopod, you could wear this.
http://www.cthulhulives.org/store/store.lasso?1=product&2=33196
Weird.
@FatherNature, I think you’ve been Poe’d. The video of the octopus attacking the diver is clearly a gag (for one thing, divers don’t breathe through our masks!), and I’m surprised you would be taken in.
All kinds of life are important to me. I don’t want to be the consumer of any product that comes from an endangered or stressed species, or is harvested in a way that causes more than a minimal impact on the habitat. I don’t like trophy hunting because the animals are taken at their prime reproductive stage.
We must eat something though, so I find christian to be quite tasty if marinated properly, don’t worry, there is an over abundance of them and the christian is born again devoid of intelligence. But, fresh christian baby with a dash of dill, roasted to a sweet golden brown, you can’t go wrong there.
If you want to avoid supporting species eradication, buy nothing with palm oil. The reckless spread of palm oil plantations by planters who know nothing of sustainable agriculture is destroying the habitat of the Sumatran orangutan. They are magnificent creatures who may be extinct in the wild within fifteen years if nothing is done.
Okay, okay, they’re not cephalopods. But primates count for something, don’t they??
Are you sure it’s an octopus? Are you sure it’s not a…cuddlefish [sic]?
Thank you, thank you, I’ll be here all night.