In which my imagination rampages outside the edges of the mundane facts

They’re handing out Rubik’s Cubes to octopuses. This is good training in logic and pattern recognition, and the next step will be to hand them wrenches and welding torches and put them to work assembling underwater habitats for mankind (so think the deluded hu-mans anyway — they’ll actually use them to build lasers and water-filled assault tanks). Brilliant!

Oh, wait. Never mind. It’s actually simply a test for handedness among the octopuses, and they don’t actually expect them to solve the puzzles. Darn. That’s not as exciting.

The reason they don’t expect them to solve the puzzles, of course, is that the octopod solution would probably involve alien geometries and produce a result that might drive anthropoid brains mad.

(via The Great Beyond)

The romance of squid research

You have got to love cephalopod researchers. A rotting carcass, possibly of Architeuthis, is found in California — shredded by sharks, missing its eyes and most of its arms, torn by shrieking seagulls, described as bruised, battered, and chewed up — and the scientists are all “Helloooo, Nurse!”, and you can just imagine one of their hind legs doing a spastic tarantella and their eyes zooming out big as saucers. Heaven for a squid-fan has to be slimy, ripe, and wrapped in long, ropy tentacles, I think.

The wisdom of the cephalopod

That smart guy, Carl Zimmer, has written an article on those smart molluscs, the octopus. I like that his conclusion is that we can’t really judge their intelligence, because it is different than our own.

That’s the same answer I give to questions about the existence of intelligent life in the universe. I suspect that it’s there (but rarer than most astronomers seem to think — intelligence is an extremely uncommon adaptive strategy here on Earth, as is probably likewise elsewhere), but that it will be radically different in intent and action than our own, as different as we are from a squid, or a dolphin, or an elephant, to name a few forms that have evolved large brains. Often, the question of alien intelligence is more like, “Are there people like us out there?”, and I think the answer to that one is clearly no, almost certainly not. There are too many alternative pathways.

How do you make a cephalopod drool?

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research

We’re all familiar with Pavlov’s conditioning experiments with dogs. Dogs were treated to an unconditioned stimulus — something to which they would normally respond with a specific behavior, in this case, meat juice which would cause them to drool. Then they were simultaneously exposed to the unconditioned stimulus and a new stimulus, the conditioned stimulus, that they would learn to associate with the tasty, drool-worthy stimulus — a bell. Afterwards, ringing a bell alone would cause the dogs to make the drooling response. The ability to make such an association is a measure of the learning ability of the animal.

Now…how do we carry out such an experiment on a cephalopod? And can it be done on a cephalopod with a reputation (perhaps undeserved, as we shall see) as a more primitive, less intelligent member of the clade?

The nautilus, Nautilus pompilius despite being a beautiful animal in its own right, is generally regarded as the simplest of the cephalopods, with a small brain lacking the more specialized areas associated with learning and memory. It’s a relatively slow moving beast, drifting up and down through the water column to forage for food. It has primitive eyes, which to visual animals like ourselves seems to be a mark of less sophisticated sensory processing, but it has an elaborate array of tentacles and rhinophores which it uses to probe for food by touch and smell/taste. Compared to big-eyed, swift squid, a nautilus just seems a little sluggish and slow.

So let’s look and see how good a nautilus’s memory might be. First, we need a response to stimuli that we can recognize and measure, equivalent to the drooling of Pavlov’s dogs. While they don’t measurably salivate, the nautilus does have a reaction to the hint of something tasty in the water — it will extend its tentacles and rhinophores, as seen below, in a quantifiable metric called the tentacle extension response, or TER.

i-7be37621e667c883026d43ae4fe35d87-naut_behav.jpg
The scoring system for tentacle extension response (TER) in chambered nautilus. TER was graded every 5 s from a minimum score of 0 to a
maximum score of 3. Each level corresponds to a range of percentage extension relative to the length of the animalʼs hood. Zero is recorded when all
tentacles are retracted into their sheaths. A score of 1 corresponds to an extension of <33% of the hood length. A score of 2 corresponds to extension
between 34% and 66%, and 3 is given when tentacles are extended beyond 67% of hood length.

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