September 11, 2012 • 42 mins
What strange thoughts fill the brains of cephalopods? Do they ponder mysteries in their lightless lairs? Join Julie and Robert as they dive into the fascinating world of cephalopod intelligence, from the crafty octopus to the social cuttlefish and more.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert lamp and I'm Julie Douglas. You
know Julie. Recently, we we're discussing something on here. I
think it was something dolphin related, and we ended up
talking a little bit about the ideosaurus, which do you
(00:28):
remember I I refer to these as fright dolphins because
they kind of look like nightmares dolphin's very sharp rows
of teeth. Right. Yeah, yeah, they're a long extinct now,
but but they're they're interest because they show up in
the fossil record a lot, and and they're like bus size, big,
big creatures. And uh, it was after the podcast was
(00:50):
over I started looking at these guys again and I
happened upon a really fascinating news story that came out
about a year ago. And a number of you've probably
already heard this, but uh, you had a man by
the name of Mark mcminimon, who is a paleontologist at
Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mansachusetts, and he was
(01:11):
speaking at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of
America in Minneapolis, and he was talking specifically about a
site in Las Vegas in the Nevada's Berlin Ittheosaur State Park,
which two hundred million years ago was in a desert
but was a sea floor. So you have all these
really cool fossils, and particularly you have I Thesaurus fossils,
(01:35):
and you have this one area though that is really
perplexed um scientists for a while, where you have remains
of nine different forty five ft Athosaurus um. Back in
the fifties, there was this theory that the that due
to their position, we think they might have died in
shallow water and this was actually a tile flat um
(01:56):
or due to accident old um you know, toxic plankton
looming in the area. But recently there's been a rock
evidence to suggest this these bodies were actually much deeper
underwater than previously thought. So it read mcmentimun to come
up with a very fascinating theory, I mean not just fastening,
just a mind blowing theory and kind of a controversial
(02:18):
theory that we're still still waiting to for for the
rest of the scientific community to officially chime in on. Well,
these fossils had patterns that resemble suckers on a tentacle,
right right, and that was the big mystery. And so
mcmentimun came up with this idea that this crack and
(02:38):
like creature nearly one ft long or thirty meters long,
drowned or broke the neck of the thesaurus and then
just like took them down to his layer. Yes, and
then and then there are two additional layers of interest here. Okay, octopi,
as we'll discussing this podcast another cephal occupied especially are
(03:02):
rather smart creatures. They actually are capable of playing with things.
They get bored and they take things apart, and they
scrunch things up and they uh they can't keep their
hands still, I mean they're tentacles still rather so, uh So,
the argument here is that this ancient cephalopod giant that
dined on the sars in the deep, that that to
(03:25):
hear she also would play with his or her food.
And then there's this added layer that mcmanimum adds to
this where he suggests that these creatures might have actually
that the crack and may have actually formed these dead
ichthusars into the shape of a tentacle that they may
have been playing with their bodies actually created art the
(03:48):
first art like an artistic interpretation of itself, which is uh,
which which is again controversial theory here. But it's just
it's really mind blowing, and it just felt like we
had to mention. Well, I love the idea of it
because I immediately think the most scientific thing I can
think of, which is of course Clash of the Titans.
And I think about, you know, the cracking and being
(04:10):
released from its under original or or the original of course,
which granted that that creature well awesome wasn't like an
actual squid it was, and yeah, yeah, hey, I was
sort of disappointing when it actually did emerge. Yeah, but
it does. It brings to mind creatures like that, the
cracking of myth. It brings to mind Cthulhu. Uh. And
(04:33):
it's intelligent, god like squid in the darkness. And just
the idea that in an age, and in a in
an age with so beyond human experience and in a
place so beyond human experience, that you could have this
intellect capable of of taking these grizzly remains and wrenching
them into its own shape. You know, it's just a well,
(04:54):
and I think the reason why you can't help it
get caught up in this explanation as radical and it's right.
Yet what you're doing is you're you're marrying the brains
that we know about cephalopods with braun to come up
with this idea of them sculpting underwater. Um. But let's
talk about the fact that that there's some criticism obviously
(05:16):
that you know about this UM Yeah, yessing. Well, for
Sartis mcmanimum, he's he's still standing by what he said
and he's working on like official um official studies regarding
this theory. So so in his defense, he hasn't really
had the chance to to really come out full force
(05:38):
with his findings in his theory. He's just he's just
roughly alluded to it at this conference and said I'll
get back to you when I have these finished, and
everyone waits with debated breath. But the critics have already
pointed out that, well, that's a pretty imaginative explanation for
what we're seeing here, and there are other explanations that
don't involve intelligent cephalopod artist in the triastic age. Yeah,
(06:02):
there was there was one person who said that the
hypothesis was a lot, you know, looking at these etchings
that The hypothesis is a lot like looking at clouds
and being able to see what you desire, that this
artifact isn't there, This specimen isn't really that well preserved
in the first place. So there's that. UM. Then there is,
of course the idea that there's no direct evidence of
(06:24):
really large cephalopods at that size um And Glenn Stores,
curator of vertebrate paleontology at Cincinnati Museum Center, told Live
Science that circumstantial evidence is not enough. Totally agree with that. Yeah,
And what migmonimum is really gonna want to have here
is he needs to produce a beak or fossil evidence
of the beak because there because theoretically there could have
(06:46):
been crackings everywhere back then they could have just been
ruling the roofs, but there would have been so few
of them, and they're mostly soft material. And as we've
discussed before, fossilization is not a guaranteed process. It's more
of the exception to the rule that we actually see
fossil evidence of a creature that once lived. Now, I
will play Devil's advocate here and I will mention the
book called krack And by Wendy Williams that that you
(07:09):
lent me and she does talk about this idea of um,
cephalopods is is very mysterious creatures that wore for a
long time in the category of cryptozoology. She says that
even up until like I think the eighteen seventies, they
had a specimen. Uh, but it was until the eighteen
nineties when when the specimen was you know, wildly widely
(07:32):
then vetted, that people began to say, this is a
real thing. So of course you have to produce the
evidence in order to get there. Um. But I did
want to play Devil's advocate a bit to say that
there's there's still you know, this idea that a giant
cephalopod could have existed a long one. It's kind of
a wild theory, but wild theories, like dreams, sometimes come true.
(07:52):
Oh it was beautiful. Um. So okay, we're gonna talk
obviously a lot about cephalopods today because they are fascinating
in because their brains are just a wonder um. In
fact um, you know, the brain of the cephalopod has
really advanced our understanding of ourselves right, our our own
neuroscientists can definitely give a nod to cephalopods um and
(08:16):
even like a gerontology that the study of aging, so
the brain of the cephalopod. It's it's interesting because cephalopods
are really not that far removed from saying you're you're
common gardens slug. But we don't really look to the
garden slug for any kind of staggering intellect. It's a
pretty simple creature and pretty disgusting um that really shouldn't
(08:38):
exist at all. Whereas the cephalopods their jobs, what is
their job? They're like turning up the dirt they're they're making,
they're helping it to be more nutrient rich. Okay, well, disclaimer,
I kind of have a thing against garden slugs. Snails
are fine, and then cephalopods are amazing, even though they're
they're they're all basically buddies and probably email each other
on the weekends. And uh, in the in the cephalopods
(09:00):
of like, hey, sorry, dude, I don't know why I
lamb is such a jerk about climbing on things to
climbing up the domain. But um, like once one gotten
the sink and I almost threw up it was disgusting,
but not a cephalopod. Yeah, so yeah, please don't nail
me slugs people, But but the brain of a cephalopod
is pretty amazing because while compared to the human brain,
(09:23):
it's not really that impressive and it's not that big,
but for an invertebrate and then certainly for for a mosque,
these are amazing brains that they're packing. Also, you have
to keep in mind cephalopods were generally talking about creatures
that live only one to two years, and but they're
still there's still have an incredible brain activity going on well,
(09:44):
and that one to two years is key in studying
aging because you can see it in real time right there. Um.
This is from Science Magazines article tackling brain evolution fall
eight arms short of Martians showing up and offering themselves
up to science, cephalopods are the only example outside of vertebrates,
of how to build a complex, clever brain, says neuroscientists
(10:06):
Cliff rag Cell of the University of Chicago and Illinois.
For that reason, rag Seal says, these creatures have much
to teach us about brain evolution. So just how impressive
is the cephalopod brain? Um? Okay, so yeah, some some
general modern cephalopod stats here. Um, they do have the
most complex brains of any invertebrates. An octopus brain has
fifty to seventy five lobes and at least as many
(10:28):
neurons about one million as a mouse brain, and that
is not taking into the account the smaller brains in
each arm, the still smaller brains called ganglia technically associated
with each sucker. Cephalopods like octopus um or octopi think
we the the what do we decide on octopi as
(10:48):
the plural? Sure, cephalopods like octopi, Uh, they're unique, and
that all these ganglias have condensed, that they form a
centralized brain. And the other thing that's unique is there
are two areas of the brain that have developed that
are specialized for memory storage. And we we see this
even in nautilus. But that's jumping ahead a bit. Um.
(11:11):
So their brains are larger and more condensed, and they
also have an area dedicated to learning. Um. But here's
the coolest thing. There are more neurons and the tentacles
than in the central brains with the ability to make
really lightning fast decisions, right they have to. I mean,
that's really where you get get down to the some
of the reasoning here um specifically with the octopus. Uh
(11:32):
going on and moving into the octopus section of the
podcast here, I guess um. The theory is that since
the octopus has to live in oftentimes like a tropical
coral leaf environment, they're in a very complex environment. These
are this is the these are the streets of like
nineteen seventies in New York. These are this is the jungle,
this is the you know, this is the warriors. And
(11:53):
they have to have a lot of street smarts to survive.
So this is kind of like animal streets smarts. They
have to they have to be dexterious, they have to
be mass there's a disguise. They have to be stealthy,
they have to be killers. They have to be seductive,
well a little seductive. Well there's some seductive Um when
you get into the various coloration and hunting schemes, I
guess you can. You can make that argument. But but
(12:14):
they have to they have to to really be on
their game. And so the arms race is to be
this is not to simply hide, not to simply hunt,
but to to manage all of these skills. And to
do that you need a pretty impressive brain. And UH
and pretty impressive nervous tissue to boot. Yeah, let's talk
about their tool use. We have mentioned this before, but
(12:35):
they are master tool users. Yes, um there there, there's
some fascinating footage you can find online up to of
octopi using coconuts for shelter. Basically a coconut half turn
it up. You got yourself a house, which is not
that big of a level as that revelation for for us,
but for a creature like this, it's pretty that's pretty
phenomenal because tool use is uh is generally a mark
(12:58):
of a pretty advanced organism. But here's just the essentially
a sea slug that is uh, that is not really
a sea slug, but just to the slander it a bit.
This is a creature that that is is akin to
a sea slug, and it is it is figured out
how to use tools. Other examples, you have the blanket octopus,
which is immune to the man of war jellyfish sting.
(13:19):
So what he does he or she does is uh,
the octopus will glide down to the jellyfish, to this
man of war and a rip off a few tentacles,
and then it has this poisonous whip that it can
use to protect itself. In some of the tentacles too,
they float away and there's some bioluminescence involved as well. Right,
it's distract to make it say to the prey, well,
(13:41):
you know, am I going this way? Where am I
going that way? Yeah? I mean it's uh, I mean
it's it's rather simple tool use. They are not uh
and and we have a whole episode on tool use
that if you really want to get into like the
different levels of tool use and what they mean in
terms of a creature's intellect. So they're not doing anything
like like creating true our effects. They're not building bow
(14:01):
and arrows yet, but they are. But they are saying, hey,
that appendage on that creature there's is pretty uh, pretty hostile.
Uh and uh and it makes some pretty colors. I'm
gonna rip that off and I'm gonna use it for
my own purposes. Or that shell of that coconut is
actually pretty useful as a shelter for me. I'm gonna
take it and use it for that. Here here's one
thing that I think they completely lap us in in
(14:23):
terms of our own pincer grasp. As I had mentioned before,
they've got the ganglia on their tentacles and uh so
gangling are controlling every sucker, right, and they have exquisite
control over their body in that way, and they can
fold the two sides of it suckered together to form
a pincer grasp, and so it can do that with
every single one. So it has like a hundred pincer
(14:43):
grasp to our to our one little clumbing. It's pretty
pretty impressive. And like I said earlier, occupy are capable
of playing like their their minds are advanced enough that
they're constantly learning. They're they're they're they're geared to again,
live on this reach, live in the jungle nineteen seventies
New York. So if you take them out of that
nineteen seventies New York and you put them in suburbia,
(15:07):
they're gonna go a little stair crazy and started just
messing with stuff just to be messing with it. And
that's exactly what happens in aquarium environment. The stories are
just numerous. Anytime you if you talk to someone who's
working in an aquarium, or you know, look up any
accounts online and people say, oh, yeah, we found out
that this this octopus was sneaking out of the the
aquarium at night and eating sharks, or we we have
(15:30):
to constantly keep the octopus from taking the entire aquarium apart,
taking apart, uh you know, suction equipment, taking apart, cameras,
taking apart, submarine taking apart a robot submarine in one
of the tanks, part by part, which I thought was awesome.
There was other another account, um that one of the
(15:51):
keepers had given um some of the octopus, uh, some
shrimp and there was a slightly spoiled one, and so
the octopus actually stuffed it down the drain, whelming maintaining
eye contact with her as if to say, really, you're
gonna try to pass that by me. Yeah, And we've
actually studied this too, it's not all just like uh
(16:12):
sort of back room accounts. Uh. Read an interview with
Jennifer math Or, who's a comparative psychologist University of Lethbridge
in a bart of Canada, and um, she was part
of an experiment where they gave a pair of octopy
in an empty tank, a floating pill bottle. That's it,
just a floating pill bottle and two board occupy and uh,
(16:33):
they watched them in a seat like in twenty different
times like in a sequence. Uh, they watched them do
the She said, exactly the kind of thing that we
would do if we were to, say, bounce a ball
off a wall, like Steve McQueen in The Great Escape.
Just out of boredom. They started just bouncing this stuff
pill bottle around and flipping it around the tank, which
you know, of course, when you're in captivity, that's that's
(16:55):
going to happen. They're going to go a bit store crazy.
So it's important to have things to enrich and and
certainly they've shown themselves capable of solving mazes. Uh. They
like puzzles that Generally, if you see an octopus on
display and an aquarium, it will not be an empty container.
They'll have various things to interact with. They will be
given food inside of a toy of some kind where
they have to actually work at it because they're active
(17:18):
creatures and they need an active environment. Or sometimes they
are asked to predict the World Cup winner, like our
friend Paul the octopus who have born January eight died
October two, ten um. Anyone who follows um soccer or
cephalopod h news probably caught this one. But Paul lived
(17:43):
at the Sea Life Center in Oberhausen, Germany, and they
had this, uh, this gimmick set up where um he
was he was able to correctly predict the winner of
each of Germany's national football teams seven matches in the
two thousand ten f i f A World Cup as
well was the outcome of the final? Um didn't he
have like the for the outcome of the final wasn't
(18:06):
like accuracy? Yea and yeah. And then the other level
that you just said before that was like a six
or six yeah, And it was based on like where
you would pick food from one or one of two places.
It wasn't It's not like the octop I had a
Twitter account or a blog he was he was just
making basically a random choice. And then that's the big
criticism here. He wasn't actually making predictions and and there
(18:29):
was all there also been accusations that there was some
bias involved on the part of the people caring for
the octopus. But the food container had the team's logo
on it, right, Yeah, but but it was still an
exciting day in uh in cephalopod media, Hey, I mean
I gave some attention to cephalopods. So there you go.
That was a win. All right, Well, we mentioned the
nautilus earlier. Yes, so let's let's discuss the nautils, and
(18:52):
Nautilus is a much older organism and it's less advanced,
it's less bright compared to other cephal pods. It's tiny. Yeah,
they're the soul surviving family of an not alloids in general,
which includes like the nautilus and the paper nautilus, which
we mentioned in the previous episode. Soul surviving members of
(19:13):
the externally shelled cephalopod family that live that thrived in
tropical oceans four dred and fifty fifty million years ago. Yeah.
They diverge from the from their cousins squid, octopus and
cutlefish four hundred million years ago, which makes them more
i should say, on the tiny scale in comparison. Yeah.
And they're fascinating organisms, just beautiful to to look at,
(19:34):
and the shells are amazing. But they have tiny, tiny
brains and they lack that dedicated learning region that we
see in other cephalopods. Yet what's amazing is that we've
in experiments, we've shown that they do have a form
of short term memory that we're still trying to really
understand how it works. Because they shouldn't really be capable
of any kind of higher brain function. UM. There again,
(19:57):
they're kind of the dull knife and the cephalopod drawer um.
But in experiments they found that if they use flashes
of light UM paired with with the food, they'll actually
be able to train the cephalopod to extend its tentacles.
Whenever there's that light, it begins to associate the light
with food, and it will retain this memory for about
(20:20):
twenty four hours and then it's gone. So these guys
are kind of like a guy Pierce in Memento. They
only have the short term memory and then it fades. Well,
what I liked is that I get that right Memento. Ah,
well Memento, everything is in sort of reverse right like yeah, um.
(20:41):
But I really like the way new scientists described it.
It's called simple minded natolyst reveals Flash of Memory. That's
the article title. They say that first of all, the
food that was offered with the flash of light was
an irresistible mixture of pulverized telapia heads and water, So
the first of all it was ei um. And then
they said that that when um, when they were reacting
(21:05):
to it, that their tentacles were crazy. Now keep in
mind too that in comparison to the octopus is eight
arms um that Annalist has for for the females fifty
arms and males have nineties. So it is quite a
display when they are waving them around. Um. And that
they were panting too, which was interesting, the panting nautilus
(21:28):
by Rabbit Lamb. All right, well, we're gonna take a
quick break and when we come back, we're going to
deal with some squid intelligence. Specifically, we're going to talk
about the Humboldt squid also known as the blows rocks.
All right, we're back. The Humboldt squid also known as
(21:49):
a jumbo squid, also known again as say it for
us there much better than me? Yes, uh. In fact,
they were named that by Nexkin fisherman who who noted
their very aggressive behavior. Yeah occasionally. I mean their tales
of sailors dying at the hands of these guys, right,
I mean though they slit their throats. I don't think
(22:12):
they have shanks. They don't have shanks, but anyway they
have there have been some definite violent encounters with with
Humboldt squid, and they have this reputation as being a
very aggressive creature. Now there's been some fascinating experiments where
they like put they take decoy Humboldt squid down into
the deep and they actually they're able to explore. Then
they're not just mindlessly aggressive creatures and they're still very
(22:34):
intelligent animals. But um, under the right circumstances, they can
be extremely aggressive. But what's more interesting here for us
as we're discussing cephalopod intelligence, is that the idea that
they are able to coordinate with each other when yeah, yeah,
they hunt in schools containing as many as twelve hundred
other squid. They swim at speeds from three to fifteen
(22:55):
miles an hour, and they can eject themselves from the
water and glide through the air to escape nitors. Yeah yeah,
they have huge brains for their body size. And uh
and it's been suggested that they might actually be as
smart as dogs. Oh that's what William Gilly, who who
is featured in the book Cracking by Wendy Williams, actually
talks about that, and he studies them of course, um
(23:16):
it has a research center. But uh, yeah, as smart
as dogs, he claims. And uh he even says that
or not. He doesn't, but Wendy Williams does says that
divers Scott Castle once sall when fiddling with a latch
of an underwater cage he had just closed. So so
they have that same curious nature, that same problem solving ability. Yeah,
(23:38):
this is from the National Zoo form equals functioned. Uh.
These squid actually have two large optic lobes and the
squid brain, and that testifies the importance of vision for
locating praise for the prey for these guys and gals
and um, you know, they also rely on taste and
texture to locate food, and they have highly developed lobes
for storing chemical intact information. So that's interesting to hear
(24:02):
about the diver who was witnessing the squid trying to
open the lock, and the idea that you know it
is it has this ability to plan, and it has
this ability to store the tactile information and try to
figure out this lock. There are accounts of them actually
stealing car keys and driving as far as Mexico City. Yeah,
(24:24):
I read that. Definitely. Supposedly there's a there's a whole
pack of them that have like an apartment there. I
don't know what they do for a living. But oh fish,
of course, yeah, of course, um, and real quick, we
we mentioned the colossal squid in our our other episode
that we recorded this week on gigantism. But I found
(24:45):
it really interesting that the the the brain of the
colossal squid is actually donut shaped and the esophagus passes
straight through the center of it. So it's just a
different way of thinking about the brain of an organism
and how it fits into the overall morphology. Well, and
I think a lot of times too that we come
at it from our human centric um fashion and we
(25:07):
don't necessarily think about cephalopods um in this way. But um,
it is interesting to see that their mouths are encircled
with arms, whereas we sort of think about our own
flailing tentacles on either side of us. And that does
certainly um the color, the way or actually order the
way that their brains are arranged. So there is this
(25:30):
difference of arrangement in the in the brains of cephalopods
obviously versus humans. And we already talked about ganglion on tentacles,
but then you start to look at the eyes of cephalopods,
and this is where there is a major difference. There's
a lot of similarity, right. Cephalopods have camera eye camera
like eyes like ours, with a lens that projects images
onto the retina. The difference between humans and cephalopods, or
(25:53):
vertebrates and cephalopods in this case is that our many
armed friends don't have blind spots like we do, because
when we look at an image, there's a blind spot
in the middle, and that is owing to the fiber
optic nerve which is going in front of the retina
as opposed to behind the retina like a cephalopod. And
this is actually an upgrade. This is you know, this
is an advantage. This is something that we don't have
(26:15):
um And I also wanted to mention that another difference
is that cephalopods have horizontal pupils. So because the eyes
can rotate thanks to a balancing organ that they have
called a statusist, they can always keep their pupils horizontal
and it doesn't matter what position their body is, it's
(26:37):
always horizontal. So they just have fantastic visual coverage of
the world around it. Yeah, their brain can interpret visual
information no matter what their position is. They don't have
to account for the position of the eye like we do.
If you think about it. If we turn around quickly, uh,
you know we have we are very disoriented and we
have to sit there and figure out our location in
(26:57):
space before we can begin to take in data in
a way that's meaningful to us. But not these guys.
They can, I mean, this is an amazing piece of
machinery for them. They can also see polarized light and
this allows them to communicate by creating changing patterns on
their skin and uh, and this I thought was fascinating. Um.
(27:18):
The reason for this that they can see the polarized
light is because the sephalo cephalopod eyes started out as
light sensitive skin cells that folded in words, to form
the structure that they have now, rather than as an
extension of the brain as as we have. So that's
again another difference between the way ways that their brains
(27:39):
and eyes work. So while we've both species, or not
just species, but both vertebrates and squid, they have reached
sort of similar conclusions with with their eyes, but from
different starting points. Yeah. Just to know that the eyes
that the root material there came from from skin, from
(28:00):
skin cells is very interesting, fascinating. So let's move on
to the last real cephalopod. We're gonna discuss here um
and we're really talking about the faberge egg of the
cephalopod world, the cuttlefish. Now, back in the stuff in
the Science Flave days right at the end, we did
(28:20):
in an episode on cuttlefish, and there's a lot of
great information that's cuttlefish specific in there. But we're gonna
talk about it a little bit here, especially as it
as it deals with intelligence, because the cuttlefish has one
of the largest brain to body size ratios of all
invertebrates and UH, and you see a lot of the
the the the really impressive attributes UH involving intelligence and
(28:43):
nervous systems in cephalopods are really highlighted in the cuttle
fish is design because you have uh rapid shifts in color. Uh.
They they're fairly social creatures. I mean, they're not social
and in the in a way that's really comparable to say,
you know, dogs or or primates, but there are there
(29:03):
are some very interesting social interactions here. There's a certain
amount of communication that takes place through the use of
their colorful skin, which contains these chromatophors that can lighten
and darken, and they can shift just really rapidly from
different colors and intensities, so it red, black, and yellow
(29:24):
are some of the chromatophores that emerge. But in addition
to that, there's this luminosity, so it gives a greater range.
And in fact with with other sea creatures like fish,
they have four rods in their eyes and they're able
to perceive more color than say our three rodded eyes.
So when when we see these incredible displays of color
(29:45):
from cephalopods, keep in mind that we're not even really
seeing the full spectrum, right, And these creatures that cuttle
fish are just remarkable to to see at an aquarium. Now,
generally you have to wait for a large pack of
people with cell phone cameras to get out of the
way because you go to an aquarium you want to
take a really bad, direct flash cellphone photo of everything there.
(30:07):
Apparently that's the apparently the big thing these days. But
if you can actually get the tank to yourself for
a little bit, they're just really fascinating to watch the
color shifts that they kind of hover. For starters, they're not,
they're a lot they're a lot more interesting to look
at an aquarium because octopi uh you know, you may
catch them when they're active, but they're they're gonna be
sticking to the corners and and and all that. Where
(30:29):
the cuttlefish is going to hover out there in in
in the middle, and he's gonna kind of here, she's
gonna kind of hover around, has this little hover skirt
that goes around the edges. Um. And then they're gonna
slowly change colors, and then there may be a drastic
change in color. Yeah, and all of that is predicated
on the fact that they are controlled by nerves, so
(30:50):
it gives them that instantaneous color change. And when we
talk about those chromatoporce we are talking about tens of
thousands of organs here that are controlling that. And so
think of it similar to the way that pixels form
on images of a computer screen. That's what you're seeing
on their skin basically. Um, you talked about their communication
and their their level of social ness, and I wanted
(31:14):
to bring up Gene Bowl of Penn miller's Ville University.
She's a scientist and she says that they the males
have all kinds of really impressive displays and that in fact,
the cuttlefish can signultaneously just one side of his butdet
body to show a dominant display towards other males, while
(31:34):
um the other side of his body shows a calm
display towards a potential mate. So really aggressive pattern on
the left where where a foe is. And on the right,
I don't know exactly what it would be. Let's say
a little heart design. It's not really hard, but it's
kind of like he's flexing the muscle and looking all
bad on one side, but then he's he's kind of
smiling and winking out of the other eye. And this
(31:55):
is interesting. During mating, they display a zebra pattern, which
I just automatically always associate with wrestlers bodybuilders because always
wearing the pants with the zebra patterns are popular with
some of the boys. But but this is intricate, right,
I mean, this is ah, this is a whole language
(32:16):
that we don't necessarily have access to, that we can
witness and it can tell us something about ourselves to
some degree, but we can't even fully imagine we don't
have the language ourselves to it. There's another interesting thing
that goes on with cephalopod I mean not sephal pod,
cuttlefish mating that's really fascinating. And that's where you'll have
these dominant cuttlefish, like these big, brutish looking cuttlefish that
(32:39):
are that are not the cute little guys that you
didn't see the aquarium, the big, rugged, old man catulu
looking cuttlefish, and they're they're really bossy and they're getting
the fights over the females because you know, they're like
they really want to mate with the with the females.
But then you'll have the smaller males that will that
will disguise themselves as females, like they'll like a lot
of cephalopods. The cuttle fish has a has a lot
(33:01):
of control over just how drug queens I'm thinking boosom bodies. Yeah, yeah,
it's that kind of thing. Like they know that they
don't stand a chance walking in there as a small
male because they're just gonna get beat up and tore up,
and then the big male is gonna mate. So they
disguised themselves as a female and then they move in close.
And then the big beefy cuttlefish he looks at this
and it's like, oh, yeah, it looks like I got
(33:23):
two days for the night. Uh. You know, that's a
total win. For me. Meanwhile, the disguised smaller male actually
gets in there in mates with the female. Okay, so
you really just did um talk about the premise for
the sitcom Boom Bodies was Queen. Well, actually, the premise
was really that the rent was much more or a
favorite at this all women's boarding. But they use that
(33:45):
to their advantage to to advance their agendas with the
ladies there. The other really awesome thing about cuttlefish, um
that that that I may have mentioned on here before
is their use of ptomorphs, which means false form. And
what they'll do is a pseudomorph is a bubble of
(34:05):
ink surrounded by mucus, and it occupies the same amount
of space as the cuttle fish. It's a decoy. So
what will happen If they're in a situation where they're
they're threatened, they will shift their color suddenly to where
they're really dark like the surrounding. Then they'll shoot out
the pseudomorph and then they'll they'll turbo out of there
with their jets. Yeah. Their jet propulsion, by the way,
(34:26):
is amazing. So they create a copy of themselves more
or less. I mean, it's not it's not like an
artistic expression. But they'll they'll create, you know, appropriate mass
replica of themselves that is just ain't conside of mucus,
and then they'll jet away really fast at the same time,
so it's like slide of hand where they leave the
decoy where they just were and they're already jetting away.
And then when something tries to eat these pseudomorph of course,
(34:49):
then they just get a whole bunch of ink, which
also contains dopamine and el dopa, a precursor to the dopamine,
which may temporarily paralyze the sense of smell uh the
creature that so it's just a fantastic uh and deceptive
means of self defense in terms of their intelligence again
gene bowl Uh. The scientists devised a couple of experiments
(35:12):
to study this, rather than just sort of the stimulus
response experiments that you see sometimes um again. In the
book Crack and Winny, Williams describes this experiment as a
tank in the shape of a clock with escape routes
two of them, only one open at a time, and
that's at the three o'clock position, and the six o'clock
excuse me, the nine o'clock, three and nine three and nine.
(35:33):
And so the cuttlefish enter through the six o'clock position
and then immediately they see a queue at the twelve
o'clock position. So the que is either algae or brick.
Algae would indicate like, hey, on the right, that's your
escape hatch. Um the brick would indicate on the left,
that's your that's going to be your escape hatch. So
(35:53):
they actually get to learn these cues that hey, okay,
when I see the algae, I know to take a
ninety degree turn to the right. And it's fascinating. She said,
this was um, this process of if then propositions that
we learned, and that in humans that's represented as the
first steps in development of logic and our ability to
(36:14):
use reason and decision making. It's fascinating, alright. So one
final squid to mention, and this one is is even
even more dubious than the idea of of ancient krakens
creating art out of dead right dolphins, and that is
the idea of the mega squid, which was featured on
the TV show Future Future is Wild uh and which
(36:36):
you can believe occasionally catch on various Discovery Channel, UM
Discovery Channel or Animal Planet just check local listings that
pops up from time to time. But it was this
you know, sspeculative episode where they're talking about the future.
What if humans weren't around, what might evolve and fill
that void? What would become the dominant species? And so
(36:57):
they had some some c g I stuff going on
and some some fabulous ideas of what might happen. And
one of the cooler things that they introduced was a
mega squid, which was a twelve foot tall, eight ton
terrestrial air breathing squid that roams the northern forests of
a humanless Earth. And it's a pretty cool design. Mean,
it's on one level's kind of ridiculous because with the
(37:20):
whole air pressure issue first of all, right, going from
from from the the the pressure in the ocean to land. Yeah,
it's it's crazy to think. But that their their argument
was that it's not just a situation of a giant
squid crawling out or a giant octopus crawling out of
the water. It would have been like a slow evolutionary
(37:40):
procession years later. Yeah, And they and it had legs,
which they they made the case that each of these legs,
which looked kind of like an elephant leg Uh contain
a network of circular and vertical muscles that form these
limbs and make them strong enough to carry this eight
ton weight. Uh. They have vocal sac that vibrates to
(38:04):
produce sound. That was the other thing that they came
up with for the mega squid. And uh they also
have two large tentacles that they grab things out of
the woods to eat. So it's kind of neat. It's
it's like I said, don't don't make any any hard
vegas bets on on mega squids taking over the planet
(38:24):
any time in the distant future even, But but it's
a cool idea, and it's it's interesting to think of
cephalopods not merely as this interesting creature confined to the ocean,
but one of ours more remarkable creatures that maybe could
become the primary player in a future Well in that context,
it is really interesting to to imagine what the brain
(38:47):
would look like once it became terrestrial, because as Bull
had said before, is that one of the things that's
really exciting to her about sufflage seplode intelligence is that
we know that their relatives are arms and snails. Yeah,
not not so smart. They're um so whatever happened to
the cephalo cephalopods was different, and she wants to get
(39:08):
to the bottom of why they're using their intelligence, Why
why their brains developed in the way they that they did,
and um, what does that tell us about ourselves? As
we discussed in the Gigantism episode, as animals get bigger,
they have fewer predators and and certainly the mega squid
is not going to have the survival challenge that the
(39:31):
smaller cephalopods have evolved to deal with. So you can
imagine this thing might be pretty stupid. Yeah, I mean intellectually,
it just might. And there might not be a lot
going on because I don't have to do is wander
around the forest and eat other c g I creatures.
So little Jar Jar here, you know, all right? As
we close out here our episode on the Mind of
(39:52):
the Crack, and I thought it would be fun to
bring in Jonathan Strickling, co host of the Tech Stuff podcast,
to read The Cracking by Alfred Lloyd. Yes and his
poem is based on an old Norse legend of gigantic
sea monsters who prey on ships and drag them underneath
the ocean, below the thunders of the other deep, far
(40:15):
far beneath in the abysmal sea, his ancient, dreamless, uninvaded
sleep the krack and sleepeth. Faintest sunlights flee about his
shadowy sides above, and swell huge sponges of millennial growth
in height and far away into the sickly light from
many a wondrous, grotten, secret cell, unnumbered and enormous polypi
(40:38):
winnow with giant arms the slumbering green. They're happy lane
for ages and will lie battening upon huge seaworms in
his sleep until the latter fire shall heat the deep. Then,
once by man and angels to be seen in roaring,
he shall rise and on the surface die. So there
(41:03):
you go. Fantastic reading from Jonathan Strickland if you if
you haven't checked out tech Stuff, be sure to check
that out. It's a great podcast. UH. Chris and Jonathan
tackle all sorts of gadgety, techy nerdy topics in UH
in awesome form, and they are wonderful punsters. So if
you have something you would like to share with us
(41:23):
about the mind of the kracking, about the possibility that
this cracking theory is is true, or maybe you have
thoughts about the mega squid. Maybe you have worked with
the cephalopods at one point or another and have some
some yeah, or you know, if you have some occupied
escate stories, let us know about those. If you have
ever um snuck away from work and left a bunch
(41:48):
of squid ink inside of a thin layer of mucus
in your place as a decoy, we would love to
hear about that as well. You can find us on
Facebook where we are stuff to blow your mind, and
you can find on Twitter where our handles blow the mind,
and you can drop us a line at blow the
Mind at discovery dot com. For more on this and
(42:13):
thousands of other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert lamp and I'm Julie Douglas. You
know Julie. Recently, we we're discussing something on here. I
think it was something dolphin related, and we ended up
talking a little bit about the ideosaurus, which do you
(00:28):
remember I I refer to these as fright dolphins because
they kind of look like nightmares dolphin's very sharp rows
of teeth. Right. Yeah, yeah, they're a long extinct now,
but but they're they're interest because they show up in
the fossil record a lot, and and they're like bus size, big,
big creatures. And uh, it was after the podcast was
(00:50):
over I started looking at these guys again and I
happened upon a really fascinating news story that came out
about a year ago. And a number of you've probably
already heard this, but uh, you had a man by
the name of Mark mcminimon, who is a paleontologist at
Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mansachusetts, and he was
(01:11):
speaking at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of
America in Minneapolis, and he was talking specifically about a
site in Las Vegas in the Nevada's Berlin Ittheosaur State Park,
which two hundred million years ago was in a desert
but was a sea floor. So you have all these
really cool fossils, and particularly you have I Thesaurus fossils,
(01:35):
and you have this one area though that is really
perplexed um scientists for a while, where you have remains
of nine different forty five ft Athosaurus um. Back in
the fifties, there was this theory that the that due
to their position, we think they might have died in
shallow water and this was actually a tile flat um
(01:56):
or due to accident old um you know, toxic plankton
looming in the area. But recently there's been a rock
evidence to suggest this these bodies were actually much deeper
underwater than previously thought. So it read mcmentimun to come
up with a very fascinating theory, I mean not just fastening,
just a mind blowing theory and kind of a controversial
(02:18):
theory that we're still still waiting to for for the
rest of the scientific community to officially chime in on. Well,
these fossils had patterns that resemble suckers on a tentacle,
right right, and that was the big mystery. And so
mcmentimun came up with this idea that this crack and
(02:38):
like creature nearly one ft long or thirty meters long,
drowned or broke the neck of the thesaurus and then
just like took them down to his layer. Yes, and
then and then there are two additional layers of interest here. Okay, octopi,
as we'll discussing this podcast another cephal occupied especially are
(03:02):
rather smart creatures. They actually are capable of playing with things.
They get bored and they take things apart, and they
scrunch things up and they uh they can't keep their
hands still, I mean they're tentacles still rather so, uh So,
the argument here is that this ancient cephalopod giant that
dined on the sars in the deep, that that to
(03:25):
hear she also would play with his or her food.
And then there's this added layer that mcmanimum adds to
this where he suggests that these creatures might have actually
that the crack and may have actually formed these dead
ichthusars into the shape of a tentacle that they may
have been playing with their bodies actually created art the
(03:48):
first art like an artistic interpretation of itself, which is uh,
which which is again controversial theory here. But it's just
it's really mind blowing, and it just felt like we
had to mention. Well, I love the idea of it
because I immediately think the most scientific thing I can
think of, which is of course Clash of the Titans.
And I think about, you know, the cracking and being
(04:10):
released from its under original or or the original of course,
which granted that that creature well awesome wasn't like an
actual squid it was, and yeah, yeah, hey, I was
sort of disappointing when it actually did emerge. Yeah, but
it does. It brings to mind creatures like that, the
cracking of myth. It brings to mind Cthulhu. Uh. And
(04:33):
it's intelligent, god like squid in the darkness. And just
the idea that in an age, and in a in
an age with so beyond human experience and in a
place so beyond human experience, that you could have this
intellect capable of of taking these grizzly remains and wrenching
them into its own shape. You know, it's just a well,
(04:54):
and I think the reason why you can't help it
get caught up in this explanation as radical and it's right.
Yet what you're doing is you're you're marrying the brains
that we know about cephalopods with braun to come up
with this idea of them sculpting underwater. Um. But let's
talk about the fact that that there's some criticism obviously
(05:16):
that you know about this UM Yeah, yessing. Well, for
Sartis mcmanimum, he's he's still standing by what he said
and he's working on like official um official studies regarding
this theory. So so in his defense, he hasn't really
had the chance to to really come out full force
(05:38):
with his findings in his theory. He's just he's just
roughly alluded to it at this conference and said I'll
get back to you when I have these finished, and
everyone waits with debated breath. But the critics have already
pointed out that, well, that's a pretty imaginative explanation for
what we're seeing here, and there are other explanations that
don't involve intelligent cephalopod artist in the triastic age. Yeah,
(06:02):
there was there was one person who said that the
hypothesis was a lot, you know, looking at these etchings
that The hypothesis is a lot like looking at clouds
and being able to see what you desire, that this
artifact isn't there, This specimen isn't really that well preserved
in the first place. So there's that. UM. Then there is,
of course the idea that there's no direct evidence of
(06:24):
really large cephalopods at that size um And Glenn Stores,
curator of vertebrate paleontology at Cincinnati Museum Center, told Live
Science that circumstantial evidence is not enough. Totally agree with that. Yeah,
And what migmonimum is really gonna want to have here
is he needs to produce a beak or fossil evidence
of the beak because there because theoretically there could have
(06:46):
been crackings everywhere back then they could have just been
ruling the roofs, but there would have been so few
of them, and they're mostly soft material. And as we've
discussed before, fossilization is not a guaranteed process. It's more
of the exception to the rule that we actually see
fossil evidence of a creature that once lived. Now, I
will play Devil's advocate here and I will mention the
book called krack And by Wendy Williams that that you
(07:09):
lent me and she does talk about this idea of um,
cephalopods is is very mysterious creatures that wore for a
long time in the category of cryptozoology. She says that
even up until like I think the eighteen seventies, they
had a specimen. Uh, but it was until the eighteen
nineties when when the specimen was you know, wildly widely
(07:32):
then vetted, that people began to say, this is a
real thing. So of course you have to produce the
evidence in order to get there. Um. But I did
want to play Devil's advocate a bit to say that
there's there's still you know, this idea that a giant
cephalopod could have existed a long one. It's kind of
a wild theory, but wild theories, like dreams, sometimes come true.
(07:52):
Oh it was beautiful. Um. So okay, we're gonna talk
obviously a lot about cephalopods today because they are fascinating
in because their brains are just a wonder um. In
fact um, you know, the brain of the cephalopod has
really advanced our understanding of ourselves right, our our own
neuroscientists can definitely give a nod to cephalopods um and
(08:16):
even like a gerontology that the study of aging, so
the brain of the cephalopod. It's it's interesting because cephalopods
are really not that far removed from saying you're you're
common gardens slug. But we don't really look to the
garden slug for any kind of staggering intellect. It's a
pretty simple creature and pretty disgusting um that really shouldn't
(08:38):
exist at all. Whereas the cephalopods their jobs, what is
their job? They're like turning up the dirt they're they're making,
they're helping it to be more nutrient rich. Okay, well, disclaimer,
I kind of have a thing against garden slugs. Snails
are fine, and then cephalopods are amazing, even though they're
they're they're all basically buddies and probably email each other
on the weekends. And uh, in the in the cephalopods
(09:00):
of like, hey, sorry, dude, I don't know why I
lamb is such a jerk about climbing on things to
climbing up the domain. But um, like once one gotten
the sink and I almost threw up it was disgusting,
but not a cephalopod. Yeah, so yeah, please don't nail
me slugs people, But but the brain of a cephalopod
is pretty amazing because while compared to the human brain,
(09:23):
it's not really that impressive and it's not that big,
but for an invertebrate and then certainly for for a mosque,
these are amazing brains that they're packing. Also, you have
to keep in mind cephalopods were generally talking about creatures
that live only one to two years, and but they're
still there's still have an incredible brain activity going on well,
(09:44):
and that one to two years is key in studying
aging because you can see it in real time right there. Um.
This is from Science Magazines article tackling brain evolution fall
eight arms short of Martians showing up and offering themselves
up to science, cephalopods are the only example outside of vertebrates,
of how to build a complex, clever brain, says neuroscientists
(10:06):
Cliff rag Cell of the University of Chicago and Illinois.
For that reason, rag Seal says, these creatures have much
to teach us about brain evolution. So just how impressive
is the cephalopod brain? Um? Okay, so yeah, some some
general modern cephalopod stats here. Um, they do have the
most complex brains of any invertebrates. An octopus brain has
fifty to seventy five lobes and at least as many
(10:28):
neurons about one million as a mouse brain, and that
is not taking into the account the smaller brains in
each arm, the still smaller brains called ganglia technically associated
with each sucker. Cephalopods like octopus um or octopi think
we the the what do we decide on octopi as
(10:48):
the plural? Sure, cephalopods like octopi, Uh, they're unique, and
that all these ganglias have condensed, that they form a
centralized brain. And the other thing that's unique is there
are two areas of the brain that have developed that
are specialized for memory storage. And we we see this
even in nautilus. But that's jumping ahead a bit. Um.
(11:11):
So their brains are larger and more condensed, and they
also have an area dedicated to learning. Um. But here's
the coolest thing. There are more neurons and the tentacles
than in the central brains with the ability to make
really lightning fast decisions, right they have to. I mean,
that's really where you get get down to the some
of the reasoning here um specifically with the octopus. Uh
(11:32):
going on and moving into the octopus section of the
podcast here, I guess um. The theory is that since
the octopus has to live in oftentimes like a tropical
coral leaf environment, they're in a very complex environment. These
are this is the these are the streets of like
nineteen seventies in New York. These are this is the jungle,
this is the you know, this is the warriors. And
(11:53):
they have to have a lot of street smarts to survive.
So this is kind of like animal streets smarts. They
have to they have to be dexterious, they have to
be mass there's a disguise. They have to be stealthy,
they have to be killers. They have to be seductive,
well a little seductive. Well there's some seductive Um when
you get into the various coloration and hunting schemes, I
guess you can. You can make that argument. But but
(12:14):
they have to they have to to really be on
their game. And so the arms race is to be
this is not to simply hide, not to simply hunt,
but to to manage all of these skills. And to
do that you need a pretty impressive brain. And UH
and pretty impressive nervous tissue to boot. Yeah, let's talk
about their tool use. We have mentioned this before, but
(12:35):
they are master tool users. Yes, um there there, there's
some fascinating footage you can find online up to of
octopi using coconuts for shelter. Basically a coconut half turn
it up. You got yourself a house, which is not
that big of a level as that revelation for for us,
but for a creature like this, it's pretty that's pretty
phenomenal because tool use is uh is generally a mark
(12:58):
of a pretty advanced organism. But here's just the essentially
a sea slug that is uh, that is not really
a sea slug, but just to the slander it a bit.
This is a creature that that is is akin to
a sea slug, and it is it is figured out
how to use tools. Other examples, you have the blanket octopus,
which is immune to the man of war jellyfish sting.
(13:19):
So what he does he or she does is uh,
the octopus will glide down to the jellyfish, to this
man of war and a rip off a few tentacles,
and then it has this poisonous whip that it can
use to protect itself. In some of the tentacles too,
they float away and there's some bioluminescence involved as well. Right,
it's distract to make it say to the prey, well,
(13:41):
you know, am I going this way? Where am I
going that way? Yeah? I mean it's uh, I mean
it's it's rather simple tool use. They are not uh
and and we have a whole episode on tool use
that if you really want to get into like the
different levels of tool use and what they mean in
terms of a creature's intellect. So they're not doing anything
like like creating true our effects. They're not building bow
(14:01):
and arrows yet, but they are. But they are saying, hey,
that appendage on that creature there's is pretty uh, pretty hostile.
Uh and uh and it makes some pretty colors. I'm
gonna rip that off and I'm gonna use it for
my own purposes. Or that shell of that coconut is
actually pretty useful as a shelter for me. I'm gonna
take it and use it for that. Here here's one
thing that I think they completely lap us in in
(14:23):
terms of our own pincer grasp. As I had mentioned before,
they've got the ganglia on their tentacles and uh so
gangling are controlling every sucker, right, and they have exquisite
control over their body in that way, and they can
fold the two sides of it suckered together to form
a pincer grasp, and so it can do that with
every single one. So it has like a hundred pincer
(14:43):
grasp to our to our one little clumbing. It's pretty
pretty impressive. And like I said earlier, occupy are capable
of playing like their their minds are advanced enough that
they're constantly learning. They're they're they're they're geared to again,
live on this reach, live in the jungle nineteen seventies
New York. So if you take them out of that
nineteen seventies New York and you put them in suburbia,
(15:07):
they're gonna go a little stair crazy and started just
messing with stuff just to be messing with it. And
that's exactly what happens in aquarium environment. The stories are
just numerous. Anytime you if you talk to someone who's
working in an aquarium, or you know, look up any
accounts online and people say, oh, yeah, we found out
that this this octopus was sneaking out of the the
aquarium at night and eating sharks, or we we have
(15:30):
to constantly keep the octopus from taking the entire aquarium apart,
taking apart, uh you know, suction equipment, taking apart, cameras,
taking apart, submarine taking apart a robot submarine in one
of the tanks, part by part, which I thought was awesome.
There was other another account, um that one of the
(15:51):
keepers had given um some of the octopus, uh, some
shrimp and there was a slightly spoiled one, and so
the octopus actually stuffed it down the drain, whelming maintaining
eye contact with her as if to say, really, you're
gonna try to pass that by me. Yeah, And we've
actually studied this too, it's not all just like uh
(16:12):
sort of back room accounts. Uh. Read an interview with
Jennifer math Or, who's a comparative psychologist University of Lethbridge
in a bart of Canada, and um, she was part
of an experiment where they gave a pair of octopy
in an empty tank, a floating pill bottle. That's it,
just a floating pill bottle and two board occupy and uh,
(16:33):
they watched them in a seat like in twenty different
times like in a sequence. Uh, they watched them do
the She said, exactly the kind of thing that we
would do if we were to, say, bounce a ball
off a wall, like Steve McQueen in The Great Escape.
Just out of boredom. They started just bouncing this stuff
pill bottle around and flipping it around the tank, which
you know, of course, when you're in captivity, that's that's
(16:55):
going to happen. They're going to go a bit store crazy.
So it's important to have things to enrich and and
certainly they've shown themselves capable of solving mazes. Uh. They
like puzzles that Generally, if you see an octopus on
display and an aquarium, it will not be an empty container.
They'll have various things to interact with. They will be
given food inside of a toy of some kind where
they have to actually work at it because they're active
(17:18):
creatures and they need an active environment. Or sometimes they
are asked to predict the World Cup winner, like our
friend Paul the octopus who have born January eight died
October two, ten um. Anyone who follows um soccer or
cephalopod h news probably caught this one. But Paul lived
(17:43):
at the Sea Life Center in Oberhausen, Germany, and they
had this, uh, this gimmick set up where um he
was he was able to correctly predict the winner of
each of Germany's national football teams seven matches in the
two thousand ten f i f A World Cup as
well was the outcome of the final? Um didn't he
have like the for the outcome of the final wasn't
(18:06):
like accuracy? Yea and yeah. And then the other level
that you just said before that was like a six
or six yeah, And it was based on like where
you would pick food from one or one of two places.
It wasn't It's not like the octop I had a
Twitter account or a blog he was he was just
making basically a random choice. And then that's the big
criticism here. He wasn't actually making predictions and and there
(18:29):
was all there also been accusations that there was some
bias involved on the part of the people caring for
the octopus. But the food container had the team's logo
on it, right, Yeah, but but it was still an
exciting day in uh in cephalopod media, Hey, I mean
I gave some attention to cephalopods. So there you go.
That was a win. All right, Well, we mentioned the
nautilus earlier. Yes, so let's let's discuss the nautils, and
(18:52):
Nautilus is a much older organism and it's less advanced,
it's less bright compared to other cephal pods. It's tiny. Yeah,
they're the soul surviving family of an not alloids in general,
which includes like the nautilus and the paper nautilus, which
we mentioned in the previous episode. Soul surviving members of
(19:13):
the externally shelled cephalopod family that live that thrived in
tropical oceans four dred and fifty fifty million years ago. Yeah.
They diverge from the from their cousins squid, octopus and
cutlefish four hundred million years ago, which makes them more
i should say, on the tiny scale in comparison. Yeah.
And they're fascinating organisms, just beautiful to to look at,
(19:34):
and the shells are amazing. But they have tiny, tiny
brains and they lack that dedicated learning region that we
see in other cephalopods. Yet what's amazing is that we've
in experiments, we've shown that they do have a form
of short term memory that we're still trying to really
understand how it works. Because they shouldn't really be capable
of any kind of higher brain function. UM. There again,
(19:57):
they're kind of the dull knife and the cephalopod drawer um.
But in experiments they found that if they use flashes
of light UM paired with with the food, they'll actually
be able to train the cephalopod to extend its tentacles.
Whenever there's that light, it begins to associate the light
with food, and it will retain this memory for about
(20:20):
twenty four hours and then it's gone. So these guys
are kind of like a guy Pierce in Memento. They
only have the short term memory and then it fades. Well,
what I liked is that I get that right Memento. Ah,
well Memento, everything is in sort of reverse right like yeah, um.
(20:41):
But I really like the way new scientists described it.
It's called simple minded natolyst reveals Flash of Memory. That's
the article title. They say that first of all, the
food that was offered with the flash of light was
an irresistible mixture of pulverized telapia heads and water, So
the first of all it was ei um. And then
they said that that when um, when they were reacting
(21:05):
to it, that their tentacles were crazy. Now keep in
mind too that in comparison to the octopus is eight
arms um that Annalist has for for the females fifty
arms and males have nineties. So it is quite a
display when they are waving them around. Um. And that
they were panting too, which was interesting, the panting nautilus
(21:28):
by Rabbit Lamb. All right, well, we're gonna take a
quick break and when we come back, we're going to
deal with some squid intelligence. Specifically, we're going to talk
about the Humboldt squid also known as the blows rocks.
All right, we're back. The Humboldt squid also known as
(21:49):
a jumbo squid, also known again as say it for
us there much better than me? Yes, uh. In fact,
they were named that by Nexkin fisherman who who noted
their very aggressive behavior. Yeah occasionally. I mean their tales
of sailors dying at the hands of these guys, right,
I mean though they slit their throats. I don't think
(22:12):
they have shanks. They don't have shanks, but anyway they
have there have been some definite violent encounters with with
Humboldt squid, and they have this reputation as being a
very aggressive creature. Now there's been some fascinating experiments where
they like put they take decoy Humboldt squid down into
the deep and they actually they're able to explore. Then
they're not just mindlessly aggressive creatures and they're still very
(22:34):
intelligent animals. But um, under the right circumstances, they can
be extremely aggressive. But what's more interesting here for us
as we're discussing cephalopod intelligence, is that the idea that
they are able to coordinate with each other when yeah, yeah,
they hunt in schools containing as many as twelve hundred
other squid. They swim at speeds from three to fifteen
(22:55):
miles an hour, and they can eject themselves from the
water and glide through the air to escape nitors. Yeah yeah,
they have huge brains for their body size. And uh
and it's been suggested that they might actually be as
smart as dogs. Oh that's what William Gilly, who who
is featured in the book Cracking by Wendy Williams, actually
talks about that, and he studies them of course, um
(23:16):
it has a research center. But uh, yeah, as smart
as dogs, he claims. And uh he even says that
or not. He doesn't, but Wendy Williams does says that
divers Scott Castle once sall when fiddling with a latch
of an underwater cage he had just closed. So so
they have that same curious nature, that same problem solving ability. Yeah,
(23:38):
this is from the National Zoo form equals functioned. Uh.
These squid actually have two large optic lobes and the
squid brain, and that testifies the importance of vision for
locating praise for the prey for these guys and gals
and um, you know, they also rely on taste and
texture to locate food, and they have highly developed lobes
for storing chemical intact information. So that's interesting to hear
(24:02):
about the diver who was witnessing the squid trying to
open the lock, and the idea that you know it
is it has this ability to plan, and it has
this ability to store the tactile information and try to
figure out this lock. There are accounts of them actually
stealing car keys and driving as far as Mexico City. Yeah,
(24:24):
I read that. Definitely. Supposedly there's a there's a whole
pack of them that have like an apartment there. I
don't know what they do for a living. But oh fish,
of course, yeah, of course, um, and real quick, we
we mentioned the colossal squid in our our other episode
that we recorded this week on gigantism. But I found
(24:45):
it really interesting that the the the brain of the
colossal squid is actually donut shaped and the esophagus passes
straight through the center of it. So it's just a
different way of thinking about the brain of an organism
and how it fits into the overall morphology. Well, and
I think a lot of times too that we come
at it from our human centric um fashion and we
(25:07):
don't necessarily think about cephalopods um in this way. But um,
it is interesting to see that their mouths are encircled
with arms, whereas we sort of think about our own
flailing tentacles on either side of us. And that does
certainly um the color, the way or actually order the
way that their brains are arranged. So there is this
(25:30):
difference of arrangement in the in the brains of cephalopods
obviously versus humans. And we already talked about ganglion on tentacles,
but then you start to look at the eyes of cephalopods,
and this is where there is a major difference. There's
a lot of similarity, right. Cephalopods have camera eye camera
like eyes like ours, with a lens that projects images
onto the retina. The difference between humans and cephalopods, or
(25:53):
vertebrates and cephalopods in this case is that our many
armed friends don't have blind spots like we do, because
when we look at an image, there's a blind spot
in the middle, and that is owing to the fiber
optic nerve which is going in front of the retina
as opposed to behind the retina like a cephalopod. And
this is actually an upgrade. This is you know, this
is an advantage. This is something that we don't have
(26:15):
um And I also wanted to mention that another difference
is that cephalopods have horizontal pupils. So because the eyes
can rotate thanks to a balancing organ that they have
called a statusist, they can always keep their pupils horizontal
and it doesn't matter what position their body is, it's
(26:37):
always horizontal. So they just have fantastic visual coverage of
the world around it. Yeah, their brain can interpret visual
information no matter what their position is. They don't have
to account for the position of the eye like we do.
If you think about it. If we turn around quickly, uh,
you know we have we are very disoriented and we
have to sit there and figure out our location in
(26:57):
space before we can begin to take in data in
a way that's meaningful to us. But not these guys.
They can, I mean, this is an amazing piece of
machinery for them. They can also see polarized light and
this allows them to communicate by creating changing patterns on
their skin and uh, and this I thought was fascinating. Um.
(27:18):
The reason for this that they can see the polarized
light is because the sephalo cephalopod eyes started out as
light sensitive skin cells that folded in words, to form
the structure that they have now, rather than as an
extension of the brain as as we have. So that's
again another difference between the way ways that their brains
(27:39):
and eyes work. So while we've both species, or not
just species, but both vertebrates and squid, they have reached
sort of similar conclusions with with their eyes, but from
different starting points. Yeah. Just to know that the eyes
that the root material there came from from skin, from
(28:00):
skin cells is very interesting, fascinating. So let's move on
to the last real cephalopod. We're gonna discuss here um
and we're really talking about the faberge egg of the
cephalopod world, the cuttlefish. Now, back in the stuff in
the Science Flave days right at the end, we did
(28:20):
in an episode on cuttlefish, and there's a lot of
great information that's cuttlefish specific in there. But we're gonna
talk about it a little bit here, especially as it
as it deals with intelligence, because the cuttlefish has one
of the largest brain to body size ratios of all
invertebrates and UH, and you see a lot of the
the the the really impressive attributes UH involving intelligence and
(28:43):
nervous systems in cephalopods are really highlighted in the cuttle
fish is design because you have uh rapid shifts in color. Uh.
They they're fairly social creatures. I mean, they're not social
and in the in a way that's really comparable to say,
you know, dogs or or primates, but there are there
(29:03):
are some very interesting social interactions here. There's a certain
amount of communication that takes place through the use of
their colorful skin, which contains these chromatophors that can lighten
and darken, and they can shift just really rapidly from
different colors and intensities, so it red, black, and yellow
(29:24):
are some of the chromatophores that emerge. But in addition
to that, there's this luminosity, so it gives a greater range.
And in fact with with other sea creatures like fish,
they have four rods in their eyes and they're able
to perceive more color than say our three rodded eyes.
So when when we see these incredible displays of color
(29:45):
from cephalopods, keep in mind that we're not even really
seeing the full spectrum, right, And these creatures that cuttle
fish are just remarkable to to see at an aquarium. Now,
generally you have to wait for a large pack of
people with cell phone cameras to get out of the
way because you go to an aquarium you want to
take a really bad, direct flash cellphone photo of everything there.
(30:07):
Apparently that's the apparently the big thing these days. But
if you can actually get the tank to yourself for
a little bit, they're just really fascinating to watch the
color shifts that they kind of hover. For starters, they're not,
they're a lot they're a lot more interesting to look
at an aquarium because octopi uh you know, you may
catch them when they're active, but they're they're gonna be
sticking to the corners and and and all that. Where
(30:29):
the cuttlefish is going to hover out there in in
in the middle, and he's gonna kind of here, she's
gonna kind of hover around, has this little hover skirt
that goes around the edges. Um. And then they're gonna
slowly change colors, and then there may be a drastic
change in color. Yeah, and all of that is predicated
on the fact that they are controlled by nerves, so
(30:50):
it gives them that instantaneous color change. And when we
talk about those chromatoporce we are talking about tens of
thousands of organs here that are controlling that. And so
think of it similar to the way that pixels form
on images of a computer screen. That's what you're seeing
on their skin basically. Um, you talked about their communication
and their their level of social ness, and I wanted
(31:14):
to bring up Gene Bowl of Penn miller's Ville University.
She's a scientist and she says that they the males
have all kinds of really impressive displays and that in fact,
the cuttlefish can signultaneously just one side of his butdet
body to show a dominant display towards other males, while
(31:34):
um the other side of his body shows a calm
display towards a potential mate. So really aggressive pattern on
the left where where a foe is. And on the right,
I don't know exactly what it would be. Let's say
a little heart design. It's not really hard, but it's
kind of like he's flexing the muscle and looking all
bad on one side, but then he's he's kind of
smiling and winking out of the other eye. And this
(31:55):
is interesting. During mating, they display a zebra pattern, which
I just automatically always associate with wrestlers bodybuilders because always
wearing the pants with the zebra patterns are popular with
some of the boys. But but this is intricate, right,
I mean, this is ah, this is a whole language
(32:16):
that we don't necessarily have access to, that we can
witness and it can tell us something about ourselves to
some degree, but we can't even fully imagine we don't
have the language ourselves to it. There's another interesting thing
that goes on with cephalopod I mean not sephal pod,
cuttlefish mating that's really fascinating. And that's where you'll have
these dominant cuttlefish, like these big, brutish looking cuttlefish that
(32:39):
are that are not the cute little guys that you
didn't see the aquarium, the big, rugged, old man catulu
looking cuttlefish, and they're they're really bossy and they're getting
the fights over the females because you know, they're like
they really want to mate with the with the females.
But then you'll have the smaller males that will that
will disguise themselves as females, like they'll like a lot
of cephalopods. The cuttle fish has a has a lot
(33:01):
of control over just how drug queens I'm thinking boosom bodies. Yeah, yeah,
it's that kind of thing. Like they know that they
don't stand a chance walking in there as a small
male because they're just gonna get beat up and tore up,
and then the big male is gonna mate. So they
disguised themselves as a female and then they move in close.
And then the big beefy cuttlefish he looks at this
and it's like, oh, yeah, it looks like I got
(33:23):
two days for the night. Uh. You know, that's a
total win. For me. Meanwhile, the disguised smaller male actually
gets in there in mates with the female. Okay, so
you really just did um talk about the premise for
the sitcom Boom Bodies was Queen. Well, actually, the premise
was really that the rent was much more or a
favorite at this all women's boarding. But they use that
(33:45):
to their advantage to to advance their agendas with the
ladies there. The other really awesome thing about cuttlefish, um
that that that I may have mentioned on here before
is their use of ptomorphs, which means false form. And
what they'll do is a pseudomorph is a bubble of
(34:05):
ink surrounded by mucus, and it occupies the same amount
of space as the cuttle fish. It's a decoy. So
what will happen If they're in a situation where they're
they're threatened, they will shift their color suddenly to where
they're really dark like the surrounding. Then they'll shoot out
the pseudomorph and then they'll they'll turbo out of there
with their jets. Yeah. Their jet propulsion, by the way,
(34:26):
is amazing. So they create a copy of themselves more
or less. I mean, it's not it's not like an
artistic expression. But they'll they'll create, you know, appropriate mass
replica of themselves that is just ain't conside of mucus,
and then they'll jet away really fast at the same time,
so it's like slide of hand where they leave the
decoy where they just were and they're already jetting away.
And then when something tries to eat these pseudomorph of course,
(34:49):
then they just get a whole bunch of ink, which
also contains dopamine and el dopa, a precursor to the dopamine,
which may temporarily paralyze the sense of smell uh the
creature that so it's just a fantastic uh and deceptive
means of self defense in terms of their intelligence again
gene bowl Uh. The scientists devised a couple of experiments
(35:12):
to study this, rather than just sort of the stimulus
response experiments that you see sometimes um again. In the
book Crack and Winny, Williams describes this experiment as a
tank in the shape of a clock with escape routes
two of them, only one open at a time, and
that's at the three o'clock position, and the six o'clock
excuse me, the nine o'clock, three and nine three and nine.
(35:33):
And so the cuttlefish enter through the six o'clock position
and then immediately they see a queue at the twelve
o'clock position. So the que is either algae or brick.
Algae would indicate like, hey, on the right, that's your
escape hatch. Um the brick would indicate on the left,
that's your that's going to be your escape hatch. So
(35:53):
they actually get to learn these cues that hey, okay,
when I see the algae, I know to take a
ninety degree turn to the right. And it's fascinating. She said,
this was um, this process of if then propositions that
we learned, and that in humans that's represented as the
first steps in development of logic and our ability to
(36:14):
use reason and decision making. It's fascinating, alright. So one
final squid to mention, and this one is is even
even more dubious than the idea of of ancient krakens
creating art out of dead right dolphins, and that is
the idea of the mega squid, which was featured on
the TV show Future Future is Wild uh and which
(36:36):
you can believe occasionally catch on various Discovery Channel, UM
Discovery Channel or Animal Planet just check local listings that
pops up from time to time. But it was this
you know, sspeculative episode where they're talking about the future.
What if humans weren't around, what might evolve and fill
that void? What would become the dominant species? And so
(36:57):
they had some some c g I stuff going on
and some some fabulous ideas of what might happen. And
one of the cooler things that they introduced was a
mega squid, which was a twelve foot tall, eight ton
terrestrial air breathing squid that roams the northern forests of
a humanless Earth. And it's a pretty cool design. Mean,
it's on one level's kind of ridiculous because with the
(37:20):
whole air pressure issue first of all, right, going from
from from the the the pressure in the ocean to land. Yeah,
it's it's crazy to think. But that their their argument
was that it's not just a situation of a giant
squid crawling out or a giant octopus crawling out of
the water. It would have been like a slow evolutionary
(37:40):
procession years later. Yeah, And they and it had legs,
which they they made the case that each of these legs,
which looked kind of like an elephant leg Uh contain
a network of circular and vertical muscles that form these
limbs and make them strong enough to carry this eight
ton weight. Uh. They have vocal sac that vibrates to
(38:04):
produce sound. That was the other thing that they came
up with for the mega squid. And uh they also
have two large tentacles that they grab things out of
the woods to eat. So it's kind of neat. It's
it's like I said, don't don't make any any hard
vegas bets on on mega squids taking over the planet
(38:24):
any time in the distant future even, But but it's
a cool idea, and it's it's interesting to think of
cephalopods not merely as this interesting creature confined to the ocean,
but one of ours more remarkable creatures that maybe could
become the primary player in a future Well in that context,
it is really interesting to to imagine what the brain
(38:47):
would look like once it became terrestrial, because as Bull
had said before, is that one of the things that's
really exciting to her about sufflage seplode intelligence is that
we know that their relatives are arms and snails. Yeah,
not not so smart. They're um so whatever happened to
the cephalo cephalopods was different, and she wants to get
(39:08):
to the bottom of why they're using their intelligence, Why
why their brains developed in the way they that they did,
and um, what does that tell us about ourselves? As
we discussed in the Gigantism episode, as animals get bigger,
they have fewer predators and and certainly the mega squid
is not going to have the survival challenge that the
(39:31):
smaller cephalopods have evolved to deal with. So you can
imagine this thing might be pretty stupid. Yeah, I mean intellectually,
it just might. And there might not be a lot
going on because I don't have to do is wander
around the forest and eat other c g I creatures.
So little Jar Jar here, you know, all right? As
we close out here our episode on the Mind of
(39:52):
the Crack, and I thought it would be fun to
bring in Jonathan Strickling, co host of the Tech Stuff podcast,
to read The Cracking by Alfred Lloyd. Yes and his
poem is based on an old Norse legend of gigantic
sea monsters who prey on ships and drag them underneath
the ocean, below the thunders of the other deep, far
(40:15):
far beneath in the abysmal sea, his ancient, dreamless, uninvaded
sleep the krack and sleepeth. Faintest sunlights flee about his
shadowy sides above, and swell huge sponges of millennial growth
in height and far away into the sickly light from
many a wondrous, grotten, secret cell, unnumbered and enormous polypi
(40:38):
winnow with giant arms the slumbering green. They're happy lane
for ages and will lie battening upon huge seaworms in
his sleep until the latter fire shall heat the deep. Then,
once by man and angels to be seen in roaring,
he shall rise and on the surface die. So there
(41:03):
you go. Fantastic reading from Jonathan Strickland if you if
you haven't checked out tech Stuff, be sure to check
that out. It's a great podcast. UH. Chris and Jonathan
tackle all sorts of gadgety, techy nerdy topics in UH
in awesome form, and they are wonderful punsters. So if
you have something you would like to share with us
(41:23):
about the mind of the kracking, about the possibility that
this cracking theory is is true, or maybe you have
thoughts about the mega squid. Maybe you have worked with
the cephalopods at one point or another and have some
some yeah, or you know, if you have some occupied
escate stories, let us know about those. If you have
ever um snuck away from work and left a bunch
(41:48):
of squid ink inside of a thin layer of mucus
in your place as a decoy, we would love to
hear about that as well. You can find us on
Facebook where we are stuff to blow your mind, and
you can find on Twitter where our handles blow the mind,
and you can drop us a line at blow the
Mind at discovery dot com. For more on this and
(42:13):
thousands of other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com.
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