I was talking to my partner last night about this article. He goes, “Honey, I love you, but I don’t get it. Why is this terrifying news?”
To which I replied: “You don’t…get it? This doesn’t FREAK YOU OUT? That octopuses are smarter than MOST OF YOUR FAMILY IN FLORIDA?”
Eventually, I think he understood, though he never felt my amazement. (“Honey, you’re a very specific person,” I’m told.) Now, if you would be so kind, allow me to attempt to instill in you the amazement and panic I feel about what we’re learning about our terrifying marine friends:
So, most mornings, I briefly scroll through Science Wire (as one does, obviously). Normally it’s a list of stories like “Ethanol-Assisted Catalyst Removes Nitrogen Oxides at Low Temperatures,” and my brain immediately glazes over in sludge. Today, one stopped me in my tracks, and I went, “Oh. Oh, no.”
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Just when I thought I understood my place in the universe’s intelligence rankings, just when I thought I could go to the aquarium and not feel completely terrible about enjoying it, science comes along to ruin my week. Researchers at Dartmouth have confirmed that octopuses — those squishy, boneless, eight-armed weirdos — can use mirrors to find food they can’t directly see. Cool for them. Deeply unsettling for the rest of us. (Or, at least, me.)
Here’s the setup: scientists put three California two-spot octopuses in front of a mirror and hid a virtual crab somewhere behind them, visible only in the reflection. To get the snack, the octopus had to look in the mirror, figure out the crab wasn’t actually in the mirror, turn around, and go find it in real life. That’s not “ooh, shiny” behavior. That’s spatial reasoning. That’s the kind of thing toddlers struggle with. That’s the kind of test I’m not sure I would ace immediately?
And they were good at it: the octopuses picked the correct direction about 73% of the time, getting faster with practice. Some of them even climbed straight over the side of their tank to get to the food rather than taking the scenic route, which feels less like “animal behavior” and more like someone who’s done this before and is tired of your questions and damnit, just give me the snack, will ya?
Until now, this kind of mirror-based tool use had only been seen in vertebrates — some mammals, some birds, but definitely not your dog occasionally barking at his reflection like a fool. Octopuses just joined that club uninvited, which is notable because, evolutionarily speaking, our last common ancestor with an octopus was a worm that lived 350 to 500 million years ago. We are not cousins. We’re not even really in the same neighborhood. And yet here they are, casually doing geometry homework that some vertebrates can’t manage.
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The leading theory is that octopuses are basically underwater cats: stealthy hunters that sneak up and pounce, and want to do it fast so they don’t become someone else’s lunch in the process. Researchers think that kind of hunting style might require a mental map of your surroundings — which would explain why an octopus brain, despite having approximately zero overlap with ours, evolved something that functions like one
Honestly, I’m never eating octopus again. I mean, it’s also gross. But now, this
So, to recap: octopuses can change their skin texture and color in an instant, squeeze their entire boneless bodies through gaps the size of a coin, regrow lost limbs, and now, apparently, understand reflections well enough to use them as a GPS to snacks. They have nine brains, blue blood, and better spatial reasoning than half the people who’ve ever tried to parallel park
I’m not saying the octopuses are planning anything, for the record. I’m just saying that if you see one looking unusually thoughtful in a tide pool this summer, maybe don’t make eye contact in the mirror
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Jacqueline Kehoe Creator
Jacqueline is a travel, nature, and science writer based in Wisconsin. Follow her work on Yahoo Creators—or find it in the wild at publications like National Geographic, Smithsonian, Travel + Leisure, and more.
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