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Total anecdote here, but when I volunteered at our aquarium in Charleston, SC (amazing aquarium, go check it out), we had a problem where our flounder were vanishing from their tank. We suspected theft and so put a camera up in the back room. The next time flounder disappeared we checked the feed - one of our octopi was escaping from his tank that we thought we had already anti-octopus'd, climbing over the walls, breaking into the flounder tank, eating a flounder, and then breaking back out of the flounder tank and back into his.

The weird thing isn't that he went to go eat a flounder, it's that he broke back into his own tank after, leaving us scratching our head for weeks over where the flounder were going. Obviously if we came in one day to see an octopus in the flounder tank the mystery would be solved day 1.

Anyway we put carpet on the walls so his little suckers couldn't stick and let him carouse around the aquarium like some sort of aquatic monkey.

Presumably he (or she?) wanted to go back to his own tank to get the regular food. Frankly I think you should take the carpet down - OK you don't want to keep losing flounder, but if the guy can wander around and climb out of his own tank you should be studying that, not trying to make the behavior go away. If nothing else, it's cruel to bore him like that. Yes, I'm serious.
he broke back into his own tank after

Octopus have dens that they only leave to eat and mate. they always return to their den after, and they only move every few weeks. So wouldnt that be normal behavior?

I guess he could have moved his den to the flounder tank.. but maybe he just found out where it was, and caught him before he decided where to move to. or maybe there was something about the flounder tank that made it difficult to find a good spot.

You're lucky all he wanted was to eat a flounder and then return peacefully to his tank instead of going full Dawn of the Planet of the Octopuses on you.
I'm also a veteran of working at an aquarium and have heard this story before. Is it something you witnessed? I've wondered where this story came from:

- http://belizeadventure.com/2013/08/octopus-facts/

- https://www.tonmo.com/threads/midnight-tank-escapes-fact-or-...

Edit: this is not to call you out for you story, it's very possible that this happened at CHS aquarium, I'm just wondering the origins since it's such a fascinating and strange story.

This reminds me of one of my favorite chainsawsuit comics - http://chainsawsuit.com/comic/2013/08/29/the-cephalopod-gamb...
> Obviously if we came in one day to see an octopus in the flounder tank the mystery would be solved day 1.

It's hard not to speculate that the octopus had a sufficiently sophisticated model of its keepers in relation to itself (which implies self-consciousness) that it knew this.

I can come up with other theories (some territorial affinity, perhaps), and I'm sure people have. I wonder which have been tested/explored...

I would love to see that footage. I've seen videos of them solving simple problems, but I've never seen them go all MacGyver. The way their described makes me think of our local raccoons, shifty, conniving and sort of belligerent. You have to respect their audacity and resolve.
Ha! I'd say it deserves the occasional fancy meal from that.
I hope you at least deliver him flounder now, from time to time.
> amazing aquarium, go check it out

Is it OK to feel sad about the aquarium based on this story?

Sounds like the octopus from Finding Dory!
Perfect setup for Octopusnado
Pedantic mode here: linguistically it should be octopodes (but nobody who isn't speaking Greek would say that); by usage it should be octopuses; octopi or octopii are just wrong (it's not a second declension noun, despite the 'us' ending)
I love how completely alien they are compared to us. The sort of decentralized nature of their nervous system compared to our path of evolution. (I'm no marine/evolutionary biologist so I'm probably butchering the terminology...)

I loved reading the two pieces Sy Montgomery wrote that are in Orion Magazine.

https://orionmagazine.org/article/deep-intellect/

And the follow-up:

https://orionmagazine.org/2011/11/interviews-with-an-octopus...

(Edit: Si -> Sy)

If you like reading about minds that are fundamentally different from our own, you might also enjoy the science fiction novel "Blindsight" by Peter Watts. Exploring the space of possible minds in the universe is a fundamental theme of that work.
> The first problem was keeping the octopuses alive. The four-hundred-gallon tank was divided into separate compartments for each animal. But even though students hammered in dividers, the octopuses found ways to dig beneath them — and eat each other. Or they’d mate, which is equally lethal. Octopuses die after mating and laying eggs, but first they go senile, acting like a person with dementia. “They swim loop-the-loop in the tank, they look all googly-eyed, they won’t look you in the eye.. (o)

the mating ritual is very alien as well

it's fascinating

first of all sex can be identified in octopodes(i) checking the 8th appendage

on the males this appendage has a small portion at the end without suckers, this is because the male uses this appendage to reach inside his head.. mantel cavity(ii).. remove a sac of sperm.. spermatophore.. and then place it inside the head of a woman (iii)(iv)

and i was told by a worker at an aquarium that if other males have already placed their spermatophore into a females mantel a later male can remove those when inserting his own

(o) https://orionmagazine.org/article/deep-intellect/

(i) http://grammarist.com/usage/octopi-octopuses/

(ii) http://www.asnailsodyssey.com/IMAGES/OCTOPUS/octopusMate.gif

(iii) http://www.asnailsodyssey.com/LEARNABOUT/OCTOPUS/octoRepr.ph...

(iv) https://youtu.be/4fkQZrfeYXQ?t=132

I went diving with a retired marine biologist who said, half-jokingly, that if octopodes had ever formed the same tribal culture as primates that we would have been competing with them for dominance at some point.
>I love how completely alien they are compared to us.

If you want to read a book which takes this idea to the extreme check out Solaris by Stanislaw Lem. It deals with a living ocean which has been completely incomprehensible to humans for hundreds of years - a neat thought exercise on the limits of knowledge.

My favorite part of the second article was how the octopus was able to attend to 3 or 4 people at once and still manage to steal the bucket of fish. It's part hivemind, part single entity and I agree, very alien. What's also interesting is that despite having diverged a very long time ago, chromatophore lobes of octopus are surprisingly sophisticated and mammal like (especially for a mollusk).
Others have already recommended Blindsight, but if you want a short story by Peter Watts specifically dealing with octopus consciousness, Colony Creature is a good read: http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=5875
Those are shorter forms of pieces in her long-form book:

https://www.amazon.com/Soul-Octopus-Surprising-Exploration-C...

Quick read, and also recommended for more good octopus anecdotes that inform this question.

Weird pupils let octopuses see their colorful gardens (berkeley.edu) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13084534
Way to make me feel worse about eating them.
Apart from cognitive skills, an important factor is the capacity of suffering. So even dumb animals might be able to feel intense pain.

In humans, while forms of suffering like loneliness, depression can be bad, pure physical pain can itself a terrible thing. For instance severe torture for 10 minutes can be worse than months of depression.

Now even if cognitive aspects are diminished in animals, the physical senses are active and often much more sharp(birds eye sight, dogs hearing).

So, what we can do is independent of whether we are eating animals or not, is to recognize this fact that animals can suffer, and ensure that factory farms which deal with billions of animals atleast stop some of the more terrible forms of animal cruelty (dunking birds in hot water while still alive).

Why worry? They'd eat you. Realize that all animal ethics are entirely manmade and foreign to the background of the Universe's amorality.

Edit: Really down voting because you don't agree? The comment was on topic, provided a view, and contributed to the conversation in some way. If you want to down vote, please be responsible enough to say why.

Last time I was in Hawaii, I had the opportunity to interact with an octopus in the wild. I will never eat one again.
Well pigs are smarter than dogs, and many people eat them.
Well, why not stop eating them?
But when the octopus hunts its prey does it have the same feeling ?
How smart inevitably limits the question by applying a human measure to it.

What I am more interested in, is to know how it is smart, not how much. How does it perceive? How does it connect and process information? How does it interract?

Is there a way to approach this subject besides shape shifting into an octopus?

Octopuses are solitary animals, so they have little in terms of learned behavior. What they accomplish is generated by thoughts originating from themselves.
I'm reminded of Paul the Octopus in the Sea Life Centre in Germany, who at least reportedly likes watching soccer. Crowds have taken to watching his behavior like an aquatic Punxsutawney Phil - looking for signs of Paul feeling optimistic or depressed - and leading crowds through an exercise to imagine that Paul is able to predict the outcomes of games.

While not really equipt with fortune-telling capabilities, Paul and most other octopi (as aquarists will share) have very distinct personalities, have favorite caretakers they can individually recognize, and in the wild will save food, trade rocks and have learned to pull diving masks off humans who bother them.

Octopi? Pah. Cuttlefish are fucking brilliant.
Good article up to the end when speculation about the uniqeness of humans are presented. "Humans, perhaps uniquely, have gained the ability to step outside ourselves"

AFAIK we have established that quite a few animals for example apes such as the Orangutan are able to identify and reason about themselves in relation to the rest of the world. They are capable of deception, cooperation etc. And of course a range of complex feelings.

The color changing and arms of an octopus would at least allow for complex information communication.

Anybody have a pet octopus and can comment on what that's like?
Also check out Sy Montgomery's book,The Soul of an Octopus, fascinating. Did you know "Three fifths of octopuses' neurons are not in the brain..." Here is an excerpt: http://www.delanceyplace.com/view-archives.php?p=3054
TL;DR Not a scientific article and doesnt arrive at many conclusions.
> And yet . . . could we be missing something here? While they can’t see much of their own kaleidoscopic skins, they can clearly sense inside what they are doing. Remote cameras on the seabed show octopuses crackling with color changes, even when there is no other creature present to observe them. Godfrey-Smith believes this is just a byproduct of neural activity, no more than an expressive quirk. But maybe it isn’t. Perhaps they are talking to themselves.

God I hate science reporting. It's like they can't help but interject spasmodic blather into an article.

Well I feel slightly bad for wanting to eat it alive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sannakji

I just like to imagine Octopus dominance if they banded together and decided not to die at 3 years old.

Pretty smart for mass produced babies. Humans wouldn't stand a chance.

Hacker news is what reddit should have been [imho]
Don't tell the Greeks. We are probably the world's largest consumer of octopus (after cheese, that is)
Smarter than us, obviously!
Saving you a click: "Are they capable of conscious thought? Godfrey-Smith treks through some rather testing philosophical and psychological terrain to conclude in the negative. While cephalopods are capable of exceptional complexity in their signalling, the machinery of interpretation is too limited. Humans, perhaps uniquely, have gained the ability to step outside ourselves, to think about our thoughts by means of an unstoppable internal monologue."
3x smarter than a managing director
Animals have always seemed to me smarter than humans in some (important) ways. Squirrels, for instance, are extremely resourceful and can survive in conditions few, if any, humans could. If that isn't being "smart", I don't know what is.

In any case, the smart/brain weight ratio is not in humans' favor here, that is for sure!