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Now that's alien intelligence:
The she-cephalopod was filmed by the Blue Planet II crew as they were exploring the inky depths in South Africa, focusing on the magical world of marine forests. As series producer Mark Brownlow explains, "We may think of our ocean's as blue but there is another surprising world of the Green Seas. From towering undersea forests of giant kelp to vast prairies of sea grass, this is an almost Brothers Grimm fairy tale of all the strange and magical creatures that live within these secret worlds. Here sea dragons lurk, bizarre giant cuttlefish breed, and an ingenious octopus outwits a forest full of sharks."
Our tale of clever derring-do begins when a hungry pyjama shark goes to attack the octopus, who quickly inserts its tentacles into the shark's gills in an effort to suffocate it. Shark lets go; octopus skedaddles.
But then she does something truly remarkable, and something never before seen (by humans, at least). As the show's narrator, Sir David Attenborough, says: "The octopus is far from finished."
Caught in the open, she scrambles to the seafloor, attaches shells to her body with her suckers, and rolls up into a beautiful mosaic ball. The shark is left confused and by the time it seems to figure out what is going on, the octopus darts away, leaving the shark looking for her in the scattered detritus of her ersatz armor.
Clever. Maybe we should try teaching octopi sign language, as as we have other species.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday November 29 2017, @04:28PM (12 children)
I have no doubt that an octopus is clever enough to learn sign language, if it wanted to. The trick is in finding a common ground that would encourage the octopus to try.
Scoop one up and put it in a tank, great, now you've totally terrorized the creature - think how cooperative you would be if somebody plucked you out of your life, transported you to a remote high-mountain location with thin air and stuck you in a glass box that smelled bad and had all kinds of constant alien noises. Now, creatures that look something like giant cockroaches come up and peer through the glass at you with their relatively tiny eyes and weird bony appendages.
I can imagine people screaming in terror in their own language, but it might be quite a while before they even thought about trying to learn to speak cockroach.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 29 2017, @04:49PM (4 children)
Send a robotic octopus avatar to chat with the octopus in its native environment.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Wednesday November 29 2017, @05:20PM (1 child)
Wouldn't that be almost as terrifying? A strange alien machine whose intentions are unknown.
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(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday November 29 2017, @08:42PM
Same point could be made for the Avatars in James Cameron's movie - demons in false bodies.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday November 29 2017, @05:27PM (1 child)
How about a virtual octopus on a flat screen?
Question: how would an octopus react to a mirror?
What about a flat screen virtual octopus with an adjacent mirror for the real octopus to see itself?
What if you provided a superior weapon of some type for the octopus to use against sharks, and the virtual octopus demonstrated its use. Would learning occur? Or instead of weapon some superior type of shielding protection from sharks, with video demonstration of its use.
Sign language teaching the octopus to agree to the EULA first.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Immerman on Wednesday November 29 2017, @09:25PM
Interesting tidbit (that I think I'm remembering correctly) - Optopuses were long thought to be uninterested in others because such video tests utterly failed to engage them. Turns out that the problem was actually that their visual systems are faster than ours, so they perceived traditional video as a series of still images. Show them the same video filmed at 120Hz instead though, and they'll react as though seeing other animals.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 29 2017, @07:07PM (2 children)
Sure but how do you think the first cat felt when it was picked up and we loved them and squeezed them .. and that turned out ok
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday November 29 2017, @08:32PM (1 child)
Wild adult cats generally fear humans and would not want to be picked up and "loved" by one. Trying this probably will not turn out "ok" for the human.
The reason pet cats like it is because they've been conditioned from birth to be around humans.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Wednesday November 29 2017, @11:11PM
Exactly. Several people I know have adopted feral animals, and while they can adapt to the indoor environment, they are very scratchy and will fuck you up if you try to grab or hold them. The half-wolf dog is also pretty terrifying.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Wednesday November 29 2017, @08:30PM
Definitely falls afoul of animal experimentation ethics, but search in this page [rifters.com] for "This is how you break down the wall" for one idea.
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Wednesday November 29 2017, @11:14PM (1 child)
In the 2016 movie Arrival, humans tried to communicate with giant seven-limbed, octopus like aliens. Only they used a kind of ink to write their complicated language in water.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday November 30 2017, @02:25AM
In Arrival, all in all, the aliens were quite inviting to the humans, and mostly vice-versa - also: Hollywood fantasy movie, remarkable parallels to Close Encounters and any other number of alien encounter Hollywood stories.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 30 2017, @04:56AM
I found an injured octopus washed up on a beach in San Diego. I brought it home, and kept it in a spare tank (I used to breed tropical fish, so had many tanks). It recovered quickly, and displayed no fear of me, but was very curious. It would position itself to be able to watch whatever was going on in the room. Looked like a giant nose sitting on top of a rock (rarely hid-- usually only while eating. I thought it would be more shy and provided plenty of places for it to hide).
A few weeks later, I released it in a protected cove with lots of eel grass and rocks and such to hide in that was adjacent to the beach it had washed up on.
All that said, I would not recommend bothering one that you may find. I'm pretty sure it was much happier back in the ocean. And, it was a bit of a pita keeping it-- it shoved stuff into the filter tube breaking the filter/pump, escaped a couple times to go exploring, etc.