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posted by takyon on Friday September 21 2018, @07:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the Molly-bathing-for-fun dept.

Scientists have discovered that your ordinary, everyday octopus can get "high" on MDMA just like humans. While intoxicated with "molly", an octopus is likely to be more social and friendly towards others, changing from being antisocial to highly social, much like how the drug affects humans.

Human and octopus lineages are separated by over 500 million years of evolution and show divergent anatomical patterns of brain organisation, which makes this find surprising. This may make the octopus an attractive test subject for future drug trials.

In order to test the theory that an octopus is affected by MDMA in the same way as a human, an octopus was submerged in a tank of water mixed with MDMA, and later put into a series of three connected chambers, one of which had a caged octopus underneath. The stoned octopus chose to spend its time trying to play with the caged octopus, in a complete reversal of sober octopus nature.

A Conserved Role for Serotonergic Neurotransmission in Mediating Social Behavior in Octopus (open, DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2018.07.061) (DX)


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