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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)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 22 2018, @11:48AM (2 children)
They had white lab coats! So, yeah. Scientists. I think one said something about piling it higher and deeper. They know a tonne, that's for sure. Not sure why they thought drugging a poor defenceless cephalopodian would help but here we are.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday September 22 2018, @02:03PM (1 child)
Again we pretend that giving MDMA to an octopus is the worst thing ever or nothing was learned from the experiment.
I wonder what the scientists who don't publish their findings are doing.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday September 22 2018, @02:53PM
Slapping the monkeys around?