Instant Genius - The Mysteries of the Octopus, with Prof David Scheel

Episode Date: July 13, 2023

Octopuses are surely one of the most unusual animals on Earth. They have eight limbs, three hearts, a doughnut-shaped brain and bleed blue blood. It’s little wonder, then, that they have inspired awe and curiosity in everyone from artists and filmmakers to biologists and science fiction writers. In this episode we catch up David Scheel, professor of marine biology at Alaska Pacific University. He tells us what he has learned in his 25 years of studying these fascinating animals, and what new discoveries he made when writing his book, Many Things Under a Rock: The Mysteries of Octopuses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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delivering digital precision with analogue warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-sized master class in podcast form. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor at BBC Science Focus magazine. Octopuses are surely one of the most unusual animals on earth. They have eight limbs, three hearts, a donut-shaped brain, and bleed blue blood.

It's little wonder then that they've inspired awe and curiosity in everyone from artists and filmmakers to biologists and science fiction. writers. In this episode, we catch you with David Sheel, Professor of Marine Biology at Alaska Pacific University. He tells us what he's learned in his 25 years of studying these fascinating animals, and what he learned from writing his new book, Many Things Under a Rock, The Mysteries of Octopuses. You're a marine biologist. You study octopuses. So of all the organisms in the sea, what led you to study octopuses? They're very unusual creatures. are unusual animals. You know, it really was happenstance that led me to this. I started out as a

terrestrial biologist. I was working with African lions, and my goal was to be the wolf biologist in Yellowstone National Park, but I forgot to take a botany course as an undergraduate, and somehow that kicked my job application sideways. So, you know, I was casting about for work and looking for opportunities and I moved to Cordova, Alaska, which is on the shores of Prince William Sound. I took a job there based on having skills in geographic information systems, mapping systems. And from there, I just applied for opportunities to do research. And this was one of the ones that came through. Actually, several came through. And for a while, I worked on a lot of different things. The octopus work, as it were, had legs. And so, you know, it's,

just kept going. So octopus is from the family cephalopods. So what are cephalopods? What other animals belong to that group? And what makes them so different from other animals? Cephalopods are one of the major divisions of the mollusks. So the mollus are the group that contains snails and slugs, the gastropods, clams and scallops, the bivalves. And then there's also some animals in there, but polyplacophoresans, which are chitin, which are less commonly known, but very, very common. There's a number of other groups that most people haven't heard of in there, and then there are the cephalopods. And the cephalopods are the nautilus, cuttlefish, squid, and octopuses. So let's have a little bit of a look at that in a bit more detail then.

So there's a hell of a lot of different types of octopus around, you know, they vary in size and in shape and all sorts. So, you know, how many are there? What do we know about that? There are about 300 different species of octopuses that occupy the shallow continental shelves. There are more species in the deep water and even a few in the pelagic ocean. So they're a very diverse group with a lot of range of body sizes and some. distinctions and differences in behaviors, most of them look remarkably similar to one another. The basic octopus body plan doesn't change that much from species to species, but there are a lot

of subtle differences. So obviously we're based in the UK, and it's not common that we see octopuses. If we go on holiday to Europe or something or to Asia, then we see them a lot more. But they seem to be everywhere. So where do they live? Well, in the UK, I think you have octopus elidone. It's the smooth octopus, I believe, on your shores. And then in particular oceanographic circumstances, you also get along your southern shores, the common octopus, octopus vulgaris. And I haven't been over there to see this myself, but I understand that this summer is one of those circumstances, maybe not in the UK directly, but over in Ireland, they're having a, finding octopus is quite commonly. Was it around cork, I believe? Anyway, there are a few species that are in your waters. Cuddlefish, I guess, are around more commonly as well.

Yeah, so they're there. And there have been in the past, there have been real outbreaks of octopus along the southern shores of England in 1900 and 1950, which I write a book in many things under Iraq. So in a lot of ways, they're pretty elusive animals. You know, they squish themselves into crevices and they're absolute masters of disguise, you know. So how do you go about studying them?

One of the great challenges, right? How to find them? Where the heck are they? It takes, in some ways, an unusual arrangement of circumstances. So I work mostly in Alaska, and up here, they use entertainment. tidal habitats. We have very wide-ranging tides, very extreme tides. So when the water's out, it goes quite far out and we're able to see low intertidal habitats. And the octopuses are, can often be found in those areas and they occupy dens under the rocks. And they leave

little piles of their food discards outside the doors. And so we can use those trails of food remains to find them. And then in Australia, I also do some work in South of Sydney in Australia, and there we were able to find a space where there are often many octopuses present at once. And so we can put cameras down and leave them. And then the octopuses are out and active and interacting, and we can watch their behavior that way. So we can't talk about octopuses, as we've sort of briefly touched on there, without talking about their absolutely bizarre physiology. You know, they've got eight limbs, three hearts, all sorts of crazy stuff.

So what can you tell me about that as a sort of, you know, a Cliff's Note sort of version? Yeah, one of the most interesting things about their physiology is just the way they can change their skin displays. They're covered in sort of a soft skin that is a very complex organ, and it is layered with chromatophores, which are cells that... are able to display or hide pigment. And so they can change their body pattern quite quickly as fast as we could move. And this allows them to adopt really three main different types of body patterns.

One is kind of a uniform color, either dark or light or in between. And then they have a very mottled skin pattern, which tends to blend them into the background. when they're on something like gravel or something like that. And then they also have what's called a disruptive pattern. And these are larger blocks of dark or light areas that really break up the body outline of the octopus and help it to hide. So what do we know about what the function of these skin displays are then? They get used in a lot of different ways.

The classic explanation has always been related to predation and camouflage. And obviously, this is a big, big, important thing that octopus is due with their changing body patterns. Some of the work that has come out more recently also shows that these body patterns can be used, for example, in signaling to cons specifics, showing an aggressive or an I'm going to stand my ground kind of body pattern, and then showing maybe a very low body pattern that sort of means, I mean no threat, maybe. We're still working out what these things really mean. So what do we know about their limbs then?

Because that's sort of a key feature, isn't it, really? Yeah, the arms are also very complicated structures. In a vertebrate arm, like on us, we have a limited number of joints, and each joint has a range of movements that's determined by the mechanics of the bones. But the octopuses don't have any bones. And their musculature is what's called a muscular hydrostat, which means that it is the contraction and expansion of the muscles on sort of a fixed volume but flexible cylinder that allows the twisting and the turning and the reaching and the pulling.

And that's very much like, for example, example, an elephant's trunk or closer to home, our own tongue has no bones, but can do things. And the octopus arm is like that. But as you say, there are eight of them. And in addition, there are also hundreds of suckers along each arm. And in order to control all of that, a lot of the neurons that run an octopus's body are distributed out along the arms. There's a major nerve cord that runs the length of each arm, and then there are ganglia nerve clusters, controlling nerve clusters at the base of each sucker pair, for example, that regulate how that sucker pair interacts with its neighboring suckers.

So yeah, I was going to ask about the suckers, because they're really interesting as well, aren't they? So it's not like, you know, when you're a kid and you have the gun that shoots and it sticks to the wall. Looks vaguely similar, but there's a lot more going on, isn't there, with an octopus sucker. Octopus suckers are suction cups. And in that sense, they're similar to these ones we use at the end of a dart gun or, you know, that you put on your refrigerator or in your bathroom. But suction cups work very differently underwater than they do in air. And in addition, the octopus suckers have two parts. And so they're sort of a double chambered suction cup. And one of the chambers works to create the place. pull, as it were, and the other one adheres. In addition, under water, the force that the suction cup adheres with has more to do with what's called the cavitation strength of water. In the air,

it's all about whether air leaks under there or not. And then, you know, we can pull a suction cup off in the air and it gives a pop because the air can expand as you deform the suction cup as you apply force. Under water, though, water is famously incompressible, which means that its volume does not change with pressure. So as the pressure goes down or as you put force on the suction cup, the water doesn't have any give the way air does until all of a sudden a little bit of it flashes into vapor. And that's a cavitation. And you see that behind an outboard motor, for example, If you look down in the water and outboard border, you'll see bubbles coming off of the spinning prop. And if you look closely, you'll see this is not entrained air from the ocean surface.

The bubbles actually arise because of the force with which the prop hits the water. And it causes these little bubbles to cavitate out, create a cavity. And then once they leave the prop, the bubbles can expand a little bit. And then they collapse again or they rise to the surface. inside an octopus sucker, as a lot of forces being applied, that octopus sucker will hold until, and unless, the water cavitates. And the force that it takes to cavitate water is much greater than the force that it would take to pull a sucker off in the air. So underwater, a sucker will hold with a lot more force than you would see up in the air that we're used to. But if you are in a situation where you need to detach octopus suckers underwater, it is,

manageable, peel an octopus off one sucker at a time, much like you would try and lift a bath map. So we mentioned there earlier the color-changing skin, the chromatophores of the octopus, but they also change their shape in really unusual and interesting ways, don't they? Yeah, they can adopt a number of different poses, and so we see some really dramatic different appearances of the octopus. I've already mentioned this idea of some. I've already mentioned this idea of some body displays accompanying more aggressive behavior or behavior that is less sure of itself. And these changes in body pattern are often accompanied by changes in body position, posture. And the postural displays can be relatively minor, such as standing tall on the arms and

raising the mantle above the head or lying very low and staying close to the substrate. But they can also be very dramatic in some ways. Octopuses can raise these little bumps or folds of their skin called papillae. And in some species, the papillae can be very thin and spindly and give the body the appearance of different species of algae, for example. There's an octopus in Sulawesi Strait in Indonesia that is called the mimic octopus, and it will adopt its body posture so that it can look like. various different other animals. It can look like a flatfish, for example, by pulling itself

very flat from side to side. So it acts a bit like a hydroplane. And then it can adopt a body coloration that is modeled much like a camouflage flatfish and swim along the bottom looking a bit like a flounder. But it can also stay in its den and put one arm out to the left side and another arm out to the right side and put some bands up and down the arms, and then it will hold one arm very much like the head of a snake, and it looks just like a sea snake. They can look like lionfish, and so they're adopting patterns of things that are generally a little bit too big to fit in the mouth or a little bit too dangerous to attack. Yeah, so we've mentioned a few things there like about the suckers, about their behavior.

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Visit focal powered by name.com for more information. So what do we know about how they perceive the world? You know, what's leading to these behaviours? Yeah, I think a lot of how octopus has perceived the world can be sort of elucidated. by watching their behavior, or at least we can get hints about it by watching their behavior. But I'm an animal behaviorist, so naturally I think that's critical. If you speak to the anatomists, you're going to get a lot of information about the sense organs and the cellular anatomy and things like that.

And then the neurobiologists will talk very much about how the processing is critical. And so in the book, many things under rock, you know, I talk a lot about the interaction of these different ways of knowing how octopuses understand their world. The interaction of watching their behavior, understanding the sensory organs that they possess, and then trying to understand how the neurobiology allows them to process that information. And so, you know, for octopuses, they have excellent vision, but it's different to our vision. They have wonderful sense of touch, but they can also taste with their touch. They have chemoreceptors that line their suckers that allow them to taste the substrate as they walk along.

And so touch, taste, and vision are very important sensory modalities for octopuses. So one thing that a lot of people would want to know is about intelligence. So everybody always says octopuses are incredibly intelligent. We've seen them doing all sort of, like opening jars, solving mazes, all sorts of different things. So what do we know about that? You know, how intelligent are they? I suppose, what do we mean by that intelligence and how do they compare to other animals? I think that's really an insightful way to rephrase that question.

What do we mean when we say an animal is intelligent? Because there's a lot of different kinds of intelligence that animals need in order to get through their daily life. And, you know, for example, birds are incredibly intelligent in how they process sound. They learn and process sound because bird calls are very, very important to a bird's life. But if you ask, how smart is an octopus at processing sound? The question almost, it's there. They have a sense of hearing.

And it is important to understand what they do with sound. But it's not going to have the same influence in their life as it does in the birds. So if we look at what ways are octopus is intelligent, I think one of the important things to think about is that octopuses are very curious animals. They're very interested in investigating things. They're very persistent in that they don't give up very easily in what they're doing, but they're also flexible. They're willing to change tactics when one tactic doesn't work. And for an octopus, that curiosity is kind of built into their entire. evolution. They are crevice foragers in many ways. They're specialists in the coral reefs,

for example, in reaching into crevices and trying to find what they're going to forge on next. And of course, when they reach in, they can't see what's in the crevice. They can only feel it. And that's why that sense of touch and being able to manipulate things by their arms and their suckers is so important. And they're very flexible. They have multiple different ways of getting at prey, but also in managing prey. And so another thing that I write about in many things under the rock is this one very thick clam shell that I had found outside of an octopus dead. And the clam shell bore the marks of the different ways that the octopus had tried to open it. It had tried pulling on it. The octopus had tried drilling through the shell with its radula, which is this sort of tongue-like organ in the mouth,

and had been unable to get through it that way, and had finally chipped it open with the beak. So here we see the octopus being both persistent but also flexible. It tried things, and I think there were five different drill marks on this one shell, and so it had persisted in trying with the drilling, even when it hadn't worked at first, but then failing to get a good result, and it shifted to get another way.

And eventually it had opened the clam, because that's why I found it there, this open clam shell with the marks of octopus, So I think if you put together curiosity, persistence, and flexibility, you have three really important ingredients for intelligence. Even for our human intelligence, a lot of it is built out of curiosity, persistence, and flexibility. And I think octopuses are intelligent in exactly that way. So yeah, coming off the back of that, you know, so can we teach them things, you know? Is it possible to teach an octopus to do something?

Yeah, octopus is very good learners. One of the, you know, I had an octopus in my living room for a while. There's a BBC documentary, The Octopus in my house about that. And the octopus's name was Heidi. And one of the things I thought that would be fun was to sort of teach the octopus, you know, a way to play. And of course, you know, my daughter Laurel had wanted a dog. And so we thought, well, why don't we play, see if we can play catch or, you know, with the octopus, something. So we put a ball on a string so that I could pull on the ball and get it out of the bottom of the aquarium.

And then, you know, I think I rub the ball once with a little bit of the odor of a shrimp to get the octopus to touch it. And then as soon as Heidi was grabbing the ball, we could instigate a game of tug of war or chase the ball by keeping it just out of her reach as we moved it across the tank. So we had tug of war going on and chasing the ball. And then all it took to teach her that this could be fun was to give her a little piece of shrimp when we were all done. Right. And so then the ball signals feeding time. She gets a lot of interaction and tug of war and the kinds of things that even dogs like them. about that. Then at the end, she gets a little treat. And yeah, it took,

octopuses tend to learn, you know, they, they don't always learn perfectly, but once they learn, you know, it usually takes one good interaction and they've got something down. You mentioned that and you mentioned the clam earlier and how the kind of agile thinking, if you can call it that, the octopus was doing, you know, it was experimenting. So I've seen some videos of them, one, for example, hiding or shielding itself in a half-coconut shell, you know, I think it was your research, wasn't it, where they're throwing things at one another? What do we know about them using tools? Octopus's are great den builders in the sense that they will excavate a space under a rock, they will move things around, break out things

they don't like and chuck them out the door, and so they're kind of making this little space that they're comfortable in. But we usually don't think of den construction or nest construction as tool use. We think about tool use as this notion of taking something in the habitat, manipulating it and orienting it, and using it to interact with another thing. And that other thing might be another object, but it might also be another animal, or it might even be another octopus, right? And so in the case of the coconut halves,

what's fascinating about that is they don't just hide in the coconut shell. They'll pick up the coconut shell and carry it with them as they walk across this very open habitat that doesn't have very much shelter. And there are even observations of this same animal, which colloquially known, commonly known as the coconut octopus, right? it'll collect two half coconut shells and then if it is threatened it will climb into one coconut shell and pull the other one over it. And so assemble the two halves that it's carried with it. So in that instance, it's showing this notion of, wow, I want to go out across an area where there's not likely to be any shelter.

So it's got anticipation. It's got some level of future thinking, if you will, or even, just nervousness, right? Looking out, there's very little shelter. I don't want to be without, I'm going to carry something, so I'm less nervous, right? Whatever, that, however you want to contextualize that. But then it also assembles the two halves. And the coconut shells are like this, they're in the water as a human artifact, right? These are, at least every video I've seen, these are sliced open coconut shells that are probably floating in the water just as are sinking in the water as a human artifact. But if you think about it, a coconut shell is not very different from a clam shell. And clam shells are natural objects. And this octopus will do the same thing with a clam shell.

In terms of the throwing, the octopuses are taking this sort of den construction kind of behavior one step further. So they would normally push things out of their den. They would normally after feeding, they'll take those shell remains and push them away, right? Or put them outside the dead. But with this throwing behavior, they're dropping down into the dead and they're scooping up a bolus of stuff that they have. And that might be silt or shells or whatever. And they've got this collected under the web and held by the arms. And then they take this organ that they exhale through. It's called the funnel. It's the organ. It's the organ that they exhale through. It's the organ. It's the organ. they use to direct their jet. And it's very well known for long time that octopuses will direct

this jet and blow water at an irritating fish that's bothering them or something like that, or blow sand away from them to excavate a little bit of a hole under their body. But what's unique about this throwing behavior is they first gather all this material and they hold it in their arms just so, and then they'll direct the jet behind their rear legs up under the body forward, in a forward direction. And then they'll direct it on this, all the material they're holding in their arms, lift up slightly, exhale hard, and blow all that material out directly at another octopus that's near them and that they're trying to discourage. And so you get this propulsion of these projectiles or this silk cloud into the face of another octopus.

And so that in particular is a kind of tool use because, first of all, it's not den construction. It's not building a nest. It's extended from those behaviors, but it's not what's going on at the moment. They're holding and orienting one set of material, the projectiles, and they're directing it on another object, the other octopus. And so this is classically meets the definition of tool use. So it's very interesting and fun kind of behavior. And it also shows very few animals are known to throw material, throw things.

Chimpanzees do it. Cappachin monkeys do it. Polar bears have been seen to throw material in trying to get food. And so there's reports from Aboriginal people, for example, in Canada, of polar bears taking a chunk of ice and throwing it from a high position down onto an animal that it hopes to stun or kill for its food, which is pretty amazing, right, when you think about it. So the octopuses are doing something similar in their interactions with one another, where they're picking material up and aiming it and throwing it.

And to do it in this social context from one octopus to another octopus at the same species, There's very few animals that are known to throw in these social context. Only some of the social animals like the chimpanzees and the cappachins and a few other animals that are social mammals are known to throw in a social context, plus now the octopus. Going on from animal cognition and things like this. So one thing that you mentioned in the book was something about the notion of octopus's dreaming. So I think this is really interesting. A lot of people, perhaps they're dog owners and, you know, their dog's leg will move when they're asleep and they say,

oh, he's chasing a rabbit or something. What do we know about that in terms of octopuses? Well, it's exactly analogous to the dog situation. And one of the interesting things to realize is if you talk to dream researchers, you know, we get access to human dreams, we dream ourselves. but other than that, we get access to human dreams by talking about it. Someone will tell you the dream. So this question of how do we learn about animal dreams on its face seems to be, well, we can't, because the animal can't talk to us about the dream.

But if you look more closely at what dream researchers do, they use three other nonverbal clues to learn about human dreaming. So we have sleep behavior, things that. that happen when you're asleep. We have brain recordings of brain waves and things like that that are indicative of a dreaming state. And we also have one of the things that happens in our dream is we replay what we do in our lives. We rehearse. And so if you're trying to, if you're studying how to how to do something that involves a lot of movement in action, let's say you're practicing every day at martial arts or something, this may show up.

up in your dream as you dream moving through the scene behaviors. And brain recordings will show that the brain wave patterns that show up when you do the behavior also show up in your sleep when you report dreaming about that behavior. And furthermore, if that involves movements of the small muscles like finger twitching, leg twitching, things that aren't inhibited during normal dreaming, you will act out the dream. So, act out our dreams, we can see our dreams in our brainwaves, and our dreams help us learn. And so if we apply those three things to animals, we can see that animals also enact their dreams while they're asleep. That is, they show behavior consistent with dreaming while

asleep. They show brainwaves consistent with the brainwave recordings when they do the behavior when they're awake. And they rehearse the same sort of of things in their brainwaves and in their sleep behavior as they're trying to learn in their daily lives. So a song, a songbird will dream about singing and its brainwaves will show the same behaviors as the same brain patterns as when it sings when it's awake. But also sub-vocally, you can record that it's moving the same muscles and that its hearing centers are showing the same brainwaves as if it were singing went away. So there's no other reasonable conclusion that that bird is dreaming.

There's a little clip from that BBC special that I mentioned earlier, octopus dreaming, that shows an octopus twitching its small muscles when it's asleep. Well, what are the small muscles of an octopus? What corresponds to rapid eye movement in an octopus or, you know, finger twitching that humans do when we're asleep. Well, they do move their eyes. And they also twitch their arm tips, but the other small muscles are the muscles that control body patterns. And so the body patterns of an octopus will also change during sleep. And so in that video, I suggested that we could learn about octopus dreaming by studying their body patterns and comparing them to the kinds of body patterns

that they show when they're awake. Since that time, brain researchers have also recorded octopus neural patterns when they're asleep and shown that they behave very similar to other animal neural patterns when they're asleep. And so all of this suggests that it will be possible to study octopus dreaming and that we're just getting started on that road right now. So we've covered an awful lot over the last 30 minutes or so. and we've established that octopus is a very complex, sophisticated animals with a wide range of behaviours. But I think one thing a lot of people will talk about is octopus is as a food source.

So I think this is not, well, maybe a little bit controversial for a lot of people, you know. Some people are very clear in their mind that we shouldn't eat them. I just wondered what your opinion about that was. Eating octopuses is one of those challenging questions that the world is engaged with right now. And I think we have to be very clear to think about sort of the history of what octopuses encounter in their lives, the history of what humans have evolved out of and where we are right now. We simply can't deny that eating animals is a very important factor in human evolution. And it has been ever since, you know, before they're,

were humans, right? And octopus's face a field of predators. But at the same time, in the moment we're in right now in the world, we have areas like my life and perhaps your life where catching wild animals to eat them is just not necessary anymore. And in fact, eating animals is not necessary for me anymore. I can, you know, in the modern world, we have such a variety of food source is available to us that if I don't choose to eat animals, I don't have to. But at the same time, I live in a world in which there are people who are still making their living from the land and who still have to get their protein from the sea. And so I think on the one hand, it's wrong to condemn people for their dietary choices, right? I just, I feel like we need to

make our dietary choices in light of who we are. And who we are is complex, thing and it varies from person to person. At the same time, we're talking about expanding industrialized aquaculture to include octopuses. And that's a challenge. Industrialized aquaculture, industrialized agriculture has a lot of ethical challenges right now in terms of animal welfare. How are we raising our animals? You know, we raise a lot of animals as a society for food. And are we doing that in the best and most ethical way that we could for people and for animals both? And when we look at models of expanding that industrialized aquaculture model to rearing octopuses, we run into exactly those same kinds of questions.

But we're doing it with this animal that is sort of famously solitary, sort of famously intelligent, famously complex and difficult to rear in captivity. And I do believe that the octopus, aquaculturists are going to be able to solve those problems. And maybe they already have. And when they do, then we directly confront that question of not can we raise octopus's aquaculture way, but should we? Should we raise octopuses? And I think that's a question.

that, you know, we're wrestling with right now. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was marine biologist David Sheel. The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or download us on your preferred app store. You can also find us online at sciencefocus.com.

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