Stuff You Should Know - Octopus, Octopi, Octopod, Octopuses

Episode Date: September 21, 2010

Whatever you call them, octopuses are amazing creatures. In this episode, octopus enthusiasts Josh and Chuck take a closer look at the unusual anatomy, unique abilities and fascinating habits of octopi. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid work. Be sure to listen to The War on Drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, Charles W. Chuck Bryan, a seated across from me, and that would make this Stuff You Should Know. Yes. Yes. How you doing? I'm feeling a little rough, my friend. Are you? Yeah, I'm all right. You look a tad white. You know, Timmy,

my hazardous waste stuff, but he turned 40 yesterday. Oh, really? So we went out at a nice dinner and then, you know, went out afterward. Italian? Yeah, Italian. Can you create a little hazardous waste of our own? That is gross. It is, isn't it? I'm sorry. Well, I'm glad you made it in. I'm here, man. I'm ready. You're sitting upright, as I said, and seated across from me. Yeah. So I'm going to tell you a story, Chuck. Please try not to fall asleep, okay? There's an octopus that you probably have never heard of because he got almost no press coverage whatsoever, but his name is Paul. I've heard of him. You have? Yeah, the World Cup octopus. Okay. Well, I forget you do lots of research. Most people haven't heard of this octopus, right? His name

is Paul, and he lives in the Sea Life Center in Germany at Germantown that I am not familiar with. Right. And he had a tendency, believe it or not, to pick the winner of the eight final World Cup matches in 2010. Yeah. Didn't he pick up whatever flag he picked up or something? No. They would present him with two boxes with a muscle in each box. In one box, it would have who is playing who. Right. And he ate the muscle out of the right box every single time. In my mind's eye, he waved a little flag. I just totally created that. Or he sucked it up in his beak. Right. Because octopi have beaks. And I'm going to say octopi, I think, probably most of this podcast, but I'm going to go with octopuses. Octopuses is a way to go. You could also say octopods.

There are at least three plural forms of octopus. Wow. So you could say cactuses, I guess, cacti pods, maybe. Yeah. I don't think the pods would transfer over because octopi are cephalopods, right? Which means head foot. It means head foot literally means head footed. And that means when you look at an octopus and all you see is a head and arms. And that's why, that's why they get that name. Right. And it turns out that the area of its eyes are not its head, Chuck. Oh, really? As far as I understand. What's that? The big part that you would think is its head, it's its mantle. Oh, okay. We're getting ahead of ourselves. So you want to classify this thing a little better? Yes. We're going to classify it as the phylum mollusca with snails and slugs

and clams and things like that. Yeah. And in the class of cephalopoda, which along with their buddies, the squid and like nautilus and things like that, but they don't have like an outer shell like a lot of mollusks do. No, or an inner shell, which apparently squid have as well. And we'll get to that though. And why? But what they lack in, yeah, what they lack in shellness. Yeah. They, they make up for in spunk and pluckiness because they are probably the most interesting mollusks of all. Dude, octopuses are extremely fascinating. Then that's why we picked them. We don't do like, and this one is on cats. I mean, I love cats, but cats are not fascinating. We're cat lovers are going to hate you. But octopuses are definitely fascinating, endlessly to

me at least. And since you mentioned the mantle, I guess we should talk about that. Well, yeah, that if you look at an octopus, you see the eyes in the right behind the eyes, it looks like its head. Now that the eyes are actually attached to the head and what's behind it is called the mantle. Yeah. And the mantle is where all of its internal organs are stuffed into. Everything is in that bulbous sack. The anus, the gonad, the posterior salivary gland. She just giggled when you said anus and gonad. She always does. Good Lord. Sometimes I'll just walk past her in the hall and just be like anus, gonad until it starts tittering. So everything's up in there, right? Yeah. Digestive gland. Right. The anus, the gonad. Right. She's still laughing. She did it again.

And the mantle is like an extremely strong muscle. And part of the reason for that is as to protect all those organs, obviously. And it also helps with respiration. And there's also a funnel. This is awesome too. That we will get to later. Yeah. It's going to come up here or there. So keep an eye for funnel. If this were Peewee's Playhouse, that would be the secret word of the day. Oh, really? Yeah. Well, let's just make it that. Okay. And also they call that a siphon. And then like you said, we'll explain what that does. But we should talk about, we should just go ahead and lead off, I think, with the most fascinating part of an octopus to me is the camouflaging abilities. Yeah. I was going to say that its blood was blue.

Well, you know what? Go ahead and say that. That's good. That's pretty cool. Do you want me to? Yeah. Blue blood. All right. Well, your blood is red, as is mine. Yes. As is all of our listeners. Because we're American. That's right. And we're not wealthy. But octopi apparently are because they have blue blood. Right. And the reason our blood's red is because we have an iron containing protein called hemoglobin that binds oxygen together in our bloodstream for more efficient delivery. Right. Octopi have blue blood because they have a protein in their blood called hemocyanin. And cyan is another name for blue. There you go. And their blood is blue because hemocyanin is copper-based, right? Yeah. It's a copper-based protein. And I guess that

makes the diff in the color. It does. It makes all the diff. But that's really interesting because you pointed out something that has to do with one of their most fascinating features. Because they have low oxygen levels, they have three hearts. Yes. Two. Yeah. Two pump blood to the gills, right? Yeah. And then one handles the rest of the body. That's right. That's so awesome. It is. Nature finds a way. Always. I guess we'll put another heart. Yeah. 600 million years, we're going to get three hearts. So that is awesome. But back to what we were saying, which I think is the most awesome. It's not as awesome as yours. The color changing. Well, it's not mine. The color changing, camouflaging ability of the octopus. If you've never seen it,

go to YouTube and type in octopus color change. Dude, it's unbelievable. There's one. It's like 15 seconds long where the beginning of the shot, you literally are going like, all right, where's the octopus? Wow. And then it's, you know, part of this reef. It shoots off, changes color, and like under a second, which it can do. And then attaches to another reef and boom, it's that color and looks exactly like that reef. Wow. It's mind blowing. Yeah. And we have no idea how it knows what color to change it to, right? No, we don't know how it knows, but we know how it does. Right. Exactly. They're, uh, it's through chromatophores, right? Yeah. That's the secret. Okay. So chromatophores are little cells that have like three pigment sacks in each. Yeah.

So very tiny pigment sacks that depending on the muscle surrounding the cell, um, whatever color needs to be featured is expanded or contracted. Yeah. So the other two will be hidden while one is, is expanded. Yeah. And that's a cell, as I said, which means it's very, very tiny and the octopus's skin is covered. Tens of thousands of them. Right. And each one is controlled by a different nerve, right? Yeah. And the way they put it in the article to understand how that works is pretty good. I think Jennifer Horton did a great job. It's like if you put a, uh, if you color a section of rubber band and then you stretch it out in an instant, it's going to look completely different color wise and that contracts and it's going to be a very deep color. And that's what it's doing.

Spreads over a larger surface area too. Yeah. But since each chromatophores is controlled by its own nerve, um, it's a nervous system, right? No, the nervous system controls each one independently. Okay. So it's like the nervous system is going, okay, you're going to end in this chromatophore. Right. Right. And tens of thousands of them. So you have all these mind boggling different combinations. So the color change can be very, it's not just like, okay, I'm going to be blue now. Right. It's, it's like I'm going to be speckled like this coral reef that you were just talking about. Yeah. I'm going to look exactly like whatever I'm next to. Or a sandy bottom. And it also doesn't hurt that they have, um, uh, what are they called, uh, the little mirror like reflective

erythrophores. Yes. Yeah. They mirror, uh, the surrounding environment. So that helps. And then for the texture, they have projections called papilla on their skin and they can actually change textures to blend in as well, which is these videos on YouTube dude. It's insane. It doesn't look like nature should be able to do what these things do. Right. In a second. Right. And it's really awesome. So, uh, at least one researcher, um, said that, uh, chameleons camouflage is humdrum by comparison. Oh yeah. Have you seen though that one chameleon on YouTube with the different colored sunglasses? Is that real? I think it is. I got the impression that that was a, uh, Photoshopped or something. I didn't know that they could change that quickly,

but they still got nothing on these octopuses. Okay. So even if it were Photoshop, they still learn as good as an octopus. No, not by a long straight. Check those out. It's awesome. Um, so Chuck, one of the, well, the main reason why they can change colors not so they can be on YouTube. Right. Um, it's so they can evade predators, right? Yeah. And hunt better and hide. Sure. For prey and stuff like that. Um, but one of the, one of the, I guess one of the characteristics they're most famous for, um, is for evading predators is their ink, right? Yeah. Octopus can blow a bunch of ink in your face. Yeah. And you mentioned the, uh, the siphon funnel earlier, they use that in, uh, conjunction with the ink sack. So they'll spit out some ink,

which itself would be just like a very concentrated ink blob. Or yeah, it could be like little globules too. Yeah, they'll do that sometimes. Um, they say, I think, what do they do that to, uh, decoys? Yeah, decoy. But if they want to like evade something, if they're in a major threat mode, they'll squirt out some of the ink and then shoot out a big puff of water from their funnel that they're holding. And, uh, all of a sudden, that creates the big, like James Bond oil slick, right? Actually would be more like a cloud that you can't see. The deporter horizon oil slick. It was all octopuses. Oh, was it? Uh, the ink though also contains, uh, triosinase and that impairs taste and smell. So that you,

not only if you're a predator, like your shark, let's say, not only can you not see your, your, you know, remember the, the things in the nose of the shark? Sure. Yeah, that'll affect that. And they'll just get all wacky and they won't know what to do. I start swimming around in circles and smoking cigarettes frantically. Yeah, exactly. I get a little upset with that. So, um, especially with the, the kind of nervous system that, uh, octopuses have to have to, um, for each chromatophore, be controlled by its own nerve ending, um, to be able to release ink, that kind of stuff. This process is that an octopus goes through. It shows that they do have a big central nervous

system, but they also have like a pretty decent sized brain as well. Right? Yeah. And you know, before we move on from the disguising thing that the brown octopus we should point out can also contort its shape to look like other things. Right. And they think that it chooses what to look like depends depending on what's going on. Like, uh, I think the example in the article was, um, damsel fish. Yeah. If the confronted by a damsel fish, they'll all of a sudden be like form of a sea snake because damsel fish is afraid of the sea snake. Right. And the octopus will look like a sea snake. It's like, it's crazy. Yeah. Have you seen the sea snake video? No. Did you watch any white snake videos today? No, I love white snake though. So an octopus's brain

is, um, proportionately speaking, in some cases as, uh, as big as a mammal. Yeah. Um, or a bird's. Yeah. Birds don't have the smallest brains. Well, and it's definitely the most evolved, uh, of the cephalopods for sure. Yes. Smarts to the lot from what we can tell. It is. And, um, again, they, uh, the nerve endings that we were talking about. Yeah. Um, the, the central nervous system, I keep wanting to say nerve endings. The central nervous system, um, is separate from the brain. Right. Yeah. That's what they've learned through studies show that they, like what may happen is they operate independently. So the brain will like send the order out to do something and then just kind of take it off at the list. And then each arm has its own nervous system and it will

decide how to accomplish that task. Right. Apparently three fifths of the nerves in the octopus's body is in its arms and its tentacles. And there's eight independent nerve systems. Because of the odd jobs. And Chuck, tell them how, how they figured out that arms have their own central nervous system. I just thought this was mean. It sounds very mean. Uh, what they did was they severed the nerves in the arms from the other nerves in the bodies and brain and then they tickled it. And then they found out with some delight, I would imagine that, look, they're still ticklish. Right. Even though their brain doesn't know this is going on. So that's how they proved it. And these researchers were pretty, I guess a little intrepid because

the arms are very powerful. Oh yeah. It's almost all muscle. And they can, since they don't have any bone in them and there's tons of muscle and nerve endings in them, they can do just about anything, including go semi-rigid and bend at a spot like we can bend our arms like at our elbow. Yeah. Crazy. It is very crazy. They were talking about in here wrestling sharks. And if you want to also delight yourself, go to YouTube and type in shark battles octopus. And this octopus is like camouflaged and this shark swims by it like a decent sized shark. And all of a sudden this octopus just like leaps and wraps this thing up and the shark cannot get free. Do you see this like massive strong shark like wrestling and the octopus will not let it free. So you know,

octopuses have a feature that we're going to get to in a minute that I find as unsettling as anything. Which one? The beak. Oh yeah. But first let's talk about the eyes while we're on like the basic physiology of it, right? Yeah, they're kind of like our eyes, right? They're actually better than our eyes. They have eight layers of films that make up like their cornea, I guess, or what would be our cornea. And they're huge too because they need to capture more light right because it's dark down there. Sure. But actually camera manufacturers figured out that they could basically replicate an octopuses eye cornea for camera lenses. And that actually led to a huge decrease in the cost of cameras. Really? Yeah, because before you had to have

eight different lenses because lenses blurred. Oh, right. So you had to have eight different lenses to kind of work out that blur. But that's pretty big. It's a big camera. And they figured out after replicating octopuses eyes that they could do it for a lot cheaper. So bye-bye octolens. No, hello, octolens. They still use eight. Well, no, what it's now is an octopus eye lens. So it's goodbye octolens. Hello, octolens. Right, exactly. Oh, the other thing too, Josh, I found remarkable is that you always see octopuses kind of like, you know, monkey in their way along the bottom very slowly. They can jet like 25 miles an hour if they need to, which is 40 kilometers per hour. That's really fast. It is. And again, remember, we were talking about the

siphon. That's how they do it. They suck in a bunch of water into the mantle, seal it off, and then blow it out the siphon. And they can angle it and steer themselves that way, right? Yeah. That's crazy. At the very least, they can shoot in the opposite direction, add up to 25 miles an hour through water, by the way, which is, oh, this isn't through the air. No, they don't shoot out of the water. Wouldn't that be a weird world if you just looked out in the ocean, there are octopuses jumping out. I remember the first time I saw the shark breach on the Discovery Channel. It was like mind blowing for me when the shark leaps from the water completely out of the water, the great white. I have not seen that. Yeah. It was one of the,

it was one of the like money shots for Planet Earth that caught it on like the super slow-mo camera. Yeah. It's pretty remarkable. Cool. So should we talk about where they hang out, their life, basically, their little solitary octopus life? Yeah. And I didn't realize this, although now I learned it, it makes sense. Octopuses live on their own. They pretty much only are around other living octopuses when they mate. Yeah. Even that's kind of let down. Yeah. But yeah, and they live by themselves in dens, wherever they happen to be living right then is called their den. And that can be anything from beneath some rocks to an old jar or something that made it down to the bottom of the ocean floor. Yeah. If it's a small one, obviously. Right. But they can squeeze in

to some pretty tight areas because again, they have no bones. Yeah. But they change location like every couple of weeks and no one's ever been able to figure out why they do that. Yeah. That's for some reason that struck me as sad, but I don't know. I just picture like the lonely octopus getting lonely paranoid octopus. Yeah. Getting sick of his den and like moving every two weeks, but maybe just wants to change the scenery. Who knows. And octopi generally walk, right? Yeah. They use their suckers. Everyone knows about the suckers on the underside of the arm and they help to propel it along the bottom of the ocean. And those little suckers are really, really sensitive. They have 10,000 neurons apiece. So while they're swimming along or walking along

the ocean, they're also like checking things out with their suckers like food and stuff like that or threats. And we should say at this point that we've been talking, we probably should have said this at the beginning, but if you're an octopus nerd, we've been talking the entire time about the non finned octopus, right? Inserate. Sure. Nothing much rarer and less discussed and less studied serate or finned octopus. I didn't look up a picture of those. You know what they look like? No, neither. They have fins. I feel bad for those guys because they don't know whenever talks about them. Well, they keep to themselves. Do they? Yeah. Like all octopi. The war on drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take drugs. America's public enemy number one is drug abuse.

This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah, and they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs. Of course, yes, they can do that. And I'm a prime example of that. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. The cops. Are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid.

Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, it's Megan Devine, host of Here After with me, Megan Devine on the Amy Brown podcast network. There's a lot going on lately, which is a massive understatement from personal losses to bigger collective sweeps of a lot of awful things. Everything is a lot. We have to start telling the truth about how hard it is to be here sometimes, how absolutely sideways life can go in a culture that's often afraid of big emotions. It's a radical act just to let things hurt. Hereafter with Megan Devine is the show where everyone's allowed to talk about what's real in the service of a more connected and supportive world. It is

also the place where I get to have conversations with interesting people about difficult things with bestselling authors and a collection of artists and actors and activists. It's how you'd imagine the coolest dinner party ever might be. Listen to new episodes of Here After with Megan Devine every Monday on the Amy Brown podcast network available on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So, Chuck, we've gotten to the point now where the most unsettling part of any octopus for me emerges, and that is the beak. It's awesome. Octopus is squishy, boneless, muscular, little weird things have a beak very similar to a parrot's. I know. In the center of the underside of their head where all their legs come together.

Yeah, it's up inside the mouth, and they don't have standard teeth per se, but they have the beak and they have something called a radula, which is a barbed tongue, and so basically they'll use the beak to crack a clam open, and then they'll use the radula to like scrape out the meat, like a little finger to scoop it out, and then the last thing I want you to say, because that's really awesome. The cell very peppy, yeah. Yeah, that's like this, it's a bone, it's like a tooth covered organ that they can shoot out from between the beak, which by the way, surrounded by lips, they can shoot it out and drill into a shell, like a shell they can't open, they'll just drill into it and suck out. Have you seen

Starship Troopers? Yeah. You remember the brainworm or the brain bone? Oh yeah, that's probably based on that. Sucking brains out. Does it remind you of that? Yeah. I think it's pretty cool that they have those little, it's like a little Swiss Army knife, they're depending on what they want to use, or what they need to use, they can just like use whatever tool that's inside their little mouth. Right, and when they come upon prey, most likely what they'll do is they'll wrap their legs, they'll catch it like in a net and then pull it close to them and just envelope it completely and just go to town with it on with the beak. Right. Or one of the other tools. The other cool thing too about the salivary papilla is that, or papilla, is it papilla or

papilla? Papilla. Tortilla, tortilla. They secrete, that thing secretes something that erodes the shell. So if it's like a really tough clam to get into while they're drilling in, it secretes this thing that like erodes the shell as it's digging in to make it easier. Yeah. That's just another amazing like evolutionary feed to me. Yeah. How did you know octopuses were so interesting to select this article? I didn't. I think always thought they were cool looking and I just happened upon the article and read the first page and it's like, yeah, this is a keeper. The male pillow octopus, got you? Yeah, we should talk about that. Oh, we definitely will. We will talk about that guy with reproduction. How about that? Okay. So first, we're going to talk about being born

and that the feeding goes directly into that appropriately enough because octopuses are masters at metabolizing food. Actually, an octopus, by the time it dies, it will weigh one-third of all the food it's ever eaten. It puts food to use that well. Yeah. And apparently, a young octopus grows body weight, increases its body weight five percent daily. Yeah. That's crazy. And they don't know a lot about the little baby octopus, but some of them they do know will like kind of float near the surface as tiny, tiny little specks. And as they grow, they start to fall. And then some of them though are born slightly larger, like on the seafloor. Right. But they're like, they're on their own once they're born. Yeah. Let's talk about reproduction, Chuck.

How is that little thing born? So tell everybody about the male pillow octopus. Well, the male pillow octopus is one of the cool things about it is that it's tiny, tiny, tiny. How big is this thing? About a couple centimeters. A couple centimeters long, weighs less than a gram. Yeah. The trick that you think, all right, that's cool. There are small things in the world. I think I've eaten one of those. The trick is by accident. No sushi. Oh, okay. Never again. The trick is though, they, the females of the same species are more than six feet long and weigh a hundred pounds. They're 40,000 times the size of the male. Yeah. And Jennifer Horton put in a perspective here that would be like one of us asking out the,

well, asking out. Right. Let me put that in air quotes. A woman five times. Four times. Four times as large as the Statue of Liberty. Yeah. Proportionately. That's a lot of women. Yeah. But so you might think, well, how in the world would these things mate if this octopus is so much bigger? What happens in the case of the male pillow octopus is he will, he has an arm. All octopuses have an arm. Well, all octopuses have the arm that contain the sperm. Is that right? Yeah. It's called a hectocautilus. Hectocautilus. And instead of doing what some octopuses do, which is to put that with the woman, they will actually break it off and just say here, just take this and use it whenever you need it. Please don't hurt me. And then they swim away

and die. Well, the males actually die within a couple of months after reproducing once. So they pull off their hectocautilus. It's like a naturalization class in here. Hectocautilus. Hectocautilus. Thank you. And giving it to the female, which she just stores in her mantle. Yeah. She keeps it until she's ready to have babies, basically. Right. So then she lays the eggs, takes out the sperm arm. The little magic wand, the hectocautilus. Right. And then basically just spreads it over the eggs to fertilize them. Or there are some species of octopi where the hectocautilus is inserted into the female's overduct. Right. So there is some sort of sexual act. The traditional thing that you think about. Right. Happens sometimes.

That's an ink. Before we move on from the little guy, though, the little pillowcase guy. I'm sorry, the little pillow guy. There's no case. He also has been known to rip off the tentacles of a manna war and use it as a sword to protect himself because he's like build up resistance to the poison. Yeah. I love this little guy. Yeah. He's like the fiercest little beast in the ocean. And what's interesting is he's not supposed to be doing that because that's tool use. Yeah. There is actually a couple of months back there was a big sensation on the internet about an octopus being filmed using coconut shell halves as portable habitats, I guess. Oh, really? So we just carried around that every once I look around and get under it. It was pretty cool. But animals aren't supposed

to use tools, right? No, they're not. But octopi do. Wow. Yeah. So like you said, they'll have the little egg hatch and the female will die as well after hatching the egg, which is really sad. And yes, but she protects it the entire time. Yeah. She like blows water over it and keeps it nice and clean. And she might be, she might be caring for these eggs for between two to ten months. Right. And she's not eating at all. Oh, really? Yeah. And then once they start to hatch, she's out of there. She may not, she doesn't die quite then. Right. But she's gone. So they're solitary. Aside from the moment when they're mating and the moment these eggs hatch, they're on their own. Like octopi are solitary animals. Well, and not a very good chance of survival

either, right? Don't want them to die. Yeah. With the giant Pacific octopus, which can grow up to, I think, 600 pounds. Yeah, that's for the big ones. Yeah. They have a 1% survival rate for going from hatchling to 10 millimeters. Just to 10 millimeters. Yeah. Wow. Tragic. We need Sally Struthers in here. What else we got? Oh, the personality stuff. That's pretty cool. Yeah. Well, we were talking about them, you know, using tools. They're not supposed to do that because they're cephalopods. So they're supposed to be stupid. They're all, you know, mating and eating. Yeah. And evading maybe. Right. But octopi kind of buck that trend among even cephalopods. Yeah, they found some that have, some can open jars, have learned to open jars. It's pretty remarkable.

Outside of their tanks. Well, that too. They've found some that have gotten outside their tanks and like gotten into the food bins. Right. And then they found some that can open jars, some that can work mazes. Some that know like to pick a red ball over a white ball. So crazy. Some that can call the World Cup. Right. Absolutely. So octopi aren't supposed to have personalities. But we have come to realize that they largely do, thanks to the work of a marine biologist named Jennifer Mather. Right. Yeah. She and Roland Anderson are two biologists that kind of got the feeling that they might, you know, from seeing all these things in these aquariums that they might have a personality. And that's kind of a hard thing to test. Right.

But they did it. What was the other guy's name? Roland? What? Roland Anderson. Anderson, he was the one who was tending or he worked at the Seattle Aquarium. Is that where it was? And he found out that the keepers named three species of animals. I think it was otters, seals, and their giant Pacific octopi. Oh, really? And normally like that, you don't, you reserve naming an animal based on its personality. Right. And since octopuses aren't supposed to have personality, you want to know what's going on. Right. So he went and found out and he found that a leisure suit Larry. Yeah. Apparently this is a very touchy-feely octopus when the tanglers would get in its tank. He'd just be all over him like, Hey, baby, how's it going?

And then Emily Dickinson was so shy that she eventually had to be replaced because she'd just hide behind the artificial barrier like would never come out and like look just like it too. So people didn't even notice. Right. Exactly. And then she wrote poetry as well. Right. Sad poetry, but good stuff. And then there was Lucretia McEvil, right? Yeah. And this one destroyed her tank, the interior of her tank. So she was obviously pretty feisty. She was. And apparently they were afraid to get in there with her because again, this giant Pacific octopus, they can grow up to 600 pounds. Yeah. So if you have a McEvil one, it's trouble. Well, and once you see this video that wrestling a shark, I would be like,

I'm not going anywhere near that thing. Right. So Anderson and Mather decided to come up with some, I guess, some stimuli. I think they opened the cage. They put a brush into the tank, see what they would do. And I can't remember. There was another one. And then they figured out that these these octopus showed 19 distinct behaviors. Wow. And they put it into three buckets, right? Activity, avoidance and reactivity. So what happened? Well, what happened was they figured out that these these octopus actually were showing personality. Wow. Like they had person like an octopus would you could say this octopus right here number 89 is going to do this if we do that. But the octopus in the next hand over will do something different. That's personality.

And octopus aren't supposed to have that. They also the same group. I kind of looked over the article. It's in the February 2007 issue of natural history, right? They found that a couple of octopuses played and they gave them a prescription bottle filled with like half filled with water with oxycon a couple of right. Yeah. They really played. They got really lethargic. I bet they would play with it like they were bouncing a ball really in their tank. Yeah. These little guys are awesome. They really are. And girls. Yes. The war on drugs impacts everyone whether or not you take drugs. America's public enemy. Number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to

distribute 2200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah. And they can do that without any drugs on the table. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. Cops. Are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, it's Megan Devine, host of Hereafter with me, Megan Devine on the Amy Brown podcast network.

There's a lot going on lately, which is a massive understatement from personal losses to bigger collective sweeps of a lot of awful things. Everything is a lot. We have to start telling the truth about how hard it is to be here sometimes, how absolutely sideways life can go. In a culture that's often afraid of big emotions, it's a radical act just to let things hurt. Hereafter with Megan Devine is the show where everyone's allowed to talk about what's real in the service of a more connected and supportive world. It is also the place where I get to have conversations with interesting people about difficult things with bestselling authors and a collection of artists and actors and activists. It's how you'd imagine the coolest

dinner party ever might be. Listen to new episodes of Hereafter with Megan Devine every Monday on the Amy Brown podcast network available on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. The other cool thing that they did, the octopuses did in these tests was they wanted to see how they did with problem solving. And so they like wired clam shut. But so they couldn't because traditionally they'll break the clam open and scoop it out. And they wanted to see if the octopus would just be like, I'll just eat something else. I can't get into this one. No, no. What these things did was they said, okay, I'll get up my drill. And even though this is not how we get into clams, I'm going to drill

into this clam. And not only that, but after a few tries, they figured out the best point at the clam to drill in to get the best meat like right there in the center. They figured all this out. Unbelievable. They're very smart. Very smart. You could play cards with an octopus. There's been octopus gangsters before. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So they're very smart. Sure. I mean, you have to have an organized brain and organized mind to participate in organized crime. I would think so. Yeah. I hope everyone found this as fascinating as I did. I hope so too. All they have to do is go and type in octopus change color. And there's just like scores and scores of videos. And you can also read this very comprehensive article on the site how octopuses work.

Remember, you can say octopuses, octopi. As a matter of fact, I think everybody should walk around and call them octopuses. And when they're corrected, you could be like, no, jerk. You can say octopi, octopuses. Can't we all get along? And I found out because these other two jerks told me, right? Because they some jerk wrote an article and they'll be like, well, you're a jerk for listening to those two jerks and it'll just go downhill from there. I wonder what the octopuses garden is. You know that Beatles song that Ringo sang? No. Of course you don't. Yeah. I'd like to be under the sea in an octopuses garden, I guess. Oh, is that the name of that song? Yeah. I thought that was from the little mermaid soundtrack. No. That's under the

sea. Yeah. It's a different song. You just said, oh, okay. Well, if you want to learn more about the octopuses or the Beatles or the little mermaid, I'm pretty sure you could find something about all three of them on our site. Just use the search bar at howstuffworks.com and now it is time for a listener mail. Yes, Josh. Andy in Houston says this. Okay. Hey guys, huge fan after listening to your customs podcast about bringing items from embargoed countries took me back to some stuff I did in college. During the Columbus Daybreak in my freshman year at Clarkson University, 20 miles from the US Canadian border, a buddy of myself decided to go to Montreal for the day. Once we got there, we bummed around the city and bought some Cuban cigars, which is, I guess,

what you do in Montreal. We decided that if we'd wait until we got back to campus to and we decided that we'd wait to get back to campus to enjoy them. We pulled off the bands and figured we'd be just fine. We got to the border and the officers asked us why we were in Canada for six hours, and we just said tourism. We were then instructed to pull into a garage so we could get searched. I guess two college kids hanging out in Montreal returning relatively soon throughout the red flag. We were told to exit the car so the dogs could check it out. We were brought inside and asked if we had any illegal substances, which we quickly handed over the cigars and were terrified. They said we could be charged with willingly smuggling illegal items.

And since they pulled the bands off, they could have charged them with altering illegally altering material with the intent of bringing it into the USA, which is exactly what they did. And he said in the end they let them off with a warning and his buddy's cup holder is still broken to this day. From the car search, we were so angry at customs that we decided to spite America by blasting Rush the whole way home. It seemed funny at the time. So I guess they blasted Spirit of Radio and said we'll smoke our pubes. Best steel day or something. Yeah, nice. That's Andy in Houston. Think in Houston? Houston, Texas is what he says. But he went to school 20 miles from the Canadian border. See that's a little shady if you ask me.

I wonder if he's throwing up red flags. Talk about climate change. Well, if you want to shame me for that terrible pun or you have a story you want to share with us, you got anything? Let's plug Atlanta first. Oh, okay. Yeah, go ahead. We are having our Atlanta All-Star Trivia event, which is hopefully going to kick off a nationwide tour. And it is going to be October 13 at the five seasons brewery west side. Sometime in the evening, we'll get a time stamp soon. Just show up sometime after six. Yeah, I would say it probably right in there. And should we announce our special guest? I think we can now, sure. Yeah, dude, we got some three people verified. We're very excited about. Yes. So go ahead. We've got John Hodgman.

John Hodgman is coming to Atlanta for a trivia. Yeah, just to play trivia. He's not just going down the block like New York. He's coming down to Atlanta to play with us from Brooklyn. Yeah, also from Brooklyn. The esteemed Joe Randazzo, who is the editor of the fine, fine onion newspaper. Yes. America's finest news source. Joe and John are both coming down. And then as of yesterday, we landed local legend Dave Willis, who is the co-creator of Aquatine Hunger Force and Squid Billies. Yeah. On the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim. Absolutely. And we are super, super psyched that Dave is joining us. And we're working on a couple of other people. But if no one else shows up to me, that's like, that's a stud team right there. That is a stud team. We'll see if we can

beat everybody. I don't even care about that. I'm just excited to get those people together. I'm going to keep my mouth shut about Ohio, Virginia presidents. Okay. Okay. Yeah, we missed that one. So if you want to come play trivia with us and Hodgman and Randazzo and Willis, we're going to be hanging out at Five Seasons Brewery on Wednesday, October 13th. You got it. And just send us an email about whatever you want. How about that? Use your creativity. We have no thesis for you today. Just wrap it up, spank it on the bottom and send it to Stuff Podcast at HowStuffWorks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. Want more HowStuffWorks? Check out our blogs on the HowStuffWorks.com

homepage. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil answer for it. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Here's today's Fortnite weather report. iHeartland has been hit by a major blizzard. The snow has turned iHeartland and Fortnite into a winter wonderland with new festive games, including a winter themed escape room, a holiday obstacle

course, ice skating, hidden holiday gifts and more. Look out for upcoming special events from your favorite artists and podcasters all month, along with scavenger hunts and new how fan are huge challenges. So embrace the holidays at iHeartland in Fortnite. Head to iHeartRadio.com slash iHeartland today.