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an octopus can taste with all of its skin

but first they go senile, acting like a person with dementia

Octopuses die after mating and laying eggs

“You’d chase them under the tank, back and forth, like you were chasing a cat,”

Octopuses in captivity actually escape their watery enclosures with alarming frequency.

Some, she said, “would lift their arms out of the water like dogs jump up to greet you.”

How do you prove the intelligence of someone so different?”

Small brain size was the evidence once used to argue that birds were stupid—before some birds were proven intelligent enough to compose music, invent dance steps, ask questions, and do math.

BIOLOGISTS HAVE LONG NOTED the similarities between the eyes of an octopus and the eyes of a human.

Three-fifths of an octopus’s neurons are not in the brain; they’re in its arms.

“It is as if each arm has a mind of its own,”

Octopuses have the largest brains of any invertebrate

the skin of the cuttlefish Sepia officinalis, a color-changing cousin of octopuses, contains gene sequences usually expressed only in the light-sensing retina of the eye

In other words, cephalopods—octopuses, cuttlefish, and squid—may be able to see with their skin.

“Home,” Mather found, is where octopuses spend most of their time. A home, or den, which an octopus may occupy only a few days before switching to a new one, is a place where the shell-less octopus can safely hide: a hole in a rock, a discarded shell, or a cubbyhole in a sunken ship. One species, the Pacific red octopus, particularly likes to den in stubby, brown, glass beer bottles.

octopuses who dismantle Lego sets and open screw-top jars.

This octopus wasn’t the only one to use the bottle as a toy.

not only can these animals play with toys, but they may need to play with toys.

researchers who cut off an octopus’s arm (which the octopus can regrow) discovered that not only does the arm crawl away on its own, but if the arm meets a food item, it seizes it—and tries to pass it to where the mouth would be if the arm were still connected to its body. 

“Octopuses,” writes philosopher Godfrey-Smith, “are a separate experiment in the evolution of the mind.”

the natural lifespan of a giant Pacific octopus is only three years

Except to mate, most octopuses have little to do with others of their kind.

we have to change the way we think of the nature of the mind itself to take into account minds with less of a centralized self.”

“I think consciousness comes in different flavors,” agrees Mather. “Some may have consciousness in a way we may not be able to imagine.”

This time I offered her only one arm. I had injured a knee and, feeling wobbly, used my right hand to steady me while I stood on the stool to lean over the tank. Athena in turn gripped me with only one of her arms, and very few of her suckers. Her hold on me was remarkably gentle.