Are We as Smart as an Octopus?

It was a late afternoon in September. I was having a drink in a downtown Vancouver bar near the wharf with my friend Frank, a brown 400-pound Giant Pacific Octopus from the Gulf Islands, off the town of Victoria. We had been getting together for a drink every month for the past year.

I set up my computer and started Google Translate for our conversation. (Did you know that Google offered interspecies translating for $14.50 a month?) The other patrons moved away, giving us a wide berth as a pool of salt water had gathered around the legs of his bar stool.

To get here, Frank related, he had hitched a ride on the bottom of a fishing boat from Puget Sound to the boat dock across the street. He made a little joke: “It was cheaper than taking an Uber.” He is impressive not only for his size and long sucker-covered arms, but also because he is smart.

We were enjoying our drinks and chatting about baseball, when Frank changed the subject. “You humans can do some simple stuff. Now let’s find out how you compare with an octopus.” He sat back on his tentacles, took a bite of the king crab on his plate, and recited what had to be a prepared speech:

“Mike, can your arm grasp objects while it’s not connected to your brain? Can you change your shape, color and texture to blend with any background? Can you mimic other species to avoid being eaten? Can you escape capture by emitting a smokescreen that duplicates your profile? If one of your legs were severed, could you regrow a new one? Can you get out of a container that has just one hole the size of your head. Of course not, you pathetic human!”

As he spoke, a tip of one arm had attached a few suckers to my right wrist. That had happened before, so I relaxed. It felt affectionate. He sat back with what passed for a cephalopod’s smile, which I always found scary. “So,” he asked, “Nothing to say? Crabs got your tongue?”

That put me in a tough spot, as I didn’t want to offend him. After all, we are members of the two most intelligent species on Earth. We should be able to get along. So before responding, I took the time to consider our similarities and differences and what they imply.

Octopi vs. Humans

Octopi are also known cephalopods, a class of marine animals found in all the oceans of Earth. Cephalopod literally means “head foot” in Greek, a reference to the way the cephalopod’s head connects to its many arms. There are over 800 extant species of cephalopod. The octopus, squid, cuttlefish, and chambered nautilus are the most common representatives.

While there are similarities between humans and octopi, and start with the differences. We are vertebrates and they are invertebrates, which make octopi more flexible than humans. Their arms consist almost entirely of densely packed muscles that provide an impressive range of movement. When octopi crawl along the seabed, they contract lengthwise and crosswise muscles in their arms, elongating and shortening these muscles in turn. They twist their arms by contracting sets of muscle fibers that wrap diagonally around them.

We have one heart and one brain. Octopi have three hearts and nine brains. Two hearts pump blood to the gills, while a third circulates it to the rest of the body. Their nervous system includes a central brain and a large ganglion at the base of each arm which controls movement. About half of their neurons are in their limbs, which have minds of their own. We control our limbs with our brain. And we cannot regrow lost limbs.

Octopi, as we do, live in environments in which they are the smartest beings. Unlike humans, they have natural predators and have learned to survive through camouflage and speed.

We have longer lifespans. Giant Pacific Octopi are among the longest-lived in their species but survive only 3 to 5 years. Octopi are mostly solitary, whereas humans are mostly social. Female octopi cannot raise their offspring, as they die from starvation soon after giving birth. Males octopi die soon after inseminating the eggs. Because of their short lives, octopi cannot pass on to their offspring the experiences and knowledge that they gained during their lifetimes. The newborn octopi have to learn about the world from scratch.

What is Intelligence?

Intelligence means one has the ability to learn, to understand or to deal with new or challenging situations. It is the capability to think and act on practical, creative, and analytical ideas. An intelligent being uses its knowledge to manipulate its environment. It can think abstractly. It finds solutions that work in everyday life by applying knowledge based on its experience.

Many creatures, animals and plants, exhibit some of these qualities. But octopi are uniquely intelligent.

Octopi can perform tasks that one might think would be beyond their capability. “Can you humans unscrew the top of a jar to get a fish?” Yes, of course we can. We invented screw-on tops. Yet an octopus can even open a jar from the inside. And when an octopus fails at a task, it occasionally retreats and sits down and appears to consider its next move. Then it tries something else. One scientist who observed this behavior said that the octopus appeared to be “reflecting on the problem.”

Aside from their problem-solving ability, one of the most fascinating characteristics of octopi is that they appear to have both individual personalities and subjective experiences. If this is true, then it’s highly probable that similar to humans, they also possess consciousness and a sense of self.

Peter Godfrey-Smith, a professor of philosophy and author of Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, explains that an octopus’s brain has only limited control of its tentacles: “It’s arms are partly self, meaning that they can be used to direct and manipulate things. But from the brain’s perspective, they are partly non-self too, partly agents of their own.”

Octopi brains and vertebrate brains have no common anatomy. However, they share many similar features, including types of sleep, finding solutions to problems, short- and long-term memory, the ability to recognize individual people and explore objects through play.

Too Short a Life

I looked at Frank and asked myself, why do octopi have such short lives? Nobody knows. Outside of vertebrates, cephalopods are the only other big-brained animals on the planet. In my opinion, nature wastes their potential by limiting their lifespan.

It’s not the ocean’s environment that causes octopi to die so early. Many sea dwellers, such as the ocean quahog that lives 500 years, have long lives. Octopi, on the other hand, start falling apart after a year or two. Why create creatures that have the capacity to learn and understand so much and then give them so little time to utilize their knowledge?

It was time to say goodbye. I remembered that Frank is destined to die in a year or two. I was suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of loss. He is a good friend, and I will miss him. He threw down the last few drops of his drink and turned toward me.

“Mike, I hope you weren’t offended by my little rant. Humans and cephalopods, are on the same path. An immense journey. And here we are in a bar arguing about which of us is the smarter species. Sorry, my friend.”

“No problem, Frank,” I said and gave his tentacle a little squeeze. He waved a tentacle towards the waterway outside the bar. “Mike, it’s time to go. The shrimp boats pass through the channel around this time. I need to catch a ride back home. See you next month!”

He slowly raised himself off the stool and slithered to the floor. I watched him “walk” on four tentacles toward the door and then out into the street. In a few moments he reached the channels, smoothly slipped into the dark waters and disappeared.