p36 In our dreams, we humans experience our most isolated and mysterious existence. “All men,” wrote Plutarch, “while they are awake are in one common world, but each of them, when he is asleep, is in a world of his own. How much more inaccessible, then, are the dreams of animals. .. in In1998 a new study showed that, in fact, the platypus experiences more REM sleep – some 14 hours a day – than any known mammal. .. Even enamtodes and fruit flies sleep. A 2012 study showed that if fruit flies’ sleep is interrupted repeatedly, they have trouble flying the next day – just as a person has trouble concentrating after a sleepless night.”
p. 45 The cephalopods have a comment of 30 to 50 different patterns per individual animal. They can change color, pattern and texture in seven 10ths of a second. On a Pacific coral reef, a researcher once counted an octopus changing 177 times in a single hour… have electric skin. For its color palette, the octopus uses three layers of three different types of cell near the surface – all controlled in different ways. The deepest layer, containing the white leucophores, passively reflects background light. The process appears to involve no muscles or nerves. The middl layer contains the tiny iridophores, each 100 microns across. These also reflect light, including polarized light (which humans can’t see but a number of octopus pradators, including birds, do). The iridophores create an array of glittering greens, clues, golds and pinks. … appear to be controlled by the nervous system. They are associated with the neurotransmitter acertylcholine… helps with contraction of muscles in humans, it is also important in memory, learning and REM sleep. In octopuses, more of it “turns on” the greens and blues, less creates pinks and golds. The topmost layer of skin contains chromatophores, tiny sacks of yellow, red, brown and black pigment, each in an elastic container that can be opened or closed to reveal more or less colour. Camouflaging the eye alone – with a variety of patterns including a bar, a bandit’s mask and a starburst pattern p can involve as many as 5 million chromatophores. .. No researcher today suggests that all of this is purely instinctive. An octopus must choose the displaty it needs for a particular occasion, then change accordingly, then monitor the results – and, if necessary, change again. Octavia’s camouflage abilities were superior to those of her predecessors because, living longer in the ocean amid wild predators and prey, she had learned them.”
p. 48 For an invertebrate, the octopus brain is enormous. Octavia’s was about the size of a walnut, the same size as that of an African grey parrot. Alex, an African grey, trained by Dr Irene Pepperberg learned to us 100 spoken English words meaningfully, demonstrated an understanding of concepts of shape, size and material, could do math, and asked questions. He could also purposefully deceive his trainers – as well as apologise when he was found out… cephalopods are the only example outside of vertebrates of how to build a complex, clever brain”… the human brain is organised into four different lobes, each associated with different functions … an octopis brain .. has 50 to 75 different lobes. And most of an octopus’s neurons aren’t even in the brain but in the arms. These may be adaptations for the sort of extreme multitasking an octopis must undertake to coordinate all of those arms; to change color and shape’ to learn, think, decide and remember – while at the same time processing the flood of taste and touch information pouring in from every inch of skin, as well as making sense of the cacophany of visual images offered by the well-developed, almost humanlike eyes. … The common ancestor of humans and octopuses – a primitve, tube-shaped creature – lies so deeply enbedded in the prehistoric past that neither brains nor eyes had yet evolved. Still the octopus eye and ours are strikingly similar. Both have len-based focusing, with transparent cornea, irises that regulate light and retinas in the bacl of the eye to convery light to neural signals that can be processed in the brain. Yet there are also differences. The octopus eye, unlike our own, can detect polarized light. It has no blind spot… The optic nerve circles the outside of the retina. Our eyes are binocular, directed dorward for seeing what’s ahead of us, our usual direction of travel. The octopus’s wide-angle eyes are adopted to panoramic vision. And each eye can swivel independently, like a chameleon’s. Our visual acuity can extend beyond the horizon; an octopus can see only about eight feet away. There is another important difference. Human eyes have three visual pigments, allowing us to see colour. Octyopises have only one .. technically color-blind… New evidence suggests cephalopods might be able to see with their skin… the skin of the close relative, the cuttlefish, contains gene sequences usually only expressed in the retina of the eye.”
p 63 In Jennifer and Roland’s studies showing that octtopuses recogise individual humans, they found that after only a few trials, when the octopuses saw one of the staff members who always touched them with a bristly stick, they would make the eyebar as soon as they saw that person approach. When approached by people who always fed them, they did not.”
p. 72 The sight of a slender young woman sitting in the anaconda ehxibit with a 13-foot-long preatory reptile snuggled in her lap, the top of a tail coiled lovingly about one leg, provided dramatic evidence of what Scott and Wilson already knew: “Just about every animal” – not just mammals and birds — “can learn, recognize individuals and respond to empathy.” Once you find the right way to work with an animal, together you can accomplish what even Saint Francis might have considered a miracle.
p. 75 “Many of us respond without thinking to the angle of a horse’s ears, or the position of a dog’s tail, or the expression in a cat’s eyes. Aquarists learn the silent language of fishes.. the low-tide odor Scott detects, is that of heat-shock proteins. These are intracellular proteins that were first discovered to be released, in both plants and animals, in response to heat, and are now known to be associated with other stresses as well.”
p. 75 slime is a very specialised and essential substance, and there is no denying octopuses have slime in spades. Almost everyone who lives in the water does. Slime helps sea animals reduce drag while moving through the water, capture and eat food, keep their skins healthy, escape predators, protect their eggs… For some fishes – Scott’s Amazon discus and cichlids among them – slime is the piscine equaivalent of mothers’ milk. The babies actually feed off their parents’ nutiritious slime coat, an activity called “glancing”… A creature of the ocean bottom, a hagfish grows to about 17 inches long, and yet, in mere minutes, it can fill seven bucks with slime – so much slime it can slip from almost any predator’s grip. The hagfish would be in danger of suffocating on its own mucus, except it has learned, like a person with a cold, to blow out its nose. But sometimes it produces too much slime for even a hagfish to tolerate and the animal wraps its tail around its body like a knot and slides the knot forward, clearing the slime.”
p. 81 Evolutionary biologists suggest that keeping track of our many social relationships over our long lives was one of the factors driving the evolution of the human brain. Intelligence itself is most often associated with similar social and long-lived creatures, like chimps, elephants, parrots and whales. But octopuses represent the opposite end of this spectrum. They are famously short-lived, and most do not appear to be social … Jennifer, the octopus psychologist… believes the event driving the octopus towards intelligence was the loss of the ancestral shell… freed the animal for mobility… the octopus can hunt like a tiger.. a single octopus may hunt many different prey species, each of which demands a different hunting strategy, a different skill set, a different set of decisions to make and modify… in 20009 researchers in Indonesia documented octopuses that were carrying around pairs of half coconut shells, which they used as portable Quonset huts… At the Middlebury octopus lab … a sea urchin was feeding too near the entrance of the den belonging to a female California two-spot. So the octopus ventured out of her lair to pick up a 3.5 inch by 3.5 inch piece of flat slate lying six minches away and draffed it back to the den, where she erected it like a shielf to protect herself from the urchin’s spines.”
p. 97 “More than 500 million years ago… the arms of Octavia’s ancestor, sensitive, suckered and supple, would have been recognizable as one of an octopus.
In the wild, most female octopuses lay eggs only once, and then guard them so assiduously they won’t leave even to hunt for food. The mother starves herself for the rest of her life. A deep-sea species holds the record for this feet, surviving four and a half years withou feeding while brooding her eggs near the bottom of Monterey Canyon, nearly a mile below the surface of the ocean.”
p. 115 Hormones and neurotransmitters, the chemicals associated with human desire, fear, love, joy and sadness, “are highly conserved across taxa”… whether you are a person or a monkey, a bird or a turtle, an octopus or a clam, the physiological changes that accompany our deepest-felt emotions appear to be the same. Even a brainless scallop’s little heart beats faster when the mollusk is approached by a predator, just like yours or mine would do were we to be accosted by a mugger.”
p. 192 “Like us, apparently, fruit flies make choices propelled by emotions like fear, elation and despair. Another study found that male fruit flies, dejected after their sexual advances had been rejected by females, were 20% more likely to turn to drink (liquid food suuplemented with alcohol in the laboratory) than males who had been sexually sated.”
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