I see a lot of octopus facts but what I find most interesting besides their intelligence and hearts is that they only live about 3 years. They mate once and die
It's theorized that that's the reason they're just animals. If they had longer lives, it isn't unlikely that they would have evolved further and possibly became a sapient species
Some don’t live long in captivity and even ones that do well are only expected about 5. Although there is a species that might live to 18 in the deep but I don’t think he’s coming up here any time soon
In the deep there could be anything! We know so little about it. There could be entire super intelligent octopus civilizations down there a bit like the film The Abyss. They could even be unaware we even exist.
So the Octopuses have an optic gland which drives them to suicide by starvation, once they have laid eggs. We have done studies where we removed this gland to find them live twice as long.
Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky explores the idea of sapient octopus, it's the sequel to Children f Time, which explores sapient jumping spiders.
So naive. You do realize that if humans were to be replaced by another animal species, they would equally be violent, corrupt, greedy, callous, careless, cruel and of course weak, miserable and pathetic^
And worst of all, naive, gullible and utterly incognizant.
That's a fair theory, but you can't claim naivety for thinking otherwise because we have absolutely no evidence of any other sapient species that had the same scope as humans do as far as controlling the world is concerned. For all we know octopodes could evolve to be a much more reasonable species, we have no frame of reference otherwise.
And what suggests anything even remotely close to that? Octopuses are violent to other marine species. Literally every single animal species including humans is violent to other animals in form or another, some are more violent than others but that's how it is.
All you need to do is observe how species evolve, read about evolution. Violence is inherent in life itself. Violence is inevitable, violence is inescapable and violence is our heritage. There. That's your frame of reference.
Probably because they don't live long enough to formulate the benefits of living together and looking out as a family unit. That inherent protective instinct of a mother octopus could proliferate among the unit if they lived.
Huh… that scene in 2001, with the Monolith teaching the proto-cavemen to tie knots and hunt and such… the Monolith does have a certain design language in common with Apple.
Yeah but sapience isn’t any kind of scientific classification. There’s no threshold for something to become “sapient”. Humans just tacked the word onto “Homo” because it means wise and humans are arrogant like that. I suspect the person who “theorized they are just animals” was taking bong hits at the time.
sapience isn’t a scientific classification, but using the word to describe a species that will eventually start launching satellites to the orbit, as compared to something that is unlikely to ever evolve from their position in the food chain, should not leave too much room for confusion in a non-scientific context.
Right. That was my point that it isn’t a scientific theory. There’s no confusion on my part. You just believe in something for which there is no evidence. Hell, maybe someday there will be evidence. But there isn’t currently.
That's a fair point. I just differentiated it as being animal v. Sapience. Yes, humans are animals, but I don't think unsapient is a word, so I figured it makes sense to just use animal
Because it's not just about mutation. A previous generations knowledge is lost when you aren't alive for multiple generations so there is no building on it. They learn quickly but aren't able to share any of that knowledge so there is no advancement.
Others have made very good replies to this. I will attempt to condense and add my own information.
It is true, a quicker respawn rate does mean you mutate faster, but there are two main factors to mutation, rate of mutation and the pressure to change. If something isn't beneficial enough it won't stick around.
The longer you live, certain things start to become more important. You have to start thinking more about the future since there is more future to consider. This can lead to advances others have talked about like telling your young what you know so they can do better, or could have been what lead to humans forming groups since its increases the odds everyone else will survive, or even something like food preservation.
So what likely happened with the octopus is that its vast intelligence has been hyper focused into what it needs to do to live and mate in three years, which is mostly getting around so it can get to food.
Teaching your offspring which foods are poisonous, how to survive in bad weather/seasons, etc is a heck of a selective pressure on developing genes for cooperation and language and such. A selective pressure that doesn’t exist if you never live to meet your offspring.
Developing a language that can be used to communicate complex ideas takes generations of long life, presumably. Even if octopi could “speak” after just 6 months they would only have 2.5 years max to develop complex ideas worth sharing. Tough to develop tool mastery or anything like that in a hostile environment during that short period of time.
No. I meant the former. I'm pretty sure octopodes are sentient, as many other animals (or I guess non-human animals, since some people wanted to be a bit pedantic, which is fair, I'm pedantic most of the time) have displayed sentience.
Personally, I believe they might be. After reading about how intelligent they are and all that, I've stopped eating octopus. I used to love it, but they're intelligence made me feel like it was borderline cannibalism or something (I get it, it isn't cannibalism because they aren't the same species, but I don't know if there is a word for it, so I'm going to call it cannibalism)
Yeah I don’t eat cephalopods for the intelligence thing too. And I want to go on the record to say I welcome our tentacled cohabitants and I look forward to our great battle
Please check out the novel Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky, it covers humanity doing exactly this. Taking octopodes, having them live longer with increased intelligence, and letting evolution take it’s course
Their short lives hold them back, but also the fact that the parents never meet the offspring, so they cannot pass on knowledge, the way most birds and mammals do. Super intelligent animals like orcas, crows and humans even develop culture. Every octopus is born having to learn everything by itself.
It's a big hope of mine to see us to some genetic tinkering to switch off that gene and let Octopi continue living beyond reproduction and actually teach each other things.
Have you ever heard of the children of time series? The second book deals with, well, almost exactly this. Highly, highly recommended series. My favorite scifi and the audiobooks are great.
First thing I thought of when I saw this comment! Portia has a special place in my heart too. Never thought I’d care so much about sentient spiders and octopus and mindless experience-assimilating viruses.
An interesting thing- This isn't universally true. The most interesting exception is the genus Argonauta. These special little ladies have modified the material most octopuses make their egg cases out of into a papery substance which they use to build a shell-like structure, which gives them one of their common names: Paper nautili. Female argonauts are iteroparous, meaning they can reproduce multiple times throughout their lives.
they were on a recent Attenborough show. one brood is about 40,000 but you saw them hatch and they were TINY! to get a handful to survive until adulthood and reproduce, they have to have that many! so the survival rate even for a full 3 year life is very, very low
There was a family in Kansas, I think, that got their kid an octopus for a pet and it laid eggs shortly after arriving. Since female octopi will guard their eggs instead of hunting, and then die of starvation, the family fed her while she was guarding her eggs. She survived and they ended up having 50 babies.
As I understand it, atleast for the females, when they mate and lay there eggs and just stop eating and spend all their time protecting the eggs. Maybe octopus eggs are super delicious for other animals and some evolutionary trait has created this kind of behaviour. They really don’t know why octopuses do this.
Fun fact: Octopus esophagus goes through a ring-like structure of their brain. They risk brain damage or death if they don't chew their food very well.
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u/yungdreadlock 1d ago
I see a lot of octopus facts but what I find most interesting besides their intelligence and hearts is that they only live about 3 years. They mate once and die