Dolphins' elaborate octopus-hunting strategy
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I'm from south-west Australia (where these dolphins were observed) and grew up swimming along the coast, scuba and snorkelling to much delight.
Once, in a little sand hole near Yanchep, I was floating around on a particularly hot day, when I thought I saw a crayfish just lolling around on the ocean floor. Diving deeper to get a closer look, I realised it was just the head of the crayfish, long-since hollowed out, albeit with a bit of flesh still onboard.
I took an even closer look, and what I thought was a bit of weed attached to it was actually a long, slender tentacle, which I followed back to a minuscule hole in the rocky sand, and therein I spotted the rest of the octopus.
Delighted, I stuck around for a while to watch.
The octopus was fishing! It held out the cray corpse just a little, out in the currents, waiting patiently for the stupid little white fish to come and try to nail a bite!
When a particularly dumb little fish got its fangs in, BAM! Out came another tentacle, fast as light, and snatched that dumb fish into the hole. All the while, the original bait tentacle continued to just lull about, swinging and swaying, getting those dumb fish even closer and closer, ever more tantalising.
I stayed and watched it all day - it apparently had a nearly-insatiable hunger, or maybe it was just really enjoying itself. To my dying days, I'll never forget that clever little cephalopod ..
(tl;dr: don't eat octopus!)
This is what I get:
1: ready-to-eat food products (as cooked meats and prepared salads)
2: sing, pl delicatessens [delicatessen (store)] : a store where delicatessen are sold
It's a wonky marketing term like "lite".
does that mean "cut off" ?
Cuttlefish!
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/07/how-colorblind-cuttle...
Now that it's become clear that the octopus is an intelligent creature capable of solving problems and making plans, I'm going to eat less sophisticated mollusks and leave octopus to the dolphins.
Whales and octopuses, I think, also fit the "animals we know to live in threatened conditions" criteria many of us apply to deciding who to eat.
The "threatened conditions" is a bit more debatable, e.g. the minke whales that are being caught today by Icelandic and Norwegian whaling are of the same endangerment status as e.g. moose and wild boar - "Least Concern". Also Greenpeace et al. use quite a bit of disingenious reporting, e.g. talking about Icelandic fishing of "endangered whales" when those whales aren't actually endangered in the oceans where the Icelandic vessels fish, but literally on the other side of the earth. (I'm not particularly pro-whaling either, just food for thought.)
Octopi are even less endangered, the two large species are not on any conservation list.
The other aversion is the efficiency of dogs as food, being carnivores it takes a lot more resources to raise dogs for food than it does for pigs. Any society that went for dogs were going to get out competed.
And it's sort of interesting you bring up Asia considering that the outrage over Asians eating dog meat is much greater in Asia than it is in the West. Dogs are more and more seen as pets and not fit for consumption. Worldwide, dog meat consumption has trended sharply downward.
I eat bacon. Does that make me a hypocrite? I guess. Is that an accusation likely to make me start eating dogs or stop eating bacon? No.
It has been done in their cultures for centuries, I don't have the kind of hubris to think that my culinary customs should be everyone's.
Everything I've seen is that pigs are far smarter.
I've never heard of dogs being smart?
I dunno, managing to convince the alpha species of the planet not to eat then and instead to provide them shelter and food with no expectation of work in return could be considered pretty smart.
"The potato says these things by doing them, which is the best of languages. What is consciousness if this is not consciousness? We find it difficult to sympathise with the emotions of a potato; so we do with those of an oyster. Neither of these things makes a noise on being boiled or opened, and noise appeals to us more strongly than anything else, because we make so much about our own sufferings. Since, then, they do not annoy us by any expression of pain we call them emotionless; and so qua mankind they are; but mankind is not everybody.
From Samuel Butler's Erewhon. (The same chapter that inspired the eponymous Butlerian Jihad in Dune, incidentally.) I don't agree with the conclusion here, and I doubt Butler did either, but the whole book is a great read.
[1] http://www.online-literature.com/samuel-butler/erewhon/26/
"Sadhguru: Now, if you eat a mango, this mango becomes a woman in you. If I eat a mango, the same mango becomes a man in me. If a cow eats a mango, the same mango becomes a cow in the cow. Why is this happening? There is a certain information or software in you – whatever you eat it transforms it into a woman. If I eat, it transforms into a man. If a cow eats, that becomes a cow. So every life is happening the way it is happening because of a certain dimension of information or in modern terminology, let’s call it software. There is a certain software, which is an arrangement of information.
Now, the idea is to eat as simple a software as possible. If you eat that kind of life, which is a very simple software, your ability to override that software and make it entirely a part of you is very good. As that software gets complex, more and more complex, your ability to integrate it goes down. So, especially if it’s a creature which has some sense of thought and emotion, if it has emotion, then you should not eat it. This is the understanding. An animal, which has any emotion, displays certain emotions… especially if it displays emotion which is near to human emotion, you should not eat it because it will not integrate itself. That animal nature will start manifesting itself."
- From http://isha.sadhguru.org/blog/video/basis-for-beef-ban/
And, this idea is in Western civilization too. Look at the origins of the phrase - "you are what you eat".
I could eat babies and they would keep me alive. How does one tell if they are able to "integrate" their food without the baby nature "manifesting itself"?
Not the same as me now because currently I'm not eating babies, but it would be the new me.
Even if I never start eating babies, I'm still not the same person a year from now.
"You" is a very fluid concept.
Mahi-mahi is a fish
Killing and eating a pig when you need it to survive is not immoral. Killing a pig because you felt like having pork rinds, and then leaving the rest of the body to rot because you'd rather have steak is immoral.
While there are dolphins who won't eat octopuses because it's dangerous or difficult, I bet there are some who won't because they empathize with them. If the humans in this thread can empathize with an octopus why couldn't a dolphin?
The dolphin life span varies between 20-50 years for the various species.
But when does that happen? Wouldn't the butcher or supermarket usually sell most of the meat and the rest of the carcass is used for dog food or whatever?
I suppose there is probably some waste, but I find it hard to believe there are animals left to rot as you describe simply due to economics.
The waste is almost entirely on the consumer side.
Personally, I think consumption of more than a few ounces of meat per week is unethical, by the same logic. It's not necessary for health. However, most people in my country don't have the food culture necessary to make adequate non-meat-based dishes. We weren't all born in a family where we were taught thrifty cooking techniques. So it's a strange gray area of "unnecessary". One doesn't need to eat more than a couple ounces of meat, but one needs food and if one doesn't know how to cook plants into something that could stand in for meat in a satisfactory way, then they "need" meat.
The internet is there, so anyone could do it though. I think whether it's ethical comes down to how much free time you have and how comfortable you are with cooking. But again, that's my personal view. I wouldn't expect someone else to live by my ethics. I would expect them to have some measure of "need" in their scheme though. If their habit is "I eat as much red meat as I want I don't even think about it", unless they're and abuse victim or something that's probably not an ethically defensible position.
Cooperative hunting, altruism, care for the members of the group, and colective child care are normal.
Innate interest and sense of compassion for other marine mammals in distress, including humans, and a strong protection response in dangerous situations.
They have grandparents. This is particularly remarkable. Old specimens past their reproductive days are treated as expendable and die quickly in 99% of the animal species. Grandma's are instead VID (very important dolphins) in its societies, and live much longer than expected.
Mourning was also reported in some cases.
But there are many, many differences between humans and dolphins. We're smarter, for one. Debate philosophy. Are rarely seriously in danger of starving. Have much more culture. Etc., etc.
So, probably as intelligent as nomadic pre-historic humans. I wouldn't rate that as "highly" intelligent. Just somewhat intelligent.
These are still pre-historic dolphins, since they don't seem to record history for themselves yet. If they carry oral traditions, they seem to be limited to hunting techniques, and not specific events and personalities measured across time. There is no evidence of symbolism invented by dolphins.
Either way, the octopus is similarly prehistoric, despite readily prehensile appendages.
Nor does a lack of hands readily explain the level of elephant intelligence, given a prehensile trunk.
Hint: the animals are less intelligent for doing so.
But that was third-hand knowledge at best.
Pigs are very smart, but they're also probably _the_ most delicious meat. Its unfortunate.
Cows, I think, most people assume are stupid?
maybe it's just they like the taste? it's not like we don't go out of our own way to find some delicacies just because we are in the mood for them.
I know anthropomorphizing animals is a no-no these days, but trying to explain everything based on "nutritional value" seems a bit narrow minded...
I am not really aware of any mammal behaviour that I cannot somewhat relate to at gut level. You may say I anthropomorphize, or you may say I equate, it doesn't really matter. There isn't a physiological or neurologic feature we don't share, me and all those other mammals. I have some language and some reasoning power to top it all off with, but our sensations, reactions, emotionals, motivators, fears, pains and joys are clearly of very similar nature. Of course they are - they run on the same basic hardware architecture.
And now, if you will excuse me, my dog wants to go for a walk. I know exactly what he means.
[Edit: typo]
If you want to find where our perceptions differ from that of a cat or a dog or an elephant, I believe that anything cultural or learned in nature is a better place to start. If every human experiences it, it's likely that other mammals experience it too on some level.
I suspect that if our experiences shared few or no similarities, humans would've had far less success in the way of keeping, training, and befriending animals. The ability to accurately empathize with other creatures has to have jump-started the process in many cases.
[1] See a review about it that explains his findings. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/how-ani...
It makes sense that earlier ancestors who maybe found bitter very enjoyable and sweetness not so enjoyable died off from a lack of calories or eating poisonous things before reproducing. And it makes sense that while across cultures people eat very different foods, you see the same patterns in terms of umami and sweet being considered desirable and bitterness often rejected.
In fact the human tongue is considerably more complex than traditionally assumed. For example, besides the umami taste receptors recently proven to exist there are also studies looking to see if we have taste receptors for "fat", "starch" and even "metallic" flavors, among other things.
The chemical reaction between molecules and how the brain decodes the signals produced by them is fascinating when it comes to the flavor of things.
Do dolphins get high on octopus?
Although I just learned from Wikipedia that apparently we figured out how to raise non-poisonous pufferfish. Neat.
Perhaps it's only worth eating for the thrill?
I have a Japanese friend who explained the fugu thing to me (at least, the way he saw it). Every once in awhile a group of people die when they eat fugu that's not prepared properly. So when you go out with your colleagues you try to work the latest such incident into the conversation, and then you order fugu. The goal is to eat it with the supreme nonchalance while trying to make your coworkers visibly nervous.
> The goal is to eat it with the supreme nonchalance while trying to make your coworkers visibly nervous.
We eat raw pork mixed with raw eggs and raw onions on a bun in Germany. But nobody there thinks it's particularly dangerous. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mett)
On the other hand, many people eat octopus, some even eat it alive. If eating octopus would produce the slightest drug effect, I think that we, humans, will know it :-)
And yes, of course there is a lot of bibliography available about dolphin behaviour.
"Pufferfish produce a potent defensive chemical, which they eject when threatened. In small enough doses, however, the toxin seems to induce "a trance-like state" in dolphins that come into contact with it"
'Why do you keep having sex? You already have all the kids you want!'
Well, I think you are making a good point here, so I wouldn't write it off on that basis. In the rush to avoid anthropomorphizing animals, people sometimes go to the opposite extreme and assume that things like "taste" are uniquely, exclusively human experiences and can't be extended to animals.
That seems to attribute full ownership of a category of experience to humans, and to me that kind of assumption is more problematic, if we're talking about the excesses of anthropocentrism. I think your explanation makes perfect sense.
Super dangerous and only possible when working together.
Perhaps one day, thousands of years from now, technologically advanced dolphins will one day watch us doing the same thing again, and they will have a similar article about us!
I'd be curious to know how much of human technical advancement was thanks to the ability to relatively easily smelt metal, and whether the inability to easily smelt underwater creates an impediment to technical advancement of species living underwater.
The ocean isn't a good place for tool building!
I have a feeling that what dolphins lack in material culture, they make up for in social life, poetry, philosophy, and music. They're probably looking at us with pity: "Their pod dynamics wouldn't be such a mess if only they didn't waste so much time and effort building stuff..."
(Okay, okay, I know a lot of you people love building stuff...)
If anyone's interested, I really enjoyed Voices in the Ocean by Susan Casey as a look into how advanced dolphins may actually be. She explores scientific facts and even interviews "kooky" new-age people who swim with dolphins daily to get their POV. I was convinced that at least there are dimensions to dolphins' lives that traditional marine biologists are totally unprepared to touch.
(No idea whether there's any wood equivalent underwater.)
Having opposable thumbs is a pretty big deal. One Arthur Clarke short story that has always weirdly stuck with me is "Second Dawn" - which revolves around super-intelligent telepathic horse-like aliens, who have sadly limited technology because they only have hooves.
The only reason we haven't been able to communicate with them is we haven't found a good mutually comprehensible input medium for them. HMDs could be it, positional audio might help. But either way VR as a metaphor for UI will get researchers thinking in new ways about input as we go deeper into VR ourselves.
Presence will be the Rosetta Stone for animal language. "You are here and this is happening" is orders of magnitude harder to ignore as an atom of communication than a computer screen on the wall of a talk.
We will be able to record entire naturalistic experiences of a dolphin, and then give them an AR keyboard to play back arbitrary slices of it in sequence, and do the same for their friends.
Early dolphin language will look like hip hop music or poetry in structure (a pastiche of samples), and we will quickly find out whether they have the neuroanatomy for grammar.
I think one barrier may be that we're not that interesting to them. Perhaps, rather than sending literal-minded scientists to attempt communication, we ought to send poets and musicians.
I read of a recording of an upset, irate dolphin's sounds. When slowed down significantly, it was clear the dolphin was mimicking it's trainer's reprimands. So, one clue is that their processing speed is way higher than ours.
I also read of a researcher who set out with a box that could make dolphin sounds, and she wanted to teach dolphins to say names she has made up for three objects, with disappointing results. But I'm wondering... these are creatures that can be taught a command that means "innovate" - do something different that you haven't shown me yet today. A rule of their language might be never to use the same word twice.
Also, dolphins are aware of one another's sonar. So, they would never need to vocalize "Look at that over there." They already know what pod-mates are paying attention to. Possibly they wouldn't find it interesting to use nouns to refer to things that are already obvious on the pod's echolocation radar. Their verbal channel might deal with less concrete things like mood, nuance, intuition, and humor.
Best line from the article :D
I can't imagine that a dolphin can throw an octopus leg at more than 15-20 mph, and at that kind of speed I wouldn't imagine damage to a soft bodied creature.
I would imagine a better technique to be to leave the octopus legs for 10 minutes for lack of bloodflow to kill it. Wonder why they don't do that? Too hard to defend a bleeding morsel of food from other predators?
I don't see why you would think leaving the legs alone for ten minutes would be as effective as hammering them for ten minutes. What's going to bleed out and go lifeless quicker, an arm left alone or an arm being beat on?
Arms work even 1h after cutting off: http://moscow.sci-hub.cc/58b56284136af39dc0eaf7491b31d759/ha...
How I wish he had the human society uplift the Octopus instead of the expected mammals.
The article reveals that dolphins can be killed trying to eat octopus in a more conventional fashion, but I don't see any "risk" involved with their throwing method.
I will totally continue eating octopus
This is just a thought and may not be correct.
They can bite, and that's about it. Do these look like chewing teeth? http://4everstatic.com/pictures/674xX/animals/aquatic-life/d...