Octopuses on MDMA reveal genetic evolution link to human social behaviors
phys.org
phys.org
There is no legitimate reason for that research to have ever stopped. In humans.
I'm not saying we shouldn't be researching these chemical's potential benefits to humanity now, but it's not like these drugs were clamped down on for no good reason. We saw what many of these drugs were doing to society, completely banned them to try and counter that, including Universities in the process, and over time we've begun to develop an understanding and different perspective on these drugs, and now the pendulum starts to swing in the opposite direction.
— John Erlichman, domestic policy advisor to Richard M. Nixon
What was MDMA doing when that happened later?
We need to fish for reasons, we can't just take policy as gospel. The same arguments were made against cannabis, and look how the tide has turned.
bad bad things that cannot be allowed
I don't know if there'd be a biochemical change that limited the octopus' ability to change color or a psychological change that changed the octopus's desired signaling. Could be both!
Edit: there's a note about the dosing, in the "pharmacology" section. It indicates that higher doses produce unusual skin patterns.
Spectral discrimination in color blind animals via chromatic aberration and pupil shape
http://www.pnas.org/content/113/29/8206.full
Weird pupils let octopuses see their colorful gardens https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13084534
Dölen designed an experiment with three connected water chambers: one empty, one with a plastic action figure under a cage and one with a female or male laboratory-bred octopus under a cage.
Four male and female octopuses were exposed to MDMA by putting them into a beaker containing a liquefied version of the drug, which is absorbed by the octopuses through their gills. Then, they were placed in the experimental chambers for 30 minutes. All four tended to spend more time in the chamber where a male octopus was caged than the other two chambers.
"It's not just quantitatively more time, but qualitative. They tended to hug the cage and put their mouth parts on the cage," says Dölen. "This is very similar to how humans react to MDMA; they touch each other frequently."
Under normal conditions, without MDMA, five male and female octopuses avoided only male, caged octopuses.
Personally, I think they should extend the experiment to see what effect a stack of underwater transducers emitting a structured arrangement of audio signals combined with rapidly changing patterns of lighting, would have on the octopus behaviour.
"Although it is often supposed that octopi is the ‘correct’ plural of octopus, and it has been in use for longer than the usual Anglicized plural octopuses, it in fact originates as an error. Octopus is not a simple Latin word of the second declension, but a Latinized form of the Greek word oktopous, and its ‘correct’ plural would logically be octopodes."
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/explore/what-are-the-plura...
but in all seriousness, language is a social construct. If someone says “octopuses” and everyone understands that they mean “more than one octopus”, then the communication was successful. And if enough people use it, then we’re looking at a successful new word. For better or worse.
(From Latin pes -> pedes)