Octopuses seen hunting together with fish
nbcnews.com
nbcnews.com
Sampaio et al., Multidimensional social influence drives leadership and composition-dependent success in octopus–fish hunting groups
I was curious about the the 3D reconstruction of the scenes.
> We manually tracked individuals in the videos using the software Computer Vision Annotation Tool. We annotated three frames per second, which yielded a time resolution of 0.33 s for animal movement.
> We then used another software developed to incorporate the previously tracked animals in each camera in the ‘colmap’ habitat models and camera paths, ‘multiviewtracks’ or ‘mvt’ [29]
> [29] Francisco, F. A., Nührenberg, P. & Jordan, A. High-resolution, non-invasive animal tracking and reconstruction of local environment in aquatic ecosystems
Seems it was specifically developed to track fish. Cool project.
Links to https://github.com/matterport/Mask_RCNN and https://github.com/pnuehrenberg/multiviewtracks.
(n is the number of octopi, and 8 tentacles per octopus).
It's even sadder that you felt the need to spend your precious time commenting on something you think is sad.
https://x.com/zarinahagnew/status/1815442685446033613
> Voice of Nature - leveraging advanced environmental data, we're developing fine-tuned AI agents that can deliberate on behalf of non-human stakeholders & better represent/surface relevant information about our ecosystems, as a method to improve collective intelligence.
The dystopic angle: what if future energy goes into bringing nature into active engagement with capitalism...
Hopefully I'm never living in the world where someone has a bridge in Brooklyn to sell and the buyer is the Hudson River :)
Yes, that's inherent in the design. All grey matter (optimized for local intercommunication), no white matter (optimized for sending signals between regions).
Each arm has its own ganglion ("CPU") and the central unit struggles to keep up with these and keep them coordinated.
What a wonderful combination of words.
"It's true that our innovative management technique - Continuous Tactile Feedback - can look a little rough to the untrained eye, but our Food Collection Engineers are actually very well treated."
Get outta here with that specist language. It's 2024 ffs. Not all fish.
I'm not saying that this is impossible, but it is a very big claim. Furthermore, it is not clear from the video that the punching has the outcome implied by this hypothesis. It seems at least as plausible, at least from the video alone, that the octopus is just keeping the fish away from stealing an anticipated meal.
On looking at it again, I think the reporter and/or editor have introduced unnecessarily teleological language. The researchers themselves describe the octopus behavior as though it is a matter of herding the fish - presumably, I suppose, to where it feels there are more prey to be found.
Supplementary Video 6
Typical movement dynamics and web-over temporal characteristics when octopuses are hunting alone. https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs415...
Example of a previous fish attack of a structure that triggers a reaction from the octopus and consequent web-over over a food-baited structure
https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs415...
Examples of octopuses punching fish, thus displacing them https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs415...
Example of a multispecific group hunting and typical movements, featuring all species categories analysed in this study except yellow goatfish https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs415...
But no! "The plural form octopii is doubly incorrect. Firstly, octopus derives from Greek, not Latin; its etymologically-consistent plural form is octopodes. Secondly, even if octopus were a second-declension Latin noun, the plural form would be octopi; in the correct plurals radii and gladii, with which octopii is analogous, the first ‘i’s are part of the words’ stems (radi- and gladi-), and not their case endings — for octopii to be the plural, *octopius would need to be the singular."
Thanks wikipedia.
TIL!
1. Language is neither static nor a series of rules to be blindly followed. The way a word was pluralized 1400 years ago has limited relevance today.
2. As noted just about everywhere, "octopodes" looks insane in any modern English sentence because we don't pluralize any other word that way. It also moves the emphasis to the second syllable. Thus it manages to make everybody's life harder for no benefit, a favorite pastime of the sort of people who would suggest this pluralization.
3. "Octopuses" feels stilted, and while it is correct, I thoroughly empathize with anyone uninterested in using a four-syllable word with three consecutive unstressed syllables in a sentence. Therefore it makes sense to create a shorter pluralization, and we can do this by analogy to other English words!
3a. We are not speaking Latin. If "-us" to "-i" is a valid pluralization of other English words, then it makes sense for it to be a valid pluralization of this word. While this pattern can be used irresponsibly ("bus" -> "bi"), using it for the three-syllable "octopus" is non-destructive. It preserves the structure (and the meter!) and thus makes a lot of sense.
4. To come back to "double-I octopii is simply incorrect": It's wrong because it's trying to be pedantic but uses the rules wrong (as noted in the wikipedia reference above). If, in 700 years, I were still alive, English were still spoken, and some band of idiots had managed to make "octopii" the most common pluralization, then I would begrudgingly accept it per point 1 above, but until then, no.
E.g. Look at all those octopus.
All the divers I know say it this way, easy to say, understand, doesn't make you sound like an asshole.
It does beg the question though, how’d we come up with the list of animals to pluralize like that? Why “five birds” but not “five deers?”
As for the question, it probably has to do with the gender of the noun. I bet 'deer' derives from a neuter-gendered word in Anglo-Saxon, while 'bird' does not.
Noun gender is the system used by many languages to categorize words that have different declension rules. It's atrophied in English, but is implicitly still present in the various "inconsistencies" that pop up.
Noun gender makes a lot of sense.
There are also some middle-ground words like "Shark". One goes fishing for "shark" like they would "fish" but it is more common to say "several sharks" using a plural as opposed to "several fish" using the singular. But "fishes" is still a word, which likely goes back to ruling classes who ate fish but generally did not hunt them as they would have deer.
This is why I would prefer say axises, basises, indexes, and matrixes. I mean as plurals of their respective singulars, not as plurals of octopus.
It's also not open to arbitrary subjective opinion. There are rules, this is not 'Nam. :) Languages evolve, but you can't just claim something is correct because you think so or you'd love it to be so. It's incorrect in English language, today. Maybe in the future, when more people start using the plural "octopi", it will be correct.
Fun fact: Oxford dictionary changed the definition of "literally" to also mean "figuratively". https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/misuse-of-literally
The future is now. "Octopi" is considered the correct plural by a significant plurality of US adults, and a plurality of all age groups.
> Conversations follow rules of etiquette because conversations are social interactions, and therefore depend on social convention. Specific rules for conversation arise from the cooperative principle. Failure to adhere to these rules causes the conversation to deteriorate or eventually to end. Contributions to a conversation are responses to what has previously been said.
Both parties must agree on those rules. There is no mandate that one must follow another's rules, in the initial engagement. This is helpful to understand, in modern online discourse. If someone doesn't want to play by some basic rules, further engagement is likely futile and unproductive.
I'm guessing "platypodes" doesn't count.
Some people on the internet keep saying that that's wrong; I find that very strange.
>because we don't pluralize any other word that way.
Certainly we do “platypodes”, “matrices”, “irides”, “clitorides” and “vortices”, are all quite common words.
Octopods - 8 times better than regular pods.
"Stilted" is a bit of a judgy word, but it's not a value judgment of anyone else's intelligence. Some English speech sounds stilted. So it goes. That's why I don't prefer that pluralization in my own speech.
Lord knows I sound weird enough at times; I'm not here to throw stones from glass houses.
Note that this is the same process that we eventually apply to every other loanword; next time you talk to a German, watch them cringe at "delicatessens" as the plural to "delicatessen".
So it's like doubly wrong.
Is it the repeated "s" at the end? But we have no problem saying "buses" or "rebuses".
Is it something to do with the plural of "fish" just being "fish"? But we have no problem making whales and dolphins plural with an -s.
Is it that "-puses" sounds slightly vulgar, like we're talking about multiple female genitalia?
I genuinely don't know. All I know is that "octopuses" just sounds wrong for some reason I can't put my finger on. And that "octopii" somehow "feels" much better, even if everything about it is logically wrong.
I'll still say "octopuses", but I know I always want to say "octopii" instead. (And spell it that way too, because "octopi" feels like it would rhyme with "canopy".)
Thank you for a nifty insight, whose effects I’d noticed but whose mechanism had never occurred to me before today!
But that also goes for "octopuses", so what gives? Seems like there's something else going on that my brain hasn't accounted for yet. It's probably that the plosives (stop consonants) are hugely unbalanced, with all of them coming in the first half of the word. Plosives, as the word implies, can add quite a bit of oomph to a word, even if they aren't reflected in the stress pattern. So "octopuses" seems to just peter out halfway through the word.
So adding an additional "-es" that can be "-ehhs" or "-iz" gives at least six possible pronunciations.
There's a restaurant near here called Octapas.
There are some Latin words ending -us in English, that keep their Latin plurals. For octopuses, both plurals are common and acceptable.
Because of the english words with taboo meanings that coincidentally share the phonetic structure p-s-
I’m in his boat ;)
fun book, forgot the name.
(ht Claude)
Currently reading that one and there is no octopuses (only read half so far though) but a lot of spiders, ants and space-faring primates :)
also, the reality is
#define octopi octopodes
#define octopuses octopodes
and so on is what's more or less going on...whereas in English octopodes is a mouthful.
They can:
- shape shift into so many different forms and shapes.
- "invisibility", by instantanously changing colors & it's own skin texture, to match surrounds.
- can regrow entire body parts if cut off (like arms)
- have 9 brains (localized)
- and are ridiculous intelligent
One of the coolest things I've encountered at an aquarium was a sleeping octopus wildly shifting its colors. It seems truly alien to behold -- like it shouldn't be possible.
My googling after the fact says that who knows why they actually do it or what's going on, but, I really like the thought of them having little octopus dreams.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/spider-se...
If you slaughtered and ate your own horse, it would probably be legal (and, at personal scale, probably would not be noticed even if it were not). But ask a lawyer.
"In terms of sentience, they are at a very close level or closer than we think toward us."
That's different than intelligence though, right? Or are they two sides of the same coin? Can you have a very intelligent but low sentience or stupid but high sentience animal?
https://www.vice.com/en/article/inside-frances-fading-love-a...
How would you propose to measure, Mr. Moasure? Care to share your setup?
Would justify perfectly an: "in the video the octopus is seen trying to avoid being stolen its food by all the other fishes", that is the same behavior that you'll see if you break a crab or an urchin underwater. Many coastal fishes from rocky bottoms will come to steal any food scrap available. They don't cooperate with other fishes on any way.
Or maybe they are playing "rock, paper, tentacle", but to me the message more probable here is "this is my food, go away". If you look the video carefully the fishes seem trying to swim near the mouth of the octopus, where the probability of stealing a scrape is higher.
Probably shouldn't base your entire opinion of the study on a 17 second video or a fluff article.
I comment based on what I have, and using my personal experience on the field. Experience based on decades of hard study. I had studied Cephalopods for more than 17 seconds, you can bet for it.
If this is common behavior, don't you think that with all the scientists doing research on Cephalopods since Aristotle, and with the millions of hours of people keeping Cephalopods on captivity, somebody would had described it long time ago?. I wonder why suddenly science only finds facts that support the ideologies from the politics that (duh) block, or allow, the money trickle for research.
Never had seen so much wonderful hype science as since the last years. So much 'interesting' interpretations on the reality that defy the logical explanation, since the LLM landed. Suddenly cows fly and pigs live underground. How we never realized this wonders before the IA?
If you want me to spend hours chasing articles, pruning the lying and counterfeit, and making you a report, no problem. Just pay me for my time. Alternatively, if you want to believe that octopuses are small alien children walking undersea gardens with umbrellas, good for you. It's a free country.
Love how you keep capitalizing cephalopod like you just copy pasted it off a google search to get the proper spelling :P
Remember kids. Animals in captivity always behave exactly as they do in the wild. Also every individual is exactly the same so you never see any variation in behaviour regardless of inhabiting a wide range across multiple oceans.
Use Cephalopoda with uppercase 'C'. Problem fixed.
By the way, most people would say that the correct word is Google, with uppercase G. (I will not assume that you don't know how to use Google for that; it would be childish). In any case, yes, I check things in Google all the time, and you may want to do it also.
However the usual definition of domestication is specific to humans. The aforementioned aphid farming and the octopodes in TFA are technically in mutualistic relationships.
> The best-studied insect-associated domestication is that of the attine ants...and the majority cultivate parasol mushrooms in the Leucocoprineae [58]. The ants plant sessile fungal cultivars, manage growth conditions by regulating temperature and moisture and fertilizing the fungal gardens, protect their crop from other herbivores, parasites, and disease, and harvest the cultivated fungi for food [4,58]. This coevolved domestication system has turned ants into obligate fungivores, as experimental removal of the fungal crop results in reduced reproduction and increased mortality among ants [58]. For the fungi, the ants increase their fitness relative to the free-living state by increasing their proportion across generations, providing for geographic dispersal and protecting the fungi against parasites and pathogens [58]. In the higher attine ants, the fungal cultivars are obligate mutualists and cannot grow in a free-living state [58]. It should be noted that fungi may not be the only ant domesticates; some ants tend to hemipteran insects like aphids and treehoppers in a system reminiscent of human animal husbandry [4,10].
I would call this domestication, full stop.
[0] https://www.cell.com/trends/ecology-evolution/fulltext/S0169...
It doesn't seem that there's any evidence of that yet. Maybe if they keep at it for a while, and either the fish they hunt with branch off into a separate population or they do it so much that it affects the entire population?
> “I think sociality, or at least attention to social information, is way more deep-rooted in the evolutionary tree than we might think,”
Maybe, or maybe the neural power required to move all of those limbs is good enough at processing that they developed their own sophisticated behavior.
the only reason to doubt it would be an assumption that "attention to social information" can only happen in creatures with an complex central nervous systems. Which requires rather constrained definitions of "attention", "social", and "information"
ok, there is another reason to doubt it. inertia. We've been taught/told that a complex CNS is what makes intelligence, and it is hard to get away from that idea.
longevity research for cephalopods seems like it could be really fruitful.
I have the luxury of choice. There are many, in this world, that do not.
Now, you still might think that not being born at all is a better alternative, of course. I'm only pointing out it's a different dilemma.
We don't look at human life in that lens, it's a whole can of worm, but we can agree that ending someone's life is viewed separately from whether that person could have not existed in the first place.
"Look into the eyes of a chicken and you will see real stupidity. It is a kind of bottomless stupidity, a fiendish stupidity. They are the most horrifying, cannibalistic and nightmarish creatures in the world."
I begrudgingly agree.
Intelligence is just one thing we can consider when deciding what's morally acceptable to kill and consume. Genetic proximity to humans clearly matters to many people as well: lots of people stick to seafood and/or poultry despite the fact that octopuses and some birds can be quite intelligent.
Sociability could be a third factor. Pigs are smarter than dogs, cows are smarter than horses, but we choose not to eat dogs and horses because they more readily comprehend and obey our commands, enabling us to connect with them on a basic social level.
Sure, but it's pretty obvious that fish and chicken are very stupid animals, and those mammals are much smarter, so I'm not sure that genetic proximity is as important as you think it is. Octopuses are the only real standout here: they really are quite intelligent, which is even more remarkable because they're invertebrates. And yes, some birds are quite intelligent (like crows), but we don't eat those types of birds (probably because they're just not very good as food).
>cows are smarter than horses, but we choose not to eat dogs and horses because they more readily comprehend and obey our commands
Who's "we"? Horsemeat is very easy to find in restaurants here in Japan. It's not bad if cooked properly, but it's a lot like deer meat. Deer are pretty stupid too (probably about as smart as cows), but they aren't normally eaten either, and it's because most people just don't like the taste that much (it's "gamey"), and it's difficult to cook. Cows taste better than horses because they have a lot more fat.
Also, octopuses have been mentioned here many times, but in the US they aren't a terribly popular food item, whereas here in Japan they're very common (along with squid). So differing cultures and culinary traditions I think have a lot to do with it too, just as with horses above.
Does "smartness" carry inherent moral worth? That would be an interesting principle to hold, given what it might entail for humans.
Well that seems to be the assumption in this discussion thread.
>That would be an interesting principle to hold, given what it might entail for humans.
If you're implying that stupid people should be used as food, that's already been addressed elsewhere in this thread: cannibalism is very rare among other animals that are much stupider than us, and for good reason: there's a big risk of disease (such as prion diseases).
However, if we were visited by aliens that found humans tasty, the morality of offering up our stupidest members of society as food for them might be an interesting argument.
cruelty_cow = IntModifier * Animal_Intelligence /(AmountOfProvidedMeat/Deaths) * FrequencyOfEatingThisAnimal
Solve for:
Min (cruelty_cow + cruelty_pig + cruelty_octopus + ...)
Where AmountOfProvidedMeat > NeededMeatForHealthyDiet
And Cost * AmountOfProvidedMeat < Food_Budget
I've generally found that maximizing on Fish, Chicken, and Cow (in that order) seems to be the best bet. I tend not to touch veal, lamb, or octopus.
If you refuse to eat even humane veal (free to roam and milk-fed), then IMO you should refuse dairy entirely.
It might also be worth considering that the entire concept of humane dairy is questionable. It depends on separating mothers from calves, and either eating the latter or weaning them at far too young an age, or both. Cows are dumb, but they're not that dumb, and more importantly they are prey mammals with strong "familial" instincts. The process is fundamentally at least somewhat cruel.
The human body is an amazing thing that is simultaneously a fucking pain in the ass. There is no "one truth" for food.
Probably right (about the relying part), but eating octopuses is fairly common around the Mediterranean, at least the West side of it. Most restaurants have at least one item on the menu involving octopuses in some form or shape./
This short lifetime combined with their intelligence does raise the question how far an octopus could get if it were able to reach our age. Would they continue learning and adapting, leading to a race of superintelligent molluscs or would they plateau in their first year and just coast along?
Why shouldn't we eat _you_ then?
There is also don't mess with the effectively most powerful species on the planet whose members have collectively decided that (for somewhat principled reasons) none of them should be eaten.
Any parasite, bacteria, virus, and especially prions spread much much more easily the closer the food is to your own biology.
Cannibalistic tribes have had issues with this in even the recent past.
in germany there was a case of cannibalism many years ago where a guy known by the name Armin Meiwes slaughtered and ate another guy called Bernd-Jürgen Armando Brandes. never got the panic around it given that the whole deal was consensual. other than that you know yourself that society comes up with rules to ensure its stability and survival. eating each other wouldn't fly well from that perspective.
If you remove intelligence (or something quite similar) as the criteria, what do you have instead?
<check-mate/>
It took them some work to undo the indoctrination. Middle-school me wasn't sure if that was right. But empathy is actually an involuntary instinct in most humans, and I think Lowry was right in that most people will find such things "evil" when faced with the its reality.
Of course in real life there are places and situations where it is normalized to harm children. E.G. Currently unfolding with Sean Combs. But anybody outside those situations rightfully considers that disgusting and aberrant on finding out, and those inside it find ways to bury and rationalize their discomfort and end up traumatized for it instead of actually thinking it's good.
Either way, analogy is not false equivalency. And neither are OP's moral decisions an indictment of your culinary preference, nor does your culinary preference have any bearing on OP's morally motivated decisions.
But how it plays out, from humans where the male can provide more by continuing to live and "hunt/protect/teach"-- but at the risk that the "hunt/protect" might end his life, to spiders where (some species) the male gives his body to provide nutrition for the child,
well, who am I to say which is more moral?
So this adds another layer of wtf.
Doesn't really help moralize human behavior though.
Breed octopuses, take the dead males who succesfully bred, and offer their meat with zero harm to the animal.
As for the female octopus trying to eat the male octopus, did I ever tell ya the one about my ex wife? Huh? Huh? crickets
When “cooperative,” they are your best buddy.
When “competitive,” you are fresh meat.
And you can’t tell when they switch.
Call me when they’re hyping a product they know is trash - then we’ll know they’re at human intelligence.