[daniel1212]

Amazing. I was just reading about Octopuses on Quora.com, and saw an image I wanted to share on FR, so i switched over to here, hit F5, and the newest post was yours. So here it is: Another trick they have is the ability to squeeze their body through extremely tight spaces. An Octopus multiple feet in length, could easily fit through an inch sized hole. If that's not unbelievable; then I don't know what is.

- https://www.quora.com/What-animal-do-you-think-is-the-most-unbelievable/answer/The-God-Butcher-1

[changeitback440]

it’s not octopi?

[griffin]

In the latest Pew pole, 8 out of 10 octopi said they were NOT voting for Commiela.

Which makes them smarter than half the human population.

[griffin]

Amazing...but I’ve long felt our animal friends are much smarter than most give them credit for.

[Deaf Smith]

This type of behavior can been seen with cows and birds.

Some birds follow cows as they graze and eat the insects the cows stir up as they move through the grasses.

They cows do not know or care they are assisting birds to feed.

[Catholic and Conservative]

Badgers and coyotes sometimes hunt together. The badgers flush out prey from underground and the coyotes make the kill.

[SaveFerris]

[Octopuses work together with fish to hunt]

Well, I got news for you guys. I have been studying things closely and I have determined that the man and the dog ARE DEFINITELY working together!!!

[chiller]

bttt

[Paal Gulli]

The single most astonishing thing I know about octopuses has to do with their changing color. They have chromatophores in their skin that contain the colors black, brown, orange, red and yellow. They can make their skin appear to be any of those colors, or any color that can be made from a combination of those colors. About the only color they can’t do is blue, but they have tricks to get around that limitation.

And they can change colors not only to camouflage themselves to hide in their environment, they’ll also change colors and patterns that mimic one predator in the hope of scaring off another predator of a different sort.

But that’s not the most astonishing bit. The most astonishing bit is ... octopus are completely colorblind.

Not “color-deficient,” color BLIND. They can see no color whatsoever. All they see is black, white, and shades of gray.

So how it is they even understand a need to change color, much less recognize what colors (plural) they need to change to to fit their purpose??????

[mairdie]

All of this is totally new to me and I love it! What a GREAT thread. Again.

Sea Creatures - Joseph Blanchard
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQZME_dpC_s

[Larry Lucido]

[BenLurkin]

[Brooklyn Attitude]

“Who decides what they are going to do, where and when? Are the different players “democratic,” in that they come to some form of compromise, or does one species take the lead and the other simply follows (that is, they are “despotic”)?”

What kind of bullshite political descriptions are these? Compromise is not a synonym of “democratic” and “despotic” is not a synonym of leading, following or shared agreement.

[umbagi]

*

[Brooklyn Attitude]

Below is the abstract of this paper. Like many scientific papers it is full of painfully and needlessly overcomplicated sentences the authors think makes them sound intelligent and the paper scientifically significant. They’ve taken something simple like Groupers have learned that an octopus hunting in a coral reef will often flush out fishes the Grouper can then feed on, to a complex sociological interaction. It’s ridiculous.

Abstract
Collective behaviour, social interactions and leadership in animal groups are often driven by individual differences. However, most studies focus on same-species groups, in which individual variation is relatively low. Multispecies groups, however, entail interactions among highly divergent phenotypes, ranging from simple exploitative actions to complex coordinated networks. Here we studied hunting groups of otherwise-solitary Octopus cyanea and multiple fish species, to unravel hidden mechanisms of leadership and associated dynamics in functional nature and complexity, when divergence is maximized. Using three-dimensional field-based tracking and field experiments, we found that these groups exhibit complex functional dynamics and composition-dependent properties. Social influence is hierarchically distributed over multiscale dimensions representing role specializations: fish (particularly goatfish) drive environmental exploration, deciding where, while the octopus decides if, and when, the group moves. Thus, ‘classical leadership’ can be insufficient to describe complex heterogeneous systems, in which leadership instead can be driven by both stimulating and inhibiting movement. Furthermore, group composition altered individual investment and collective action, triggering partner control mechanisms (that is, punching) and benefits for the de facto leader, the octopus. This seemingly non-social invertebrate flexibly adapts to heterospecific actions, showing hallmarks of social competence and cognition. These findings expand our current understanding of what leadership is and what sociality is.

[gitmo]

Great article.

[central_va]

Octopussy:

[lowbridge]

I often think... fish must get awfully tired of seafood. What're your thoughts, Hobson?

[Chode]

they’re aliens...