A while back I mentioned a Current Biology article documenting the use of coconut shells by octopuses as shelters (the beasts carry the shells around with them). Whether or not you regard this as tool use, have a look at this video documenting a similar behavior seen off the island of Flores (home of the “hobbit” people). Here the canny cephalopod uses three half-shells from a bivalve. The Current Biology home page describes the video:
Tomas Olsson has filmed a similar behavior while doing a night dive in Flores, Indonesia, near Maumere, in August 2007. He found a veined octopus buried in the silty bottom with some shells around him; it didn’t take long for the octopus to understand that he was discovered – he then emerged from his cover in the silty bottom with the three shell halves, handled them as the authors described in their article, and departed in a funny way with all three halves perfectly arranged underneath him.
h/t: Matthew Cobb, Current Biology
I think the coconut use qualifies as tool use. That is, so long as they use the two halves to make clippity-cloppity noises as they sneak up on sea horses.
Whether it qualifies as tool use or not, it certainly qualifies as cuteness.
The second link has an extra “http//” in it.
Fixed, thanks!
“No, I am not descended from trailer trash. Why do you ask?”
I don’t believe there’s any way of arranging three halves of a whole in such a way that anyone familiar with mathematics would describe as “perfect”.
I could be seeing things that aren’t there, but I think this individual has EGGS in the shell. I would imagine this is a pretty significant detail to include in describing such novel behavior?
More details and a still from the video showing what I *think* might be eggs at:
http://theobligatescientist.blogspot.com/2010/01/shell-carrying-cephalopods-defensive.html
Thoughts???
Fascinating. I think it would be interesting to know how they learn to do this. Is it instinctive, and an individual octopus would act that way without contact with others that perform the same action? Or do they learn it by observing others that act the same way? Or are they delibreately instructed by other? This would be my favourite – secret schools for octopuses that we have not observed, as they plan to Take Over The World.
I remember a small octopus off the coast of Gran Canaria a few years ago which had taken possession of a large turbo shell. It reminded me so much of an ammonite that I burst into laughter, which, so it turns out, is not as much fun under thirty meters of water as it is on land.
As an economist I can assure you that this is clearly a universal action resulting from private property relations, that is, a biological organism expropriating physical objects for their own ends. This behavior is obviously the same a “A gang of Aleutian Islanders slashing about in the wrack and surf with rakes and magical incantations for the capture of shell-fish,” who are held by us economists “in point of taxonomic reality, to be engaged in a feat of hedonistic equilibration in rent, wages, and interest.”
Come on guys … its sooooo obvious. Within just a few generations the animal will be unbelievably wealthy … and its environment unbelievably polluted.