Are claims of “octopus civilization” credible?
Octopuses are undeniably fascinating creatures. Possessing superpowers that human beings can only dream of, they have the ability to regrow limbs, “taste” with their arms, and change their appearance at will. These fascinating skills are just a small part of why octopuses are of interest to science and to anyone who is curious about the natural world.
I’ve always thought octopuses were pretty neat, but I became way more became more interested in our eight-legged buddies after I read The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery and after I saw the Netflix documentary My Octopus Teacher. These pieces of media were made by people who got up close and personal with octopuses and really got to know what they were like, kind of like Jane Goodall studying chimps, but underwater.
Speaking of chimps, I’ve also been reading about Nim Chimpsky, a chimp who was taught sign language and other human-like behaviors by a team of researchers. Nim became so human-like that he would even smoke and ask for marijuana. While the ethics of smoking weed with a chimp are dubious, the reality of Nim’s life and the lives of other animals like him will forever fascinate science.
After reading the work of biologists and animal behaviorists, I’ve become really interested in animal intelligence. Well-known for being some of the smartest and most unique creatures on the planet, octopuses keep popping up everywhere I look.
Octopuses have been spotted using tools, including carrying coconut shells for shelter. They are also well known for their ability to solve puzzles, often escaping their enclosures. They’ve figured out how to do things like open jars or the lids of fish tanks for example, in order to get food or in a bid for freedom. It’s no wonder that we find octopuses endlessly entertaining.
Octopus Obsession
Octopus-themed media seems more common these days. Like most animals when studied up close, it’s difficult to avoid anthropomorphizing octopuses. Also like most animals, octopuses have personalities. It seems like they have individual tastes and preferences, relationships, and the ability to problem-solve: in other words, everything that makes up a mind. But how similar to a human mind is a cephalopod’s mind, really? How much of my own ideas about what a mind is am I projecting onto the octopus?
There’s uncomfortable questions that I always ask myself when I think about animal intelligence. What would we do if we discovered that they were as smart as people? Would that mean that they deserved rights? To be treated as a foreign nation rather than as a research project, a science experiment or a meal?
Part of why octopuses are so spellbinding is because of how alien they are in both appearance and demeanor. What if we encountered a species of aliens that were as different from us in appearance as octopuses, and as intelligent as people? Would we be able to accept them as intelligent? Or would we treat them the way we treat animals on earth– as living beings that are “below” humans in a moral way, and undeserving of the same rights?
Octlantis and Octopolis: Octopus Cities?
I was startled when I first read about alleged “octopus civilization” online. I saw some clickbait-y stuff about it popping up in my Facebook feed and decided to look for more information to find out how credible the claim was.
I was stunned to immediately find a Wikipedia page that describes clusters of octopus dens as “non-human settlements.” Wikipedia was quick to clarify that despite being called “Octlantis” and “Octopolis,” that referring to these sites as “cities” is something that researchers might find to be “misleading.” Still, “non-human-settlements”? With my curiosity about octopuses, I was hooked. I knew I had to investigate further.
Researchers Martin Hing and Peter Godfrey-Smith published a piece in The Conversation in which they discussed to what degree the octopus “cities” they studied were “intentional” on the part of the octopuses. Hing and Godfrey-Smith were part of scholarly research into the matter, in which they stated that “city” is is not an accurate description of the sites they observed, contrary to the bold claims made by The Guardian, Science, and Discover, for example.
“In a series of news reports written about our paper, a tendency has grown to exaggerate what we reported,”
say Hing and Godfrey-Smith in a subsequent paper.
The media is often quick to sensationalize stories like this, while real scientists maintain their skepticism. I do think it’s reasonable for these researchers to try and clear up any confusion and to urge people to temper their expectations when it comes to such claims. Still, I’m not totally convinced by the debunking done by Hing and Godfrey-Smith. To me, it doesn’t seem that far-fetched that a non-human species could do something like build a city. Octopuses don’t seem like an unlikely candidate.
I kept reading and I found that other researchers, like Jennifer Mather, are also making a case for octopus consciousness.
“…the capacity not just to acquire information and store it across time but to guide information extraction when the octopus is producing motor play goes beyond a cognitive foundation, perhaps to consciousness,”
writes Mather.
Others, like Piero Amodio, think it’s better to remain “agnostic” about the topic. Still, Amodio speculates:
“Future research may eventually support Mather’s view that octopuses are capable of future planning and causal reasoning.”
It seems to me that the debate about octopus intelligence is far from over.
Octopus Abuse
Thinking about how intelligent octopuses are makes it really uncomfortable to accept how they are treated by humans.
I used to find it upsetting that people in some countries eat octopuses while they are still alive– it seemed cruel to me compared to killing any animal prior to eating it. Still, in the wild, an octopus might get eaten. Eating another living creature or being eaten isn’t a foreign concept to an octopus. What humans do to octopuses for medical research is far more cruel (in my opinion) than what happens in nature.
For example, researchers studying limb regeneration routinely cut the tentacles off of octopuses in order to observe them growing back. While Smithsonian Magazine insists that something like this is “no sweat for the cephalopod,” to me, this seems like animal cruelty, something that should probably be illegal.
Research suggests that octopuses feel pain. Spending your whole life tied up and having your arms or legs cut off over and over again sounds way worse than being eaten, even if they grow back! At least if you are eaten, it’s over relatively quickly. Imagine if aliens kidnapped you and pulled out your fingernails and toenails or teeth to study their regrowth. Imagine if they did that to your family members. Would you be upset? I would.
Now imagine if someone dumped a bunch of trash in your neighborhood. Can you see where I’m going with this? Should we be treating such intelligent creatures, who are capable of so many incredible things, with such callus cruelty? Is it something we will come to regret as a species in the future?
What if we’re wrong?
Sometimes I think about the deep ocean, and how little we actually know about what’s really down there. Beyond a certain depth, human beings and most of our scientific instruments would be crushed by the pressure of the ocean water, limiting our investigations of its mysterious depths.
What if researchers are wrong about octopus “cities” being the stuff of overzealous clickbait? What if we aren’t taking them seriously enough? I think that when researches reduce animal behavior to things like “looking or food” or “attempting to attract a mate,” they often forget that that these things are also what comprise much of human behavior. Maybe we just don’t understand their culture.
Also, octopuses aren’t the only water-dwelling creatures who show signs of intelligence. Dolphins have been shown to recognize themselves in mirrors and pufferfish create beautiful sand mandalas to dazzle their mates, for instance. How many creatures are living at depths that humans can’t travel to? What are they like? How smart are they?
If I were an intelligent water-dwelling creature and knew that I could avoid humans by staying in the deep ocean, I probably would. After all, humans are known for treating non-human creatures horribly. We’ve done it throughout most of human history. Like octopus researcher Peter Godfrey-Smith, I think that if there’s a species in the deep ocean that’s as smart as us, interacting with them would almost be like interacting with an alien civilization. Just like with space, if anyone is out there (or under there), they might just be smart enough to steer clear of human beings.
I’ll never stop imagining the massive krakens that could be living in the deep ocean, or worrying about whether or not they are smart enough to understand what humans are doing to their habitat and relatives. While claims of non-human underwater civilizations are unsubstantiated thus far, I’m keeping an open mind.
Esoteric Epistemology 
