Thursday, June 03, 2004
Octopi are Intelligent Creatures
Listen to this.:
The Stazione Zoologica in Naples, Italy, also includes a public aquarium. (One of the features was an electric ray in a petting tank. You couldn't get away with that in the U.S.) We had a large octopus in one of the display tanks who disappeared one night. The catwalks we used to feed the display animals were simply a set of boards laid over the tops of the tanks.
When we went searching, we found sucker marks drying on the boards and followed them. The octopus had gone past the dogfish tank (dogfish love to eat octopus), past the moray eel tank (morays also find octopus tasty), past the sea anemone tank (pretty but inedible) and dropped into the crab display where he reposed on a pile of empty crab shells radiating pleasure and satisfaction. Many people don't realize that an octopus can clearly show its emotion. It is relatively easy to tell when an octopus is happy, sick, scared, curious or even horny by the texture and color of its skin, which it can control almost instantaneously. After a few similar incidents, we moved this guy to a large tank in the common area of the research facility where he became a pet.
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