All language subtitles for BBC.Natural.World.2019.The.Octopus.in.My.House.720p.HDTV.x264.AAC.MVGroup.org.eng

We take our way of existence
for granted.

But there are other ways
of being.

The octopus has followed
a different evolutionary path,

making them different from all
the other intelligent animals

on this planet.

But me, I'm less intrigued
by the differences

and more interested in our
similarities...

..and the nature of a relationship
I might have with such a creature.

This year, I got to experiment
with an idea.

What would I find out if I invited
an octopus...

..into my home?

What kind of connection is possible

with an animal that has three
hearts

and blue blood running
through its veins?

My name is David Scheel.

I'm Professor of Marine Biology
at Alaska Pacific University,

here in Anchorage.

I've studied all sorts of animals,

but for the last 25 years
my focus has been on octopuses.

I have two girls.

Juniper is away at university
right now,

and Laurel is with me
about half the time, lives here.

Laurel's 16, she's in tenth grade.

We should check with her, make sure
Dad hasn't screwed that up.

Hey, Laurel! Yeah?

You're 16, right? In tenth grade?

Yeah! There we go.

I'm going out on a limb a little,

taking my octopus fascination
one step further.

I'm going to fill my living room
with a large tank of salt water.

I got divorced,

and the ex took some of the living
room furniture,

most of the living room furniture.

My daughter's
in and out of the house,

but she was eager to have a pet.

And so, this is a compromise

between a girl who really wanted
a dog

and a dad who's overly
interested in octopuses.

Actually, it's not a compromise.

I got the octopus.

Yeah, you have the lamp.

So it's lit?

Yeah, so it's lit, and, um...

Inviting an octopus into your home
is no small undertaking.

Ah, have we got it?

All right, yeah, it's coming.
Now it's coming.

All right, here we go.

This new set-up is going to allow me
to spend more time with an octopus

than I've been able to do otherwise.

When I spend time with an octopus
in the wild,

I visit them for only
as long as I can stay in the water.

Here in Alaska,
I work with the species

that's native to these cold waters,

the giant Pacific octopus.

This has been a fantastic site.

There's maybe a dozen
or more octopuses

that we might be able to find,

at depths from ten feet deep to 90.

These are the largest octopuses
in the world.

They can be as big as I am.

Like all octopuses,
they are solitary animals.

And they are hard to find.

But they do leave us some signs.

They bring their prey back
to their den,

and they eat it at their den.

And then they throw the hard
shells outside the door.

And we call that pile a midden.

You can get a lot of information
by looking at their garbage piles.

Place your hand outside the den

and an arm might stretch out
to touch you.

Sometimes they're a bit too
enthusiastic

and they grab your mask.

You don't want to let them get
a hold of your air supply.

You know, they have eight arms,
I have two.

So, they win.

They're sort of the gentle giants
of the ocean.

They can be really large,

but they're very graceful animals.

They sort of flow from one
place to another.

And I like to watch how they use
their different legs.

Sometimes they're creeping
on their suckers,

sometimes it's sort of they're just
following the lead-to arms.

And then other times, you can see
this sort of walking behaviour

going on with the rear arms.

Down here, I'm in their realm,

and I often wonder,
"How do they see the world?"

And this is what my plan
at home is all about,

to spend a little more time
in an octopus encounter.

To consider -
how do they see the world?

How might they see us?

Well, I didn't want a giant Pacific.

I wanted something
that was different,

something that will be new to me,

a warmer water species,
that's faster, more active.

This is a species that's been kept
in aquariums

to be studied for its intelligence.

It's an Octopus cyanea,

known as the day octopus.

They call it that because, unlike
some other octopus species,

these guys are active
during the day,

and so you get to see them more.

Yeah, pulling hard.

Well, just a minute,
I'll put you in the tank.

No. No, not yet.

Not yet.

Just a minute.

There you go.

There you go.

There she goes.

Oh, nice colour change.

Oh, look at this.

Nice.

I guess the big thing for me
about keeping an animal in the home

is it's just more relaxed.

If I don't want to do anything,
I don't have to do anything -

just see what the animal does.

And I'm not trying to do science
here.

I'm just trying to think

a little bit.

So, it's just a chance to be

more available

and more present for whatever the
animal's living, day-to-day.

She's very careful to keep
her eyeball in view of mine.

And she's already checking me out.

I always get the sense when you're
scuba diving

that they play this game with you.

Octopuses adapt their environments
around them to their own liking.

They clean out a hole under a rock
or in a crevice,

blowing out sand
and debris with their siphon.

And at that point, it's not
just shelter.

It's home.

Hey there.

Are you interested in some food?

Octopus love crab.

Oh, there it is.

She's definitely feeling for it.

Oh, oh, oh, oh!

She's after the tube, not the crab.

There we go.

There we go. Oh!

All right, look at the colour
pattern.

That is a satisfied octopus.

I like the texture she's put on.

She didn't have that before.

The papillae coming up around
the eye,

and the sort of bumps and things all
over her head.

It's very nice.

Now she at least will know
that the tube

and the environment
have interesting possibilities.

Laurel is also going to be helping
me take care of the octopus.

You know, the octopus is very happy
to see Laurel every day.

Hello.

Laurel was just glad to have
a pet that was glad to see her.

Yeah, I think a lot of her pets
are kind of indifferent to her.

Her goldfish and her rabbit outside.

You want to come over here?

So an octopus is kind of fun,
cos it comes running.

Looks like she's coming back over.

Laurel would send me
little video clips

of the octopus getting up
and waiting on the glass,

and ready to play.

And, you know, I'm sure Laurel
looked forward to it every day.

Come here, Heidi.

Some of the things that she would do
remind me

of what, like, dogs would do.

Oh, you're already up there.
Come here.

She comes over to the wall of
the tank

and just kind of like all excited to
see you.

And so, being an intelligent animal

means that you need
a lot of stimulus,

so being played with
or having just, like, interactions

with people is entertaining for her.

Laurel at times, she'd sit for 30
minutes with the octopus

just holding on to her,

then wait for it to let go.

And now she took something.

So she'd sit there with her hand
in the aquarium for 30 minutes,

so they're pretty affectionate.

She's filming more of the sand
right now.

Well, now she's filming me.

Hi, Heidi!

The reason we call her Heidi
was cos, when we first

got her, she spent a very, very long
time in her den

and she was just hiding
the whole time.

She didn't seem to want to come out
and then,

basically once we taught her
that we meant food,

she just grabbed on and was like,

"OK, I'm keeping you with me."

The cephalopod community,
we're all excited about octopuses,

and we're a fairly
close-knit group of researchers -

share all kinds
of different experiences and advice.

Well, hi there.
Hi, David. How are you doing?

All right. How are you?

Bret is an expert on the early
stages of cephalopod life,

that group of animals
that includes octopuses,

cuttlefish and squid.

Exactly. So how's everything going
over there?

Cos I've never kept an octopus
in my living room before.

You want to take a look
at the set-up?

Yeah, I'd love to. All right.

Let's see if I can get the computer
over there and show you.

So, she's actually out right now.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's great.

She's got a good marbled colouration
going on there.

My day octopus is already a few
months old.

There's a rock she's sitting on,
so...

But at Bret's lab, we can get
a glimpse into the first few weeks

of a cephalopod's life.

We're watching the mother
until she starts

going through her egg-laying phase.

And once she starts laying her eggs,

she'll sit there and pulse jets of
water over her eggs.

What that does is basically keep
them oxygenated,

and the eggs continue to develop

until they get
to basically look almost like

little octopuses
inside of each individual egg.

And then we know they can
kind of hatch at any time.

This is one of the few places
you can see octopuses hatch

from the egg.

From this moment,
octopuses are on their own.

The first instinct of this hatchling

is to construct a den
out of whatever it can find.

Baby bobtail squid hide by sticking
grains of sand to their bodies

with a mucus extruded
from their skin.

These are all hard-wired
little predators.

They don't hesitate
to take down prey

even when it's two or three times
their size.

Their colour-changing cells
start flashing...

..while they're still in the egg.

Three types of cells
with neural control

make colour change
almost instantaneous.

These young pyjama squid use this

to produce their signature
striped pattern.

But there is one cephalopod

that is the master.

Just a few centimetres long,

these baby flamboyant cuttles...

..can beguile anyone

with a shape-shift
that is out of this world.

The day octopus can also perform
an extraordinary display

with their skin.

And I already have some experience
with these octopus in the wild.

I've been in the water with them

on the southwest coast
of Madagascar,

working with local Vezo fishermen,

designing a way to census
the octopus population.

Breece has an amazing ability
to find the octopus

in amongst the coral.

Do you see there? Oh, yeah.
The head.

Yeah. Do you see? Yeah.

It's amazing to me
how fast they are here.

The octopuses in Alaska,
they're kind of big, slow giants

and these guys are just quick
and agile and limber

and really everything they do they
seem to do it at ramped-up speed.

I've had them in my hands
and then they're already gone.

And then I look over
and Breece has caught it again.

Its face is the strangest
of them all.

The day octopus is a master
of camouflage.

Its skin can change colour
in milliseconds.

And it can use muscles
on the surface of its skin...

..to change texture as well.

And this species has recently
been recorded

demonstrating an incredible
behaviour with its colour displays.

It's a display called passing cloud.

It's just so stunningly beautiful.

It's like, wow, what's that?

The thing about passing cloud
is it's a very impressive

physiological ability...

..and at the same time
it's a bit of a mystery.

The most common theory you hear

is that octopuses are using
passing cloud to startle its prey.

Trap it in the web of its arms.

My octopus is showing impressive
colour changes of her own.

Observing what we're doing.

We've seen how closely the octopus
we have here at the house

is watching our eyes.

You look at them and you feel
like they're looking back.

That's not an illusion.
They are looking back.

And so, when you're an animal
that's that attentive

to another animal's eyes,

that is very suggestive of high
level of awareness of the world.

Well, scientists do find questions
about octopus intelligence

particularly intriguing.

At the Seattle Aquarium, they did
some experiments giving different

objects to octopuses
and recorded what happened.

In one of the most telling
experiments,

the researchers put a pill bottle
in the tank

with just enough air in it to float.

There was no food or anything
to be gained here

but still a few octopuses
found reason to be interested.

Nothing happened at first,

but after the fourth time,
the octopus would, erm...

..would bounce...
take the pill bottle,

and blow it out
into a stream of water

that was circulating
around the tank.

There it goes.

And the water would bring the pill
bottle back to the octopus again

and it would start the whole thing
over again

and it would do it
again and again -

blowing the pill bottle into
the water until it came back

and then blowing it back
into the water again.

A bit like bouncing a ball.

The conclusion from this experiment
was simple.

It fit all the criteria for play.

Play, of course, is something
that intelligent animals do.

And Laurel spends many hours
playing with Heidi.

SHE LAUGHS

Now... Now she's...
Now you say hello to me.

Octopuses have up to 240 suckers
on their arms.

Each has sensitive
chemical receptors.

Heidi can touch and taste
Laurel at the same time.

She just lightly jetted at me.

She doesn't want me to leave.

Octopus also have oestrogen,
like humans do.

Is it possible that Heidi
can be detecting the oestrogen

on Laurel's skin?

Does Heidi maybe taste
the difference

between males and females?

Heidi!

Her arm is now up my sleeve.

That's fun. Heidi!

You're... You're being...

You're being naughty.

She's lifting herself almost all
the way out of the tank right now.

Come here. Come here.

Come here.

Oh!

Now I'm wet.

The idea of Laurel having any kind
of relationship with a mollusc

is extraordinary
when you think about it.

This is an animal that
has 600 million years

of distance from us.

That's almost as deep as any divide
can be between two animals.

With three hearts, no bones,
a beak with a venomous bite

and a gut that runs
through its brain,

to one point of view,
the octopus is completely alien.

As science fiction movies
have long demonstrated,

humans spend a lot of imagination

dreaming up what it might be like
to meet an alien.

In the latest blockbuster, Arrival,

the film-makers imagine what
it might be like to encounter

a species that changes the way
we think about the universe.

And I think it's an important
observation

that they culminate this encounter

with cephalopod-like figures
from outer space.

To really understand quite
how alien octopuses are to us

and to every other intelligent
form of life on Earth,

we need to appreciate the unique
evolutionary path of the octopus

on the tree of life.

It's octopus lecture 101
for my students.

OK, what does the tree of life
look like?

Here are a couple
of artistic versions.

Now just to give you
a quick overview,

here's the plants,
here's the animals,

this is the branch
that has the vertebrates...

VOICEOVER: To meet the common
ancestor of humans and octopus,

you would have to travel
back in time

more than half a billion years...

..millions of years before any
animal crawled out of the ocean

on to the land.

So here's the octopus
and here's the human...

..and their last common ancestor

is something that was
fairly like a flatworm.

And what would this common
ancestor look like?

Well, maybe a little bit like this.

A small, flat worm.

Barely any eyes to speak of,

with a cluster of neurons
forming just a pinprick of a brain.

From this beginning,
one path of evolution

gave rise to every bird
and every reptile, every mammal,

all of them, us included,

all adaptations from
this common ancestor.

Designs of eyes and brains
and hearts

becoming ever more sophisticated
and more varied.

That was the path for every
intelligent animal...

..except for one.

That is why people talk
about meeting an octopus

being like meeting an alien.

Because octopus branch of life
evolved on its own separate track,

inventing its own version of an eye,

its own version of a brain,

its own version of a heart.

The octopus is a unique expression
of evolution...

..so any contact I have
with these animals

is possible because evolution
built our eyes,

our minds, our behaviour,
twice over.

There is no other intelligent animal
on the planet

that has evolved separately from
all the other animals in this way.

And this is why people are
so fascinated to make contact

and to understand every facet
of this very particular sentience.

In aquarium tanks

all around the world,

octopuses have been put through
their paces.

They've solved complex mazes...

..even learnt symbols,

passed memory tests
for their rewards...

..learning from feedback,
forward-thinking,

applying diverse behaviours
to novel situations.

When you stack them
one on top of another,

that's what we call intelligence.

And the unique evolutionary
journey of the octopus....

Come on, Heidi.

..makes this intelligence
particularly intriguing.

For a start,
the intelligence of an octopus

is not just gathered as one lump
in its head, like it is with us.

Parts of the octopus' intelligence
are distributed in its arms.

And that means that, to some extent,
the body can be its own controller

rather than having a body
being driven

entirely around by the brain.

Eight arms,
independently gathering data

and reacting to the world
around them.

All kinds of intelligence
require feedback.

I think that's why humans are
intelligent,

is cos we just, you know...

"No, you try
and you learn from your errors,"

so trial and error
is really the intelligent thing

and octopuses make trial and error
do more than you might expect.

Heidi and I are playing around,

recreating an early one of these
experiments into octopus cognition.

In 1959, a Harvard scientist
asked a simple question.

Can an octopus learn to pull and
release a lever to get a reward?

That experiment was successful

and so, I thought, wouldn't it be
fun to play with whether Heidi

would be interested in manipulating
something outside of her tank?

And so this is sort of a way
to see if she can learn that

when she gets the light to turn on,
she can bring us into the room.

It's kind of an interesting
thing to play around with.

When you pull on the string,
a light goes on...

BUZZER

Ooh. And the buzzer.

HE LAUGHS

Want to chase the ball?

Come on. Up here.

Come on.

The concept, which didn't
get fully explored,

was can she learn that by doing
something in the tank,

she can affect my behaviour
when I'm not actually in view?

That's it. Come on.

There you go. That a girl.

Come on. Oh.

Oh, you got it. Oh!

BUZZER
You vicious predator!

BUZZER

So I was curious about, does the
octopus retain enough of a concept

of the person not present
in her view

but present in her mind?

You going to get it, Heidi?

BUZZER

It's on.

Well, hi.

You get it?

Well done.

BUZZER

It didn't take her any time at all
to learn

that there was a cue over here.

You want some shrimp?

But the rest of it, you know,
that was...

..challenging.

BUZZER

This idea was more fun
in the concept

than at any point in the execution.

Yeah.

Heidi got fairly insistent.

BUZZER

And I decided to take
this all apart.

HE LAUGHS

Our understanding
of octopus intelligence

took another leap forward
when in Indonesia, in 2009,

researchers reported
a veined octopus

doing something truly remarkable.

It was a discovery that would put
our understanding of the octopus

onto a new level of sentience

occupied by only a few species
of animals.

Living on the sand flats,
they have very few places to hide,

but this octopus has a unique
solution to the problem.

It carries half a coconut shell
with it.

But it needs to find something else
to complete the set.

Two coconut halves.

A perfect shelter.

What is remarkable about
this discovery

is how the octopus
dismantles its home...

..carries it around...

..uses it to hide
and to ambush prey...

..and now it's putting it
back together again.

This octopus is thinking ahead.

This is real flexibility.

The octopus has to anticipate
to carry that awkward object around

and then correctly assemble
the separate parts

to create a single functioning tool.

And less than 1% of all animals
have ever been seen to use tools.

And it's not just science
that is starting to take notice

of the extraordinary octopus.

Laurel was showing me all
the attention these animals

are getting from people.

I've seen Heidi do this before.
Yeah.

So my real question on this one is,
who's taking the video?

Is it another octopus who
stole the GoPro?

LAUREL LAUGHS

Maybe he's filming himself.

Yeah, he's doing a blog.

Oh, yeah. Video blog!

Yeah.

And he's like, "Look at this strange
thing that came and found me."

We're no longer just eating
octopuses.

People are meeting them now -
making contact in the ocean.

I held a fish in front of his shell
and he grabbed it from my hand.

He touched my finger with his arm

and I think that we were both a bit
surprised, so we both pull back.

This time he grabbed my finger and
he tried to pull my finger inside

but I was really surprised
by his strength.

This clip has 11 million hits.

He was punching the fish away
with his arms.

It was the funniest thing
I've ever seen.

This octopus trying to punch away
little fish.

It was definitely the coolest
encounter I've had with an octopus.

I tried to see how he responds
to different objects,

like a cone shell or a mirror,

but he never really respond
the way that I expect.

For example, he was not interested
at all in a cone shell

that I gave him, but he kept
going up to my hands

and he kept feeling my little
elastic band around my wrist.

I went on holiday and I didn't see
him for a few days before.

I was worried he wouldn't be there
any more when I came back.

But I found him and he swam up
to me and he touched my foot.

985 clams disliked this video.

That's funny.

This one also went viral.

It wasn't hard to get Heidi
to demonstrate

these impressive skills
of contortion.

She doesn't have a skeleton.

Want to go through?

Come on, Heidi. Come out and play.

Come on.

Octopus are able to squeeze through
the smallest of gaps.

That a girl.

That's it. Come on, sweetie.

Good girl. Come on.

Come on.

A little squeeze.

There we go. That a girl.

Keep coming. You can do it.

Almost.

You can squeeze.

I need to be very careful.

This ability makes Heidi
a real escape risk.

She is quite capable of leaving
the tank if she gets a chance.

In fact, octopus can move across
land with surprising ease.

In northern Australia,

it's part of the hunting strategy
of the Abdopus octopus.

Octopus have gills, so they can't
survive out here for long.

But they do absorb some oxygen
through their skin...

..allowing them enough time
to find a new rock pool

with new opportunities.

And leaving the water is not
just being seen in the wild.

There's stories everywhere.

There's far more stories
than there are data.

One story tells of a trawler
in the English Channel

and an octopus caught in a net
left on deck.

Somehow it manages to slither
from the deck

down the companionway
into the cabin

and, hours later,
is found hiding in a teapot.

Now we turn to a tale of escape.

A daring act by an octopus.

Inky, the octopus.

In a New Zealand aquarium,

another octopus named Inky

becomes famous on the news

when it was reported
for escaping its tank

and crawling across the floor,
disappearing down a drain,

escaping to the sea.

The manager of the aquarium
says Inky will not be pursued.

Some of my favourite stories
are about pet octopus

popping out of their tank...

..to snack on their neighbours.

People notice their fishes going
missing in the middle of the night.

They discover that an octopus
might sneak out

under the cover of dark...

..and then return unnoticed.

My investigations into this suggest
an octopus leaving its tank

to grab a snack does happen,

but finding its way back?

That is probably urban legend.

Back in our living room,

Heidi has become a fully-fledged
consummate predator.

Sometimes, when Heidi hunts,

before the attack,
she might be camouflaged.

But as she gets ready...

..she'll drop all her camouflage...

..and then there's this
ghostly white form.

And then pounce.

While she's a master
of her environment...

DAVID ATTENBOROUGH ON TV:
..invigorated by daily sunshine...

..she is also taking part
in our lives outside the tank,

adapting to our daily routine
with remarkable ease.

We'd come in, we'd turn on the TV,

we'd sit down and a couple
of minutes later

she'd move over to the front
of the tank, closer to the TV.

She started doing that
pretty much every time

we would come into the living room
to watch TV,

and so we'd have TV time
with the octopus.

I think this is how
she would orient herself

if she's actually watching it
cos her eyes just moved

so that they're more facing
towards the TV.

TV: An oceanic wanderer
stops by to be cleaned...

There seems to be, like,
very subtle changes,

like slight widening of eyes

and, like, a slightly faster
breathing.

TV: ..invigorated by daily sunshine,

marine life flourishes...

But is Heidi really watching TV
with Laurel?

The idea isn't as far fetched
as it sounds.

Researchers for a long time
have used video

to show cuttlefish and octopuses.

And see how they react to it.
Are they signalling to one another?

Is there's sort of
a language of behaviour?

So it's completely believable
that Heidi is watching television.

TV: ..long distances along
the reef in order to get here.

But to what extent
is she watching us?

Increasingly, we can see just
how well Heidi recognises us.

There is good evidence
that she is aware of who we are.

So sometimes I take
extra measures...

..to be someone else.

EERIE MUSIC

This isn't an octopus horror show.

It's actually based on hard science.

There is plenty of evidence that
shows octopus recognise people.

I'm going to weigh Heidi today

and to do that
I've got to capture her

so that I can lift her up
on the scale

and she might not like that
so I'm going to wear a mask.

Well, you see,
there's an interesting study

that was done in 2008 that showed
that octopuses in aquariums

remember and recognise
individual human faces.

The experiment dressed two people
in identical uniforms.

One would feed the octopus.

The other would annoy the octopus
with a bristly stick.

Within just a week, the octopus
would move towards the person

that fed them

and avoid or even squirt
the annoying one.

What do you think, Heidi?

Here goes.

And so, when I weigh Heidi,

this just might make it a little
easier for her to forgive me

for capturing her and weighing her.

It's harder to tell
in the living room experience,

but Laurel is quite convinced
that Heidi showed a difference

between the way she reacted
to either of us

and visitors to the house.

Recognising people on the other
side of the glass

is an unlikely ability for a
creature that comes from the ocean.

OK, you've been weighed.

And there is a new dimension
being added to this study

of octopus intelligence.

Personality.

Scientists have used the
relationship between octopus

and humans in an aquarium
setting like this...

Oop! That's the first time that
she's ever taken it away from me.

..to demonstrate how individual
octopus have their own personality.

And Laurel is certainly convinced
about the particular character

of our octopus.

Heidi's definitely a troublemaker.

When we feed her,
she grabs onto you...

Heidi!

..and then she jets at you.

That was very wet!

It's just cold.
She got it right up my sleeve.

You know, you're trying to pull away
with this octopus stuck to your arm

and she's jetting water in your face
and it's, you know, she's trying

to get attention and she doesn't
want us to leave the room.

There have now been several studies
that have looked for signs

of personality
in different cephalopods

and typically find that there
are individual personalities.

Bringing the octopus into an area
of study normally reserved

for animals like chimpanzees
and dolphins

is another milestone
in the understanding

of octopus intelligence.

And certainly the first time
for an invertebrate.

This experience with the octopus
in our living room

helps me understand a little
bit more about how they

experience the world,
but it also highlights a paradox...

..one of the cephalopod mysteries.

Scientists have a model
that suggests that

some of the things that go along
with intelligence

are longer life spans...

..and complex social lives.

Neither of those things
apply to octopuses.

They live short lives
and they spend them alone.

The fact that octopuses are solitary
seems at odds with how Heidi

can have this kind of intelligent
relationship with us at all.

Recently, I've been investigating

a unique discovery in Australia...

That a girl.

..one that suggests octopuses may
not always be solitary after all.

This extraordinary discovery
happened in 2009

in a small bay not that far
from Sydney Harbour.

A diver named Matt Lawrence
plunged over the side of his boat

and drifting along just exploring
in areas of the bay

that everyone else found
were pretty boring.

And in the middle of a silty area,

he came across something
very unexpected.

Piles of empty scallop shells.

And in amongst the scallop shells,

about a dozen octopuses
had made their homes.

We have nicknamed the site
Octopolis,

although it's hardly
a city of octopuses.

But an aggregation like this

is unheard of
anywhere else in the world.

I'm helping to try and find out
what's going on here.

And working with Matt, we're
putting some remote cameras down

to get a closer look at the
behaviour at this unusual site.

We wanted to capture
the natural behaviour

and Matt started putting GoPro down.

You know, one or two GoPros
on the site to sort of

film the octopuses
when divers weren't around.

And so it's kind of exciting
to come back

and track what's going on with the
octopuses from moment to moment.

So that's the octopus... Yeah, he's
pulling down another camera.

Taking over the camera now.

Oh, he's got the camera.

No wonder we can't keep the cameras
alive. They take a beating.

I love it when this happens
and then another video

records the octopus
vandalising our cameras.

And when the cameras aren't getting
pulled apart, they're recording

social interactions that you simply
can't see anywhere else.

They appear to signal to one another

and make themselves look really
dark and conspicuous and large

when they're approaching

and rather flat and pale
when they're retreating.

You see octopuses reaching
towards each other.

I wouldn't want to speculate yet
what that is,

but they're interacting.

This is pretty new.

So this -
this is more of that signalling.

But why does the approaching octopus
evict this one and not that one?

I wonder if it's possible

that they're recognising
one another, you know. Yeah.

They prefer one animal over another,
you know, like a smaller rival male.

That's the high five.
Yeah, there it is.

Go over and touch each other
and just... Yeah.

Octopolis is sort of a wonderland.

It's just kind of awe-inspiring.

There's octopuses side by side
in adjacent dens...

..and that's so surprising
for an animal

that we always thought was solitary.

You see octopuses approaching one
another, then chasing one another.

We see them wrestle
with one another.

It's always fairly spectacular
cos it's like watching

two umbrellas have a fight.

HE LAUGHS

What makes Octopolis unique
is that this is a spot

where the conditions occur
that force...

..social skills upon the octopus.

It's a very exciting find.

It does sort of shake up the
cephalopod world a little bit,

to think that octopuses may
have to deal with one another

and, in doing so, sort of
hone their social skills.

The research has only just begun
and we'll need to work out

how these environmental conditions

might create what we thought
did not happen...

..octopuses living side by side
with one another.

Each new discovery makes
a little more sense of how Heidi

can have a relationship
like she does with Laurel and me.

Having an octopus in our living room

has enabled us an intimacy
not possible in the lab.

And last night I witnessed something
I've never seen recorded before.

You know, if she is dreaming,
this is a dramatic moment.

You could almost just narrate the
body changes and narrate the dream.

So here she's asleep.

She sees a crab and her colour
starts to change a little bit.

Then she turns all dark.

Octopuses will do that
when they leave the bottom.

This is a camouflage,

like, she's just subdued a crab
and now she's, erm...

..going to sit there and eat it

and she doesn't want anyone
to notice her.

It's a very unusual behaviour
to see the colour come and go

on her mantle like that.

I mean, just to be able to...

..see all the different
colour patterns

just flashing one after another.

You don't usually see that
when an animal's sleeping,

which really is fascinating.

But, yeah, if she's dreaming,

that's the dream.

The solitary octopus
does not fit our theories

of how animal intelligence
can evolve.

And yet, it is.

And there is another thing
about the octopus

which also contradicts our theories
on the development of intelligence.

It is something Laurel and I will
soon have to come to terms with

because most octopus live
for only a year or two at most.

It is incredible that octopus
can become so sophisticated

in such a short time.

There is a connection here

that crosses a divide
not just from air into water,

but also across half a billion
years of separation.

And it's been a privilege
to have a relationship

with such a strange
and wonderful creature.