Original subtitles

We take our way of existence for granted, but there are other ways of being.

The octopuses followed a different evolutionary path, making

them different from all the other 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 Scheele. I'm professor of marine biology

at Alaska Pacific University here in Anchorage. I've studied

all sorts of animals, but for the past 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 10th grade. We

should check with her, make sure dad hasn't screwed that

up. Hey Laurel, you're 16 right in 10th grade? 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 saltwater.

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.

Inviting an octopus into your home is no small undertaking.

All right. Yeah, it's coming. No, it's coming. All right. There we go.

This new setup is going to allow me to spend more time

with an octopus than I've been able to do otherwise.

Here in Alaska, I work with the species that's native to

these cold waters, the giant Pacific octopus. But 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.

No, 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 color change.

Oh, look at this. Nice. I mean, 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 he's 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, she's

after the tube, not the crab. There we go. There we go.

There we go. Oh, all right. Look at the color pattern. That is a satisfied octopus.

I like the texture she's put on. She didn't have that

before. The papilla 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 was very happy to see Laurel every day.

Hello. Laurel was just glad to have a pet that was glad to

see her. I think a lot of her pets kind of indifferent to

her. Her goldfish and her rabbit outside. So an octopus

is kind of fun because 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 here. Come here. You know, 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

tells me she'd sit for 30 minutes with the octopus just

holding on to her and wait for it to let go. And now she's

excited. 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 because 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, okay, I'm keeping you with me.

The cephalopod community, we're all excited about octopuses

and we're 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? Brett

is an expert on the early stages of cephalopod life. That

group of animals that include octopus, cuttlefish, and

squid. So how's everything going over there? Because I've

never kept an octopus in my living room before. You want to

take a look at the setup? 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 coloration going on.

My day octopus is already a few months old. But at Brett's

lab, we 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

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 bobtailed squid hide by sticking grains of sand

to their bodies with a mucus extruded from their skin.

These are all hardwired little predators. They don't

hesitate to take down prey, even when it's two or three

times their size.

Their color-changing cells start flashing while they're still in the egg.

Three types of cells with neural control make color change almost instantaneous.

These young pajama squid use this to produce their signature striped pattern.

But there is one cephalopod that is the master.

Just a few centimeters long, these baby flamboyant cuddles

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 a local Vesuvian

fisherman, designing a way to census the octopus population.

Brice has an amazing ability to find the octopus in amongst the coral.

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 they're 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 Brice has caught it again.

The day octopus is a master of camouflage.

Its skin can change color 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 behavior with its color 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 and trap it in the web of

its arms.

My octopus is showing impressive color 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 have

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 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 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.

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's just she's just lightly

jetted up. She doesn't want me to leave. Octopus also have

estrogen like humans do. Is it possible that Heidi can be

detecting the estrogen 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

mollusk 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 filmmakers 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.

Okay, 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... 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 onto 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 behavior 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 have solved complex mazes, even learned symbols, past

memory tests for their rewards. Learning from feedback,

forward thinking, applying diverse behaviors 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

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 because we just know 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.

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, and 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 is showing me all the attention these animals are getting from people.

I've seen Heidi do this before. Oh yeah. So my real question

on this one is who's taking the video? Is it another octopus

who's stolen this thing from?

Maybe he's filming himself. Yeah, he's doing a vlog. 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 the fish in

front of his shell and he grabbed it from my hands. He

touched my finger with his arm and I think that we were both

a bit surprised. So we both pulled back. This time he

grabbed my finger and he tried to pull my finger inside.

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 respond to different objects, like a

cone shell or a mirror, but he never really respond the way

that I expect. I went on holiday and I didn't see him for a

few days before. I was worried he wouldn't be there anymore

when I came back, but I found him and he swam up to me and he touched my foot.

985 clams disliked this video.

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.

Octopus are able to squeeze through the smallest of gaps.

Good girl. Come on. Come on. 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 abdipus 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 and 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 favorite stories are about pet octopus

popping out of their tank to snack on their neighbors. 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,

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

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. So we'd have TV time with

the octopus.

I think this is how she would orient herself if she's

actually watching it, because her eyes just moved so that

they're more facing towards the TV.

There seems to be like very subtle changes like slight

widening of eyes and like a slightly faster breathing.

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 a video to show cuttlefish and octopuses and see

how they react to it. Are they signaling to one another? Is

there sort of a language of behavior? So it's

completely believable that Heidi is watching television.

But to what extent is she watching us?

Increasingly we can see just how well Heidi recognizes us.

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

So sometimes I take extra measures to be someone else.

This isn't an octopus horror show. It's actually based on hard science.

There is plenty of evidence that shows octopus recognize

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

recognize 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 a living room experience but Laurel's

quite convinced that Heidi showed a difference between the

way she reacted to either of us and visitors to the house.

Recognizing people on the other side of the glass is an

unlikely ability for a creature that comes from the ocean.

Okay 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. 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. It's wet. It's very wet. It's just cold she got

it right up my sleeve. And 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 lifespans

and complex social lives. Neither of those things apply to

octopuses. 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. 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 are putting some remote cameras down to

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

wanted to capture this sort of 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 were

around. And so it's 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. Taken over the camera now all the man like all the.

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 vandalizing our

cameras. And when the cameras aren't getting pulled apart

they are 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 signaling but why does the

approaching octopus evict this one and not that one. I

wonder if it's possible that they're like recognizing one

another. You know yeah they prefer one animal over another

you know like a smaller rival. That's the high five. Oh

yeah there it is. Gather and touch each other and just yeah.

Otopolis is a 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 and chasing one another. We see them wrestle with

one another. It's always fairly spectacular because it's

like watching two umbrellas have a fight.

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's she's asleep she sees a crab and her

color 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 going to sit there and eat it and she doesn't want

anyone to notice her.

It's a very unusual behavior to see the color come and go on

her mantle like that. I mean just to be able to see all the

different color patterns just flashing one after another.

You don't usually see that when an animal is 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 of 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. The cross is 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.