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 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.

She 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.

I'm not sure.

Well, 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.

It's 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, we have a lamp.

So lit.

Yeah, so it's lit.

Inviting an octopus into your home is no small undertaking.

There we go.

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.

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 sight.

There's maybe a dozen or more octopuses that we might

be able to find at depths from 10 feet deep to 90.

These are the largest octopuses in the world.

They can be as big as I am.

Like all octopuses, they're solitary animals.

And they are hard to find.

They're 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.

Or by looking at their houses.

You 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 two arms.

And then other times you can see this sort of

walking behavior 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.

Yep, 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.

You 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?

Octopuses love crab.

Well, there it is.

She's definitely feeling for it.

Oh, oh, 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 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 was 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.

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 would tell 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.

Hi.

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, 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?

Brett is an expert on the early stages of cephalopod life, that group of animals

that includes octopuses, cuttlefish, and squid.

Exactly, exactly.

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 there.

My day octopus is already a few months old.

But at Brett's lab, we can get a glimpse into

the first few weeks of a cephalopod's life.

We're, you know, 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 hatch.

The second instinct 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 they already have some experience with these octopuses in the wild.

I've been in the water with them on the southwest coast of Madagascar...

working with a local Vezu fisherman designing a way to census the octopus population.

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

You see there?

Yeah, yeah.

The head?

Yeah.

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.

It's fish in the water.

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 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 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 checked it out.

She doesn't want me to leave.

Octopuses 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 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.

.

.

.

It'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 vertebrates...

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 of them.

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 learnt

symbols, passed 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 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 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.

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, the light goes on.

Ooh, and the buzzer.

Ha, ha, ha.

Want to chase the ball?

Come on, up here.

Come on.

The concept, which didn't get fully explored, was... All the way.

Can she learn that by doing something in the tank, she

can affect my behavior 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.

You vicious predator.

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 gonna get it, Heidi?

It's on.

Well, hi.

Oh, you did it.

Well done.

It didn't take her any time at all to learn that there was a queue over here.

You want some shrimp?

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

This idea was more fun in the concept than at any point in the execution.

Yeah.

Heidi got fairly insistent.

And I decided to take this all apart.

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 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 a GoPro?

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 hand.

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.

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 a 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 responded 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 hand 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 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.

Want to go through?

Come on, Heidi.

Come out and play.

Come on.

Octopuses 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, it's 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 assumed.

Some of my favorite stories are about pet octopus popping out of their tank.

It's a snack on their neighbors.

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, 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.

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

because her eyes just moved so that they're more facing towards the 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.

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 what they look like.

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.

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 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 is quite convinced

that Heidi showed the 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... Whoop!

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.

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 we saw an octopus looking 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 longer periods in 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.

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 a 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 kind of exciting to come back and track

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

So that's the octopus that's taken over the camera now.

He's pulling down

He's got the camera.

No wonder we can't keep the cameras alive.

It'll 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 are recording social

interactions that you simply can't see anywhere else.

They appear to be here to signal to one another.

And they 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 do you think why does the approaching

octopus evict this one and not that one?

I wonder if it's possible that they're like recognising one another.

You know.

Yeah.

They prefer one animal over another.

You know, like a smaller rival male.

That's the high five.

Oh yeah.

There it is.

They go over and touch each other and just, yeah.

Octopolis 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 solid.

You see octopuses approaching one another and chasing one another.

You 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.

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 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 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.