If humans leave ten million years, which creature will dominate the earth instead of humans? I believe you will definitely think of it as an orangutan! But now there is a second option, the mollusk octopus living in the ocean, because their intellectual development has exceeded human imagination!
How smart can octopus be?
Octopus, also known as octopus, is a mollusk of the Cephalopoda. They have 8 tentacles like arms, covered with round suction cups, and more females than males. They are both edible economic species, frequent visitors in IQ tests, and one of the few invertebrates that can counter-predate sharks and penguins and other high-level vertebrates.
Maybe many friends are still staying in the 2010 Octopus Paul's World Cup prediction. Of course, this is just a game of Paul , and it has nothing to do with predictions. However, it has exposed the widest range of high-IQ animals like octopus to global audiences. Their intelligence is beyond everyone's imagination!
The story of the octopus called Otto
In 2008, Elfriede Kummer, director of the Ocean Star Aquarium , found at work that the entire aquarium was pitch black and the aquarium circuit tripped. Elfriede Kummer felt it was not surprising. It was normal to occasionally happen. It must be a place where the electricity leaked, so it was just turned on again.
But the entire aquarium was pitch black again when I went to work the next day, and it was the case for several days in a row. The staff of the aquarium could not sit still. What happened? Therefore, they decided to wait in the aquarium to see who was the sacred slut.
When it was almost morning, Elfriede Kummer suddenly discovered that the octopus Otto crawled out of the glass tank. This was a 6-month-old octopus that had come to the side of the aquarium and sprayed water at the 2,000-watt spotlight. In an instant, the aquarium fell into darkness. The culprit was found. The octopus sprayed water caused a short circuit and the aquarium air switch was protectively tripped!
Maybe Alto thinks this light is too bright, maybe it feels that this light is on, and other aquatic animals in the aquarium are not disturbing it restlessly, so it wants to "turn off the lights"! And in fact it has done this work that is nearly impossible for marine life.
What other surprising intellectual stories do octopus have?
Octopus can open the sealed cork in a glass bottle filled with lobsters and eat the lobster. Even if the octopus has never seen a bottle of this structure, it can quickly find a way!
Octopus has a strong learning ability. When the octopus sees another octopus take out food from a complex structure, it will copy it immediately and use the same method to remove the food.
octopus has long-term memory. There is a story in the American magazine Orion that there is a octopus named Truman in the aquarium. He doesn't like a female volunteer and often squirts him. Later, the female volunteer left the aquarium because of his studies. But a few months later, when he returned to the aquarium and passed by the octopus, the octopus that had not sprayed water for several months suddenly spit out a column of water at him.
They also make tools and use coconut shells as their own protection. They can not only unplug the bottle cap from the outside, but also open the bottle cap inside the bottle. The huge body can pass through a 3-centimeter hole. In short, when you stay with it, you cannot treat it as an animal at all, but as a friend, and a friend who will play tricks.
Distributed brain processing system of octopus
The human brain is on the head, and at least the part that can form consciousness is concentrated in the skull, but octopus is not. They have three hearts and also have a distributed processing system. You are not wrong. The brain of octopus is distributed!
Three-hearted and nine-brained octopus and one-hearted and one-hearted human
octopus have nine brains, the head is a relatively large nerve center brain, and the other eight are distributed among the eight tentacles. The control of these eight tentacles is independent, and of course, extremely complex work can be completed through coordination. The flexibility is orders of magnitude more than the human hands.
Tentacles are extremely sensitive, and 40 million sensory receptors are all around, including taste and smell. The real ear-listening octopus is the real octopus. These receptors can also ensure that they avoid fighting and entanglement when touching themselves. Even when fighting with the other party, the other party’s hand is bitten, and it will never bite it on your own because of the fight.
The brain of octopus
The number of neurons in octopus is not particularly high, and it does not have much advantage in the competition with mammals. For example, look at the figure below:
It is only a higher number of neurons than mouse and Dutch pigs, but it is far from the opponent of cats and squirrel monkey . But you should know that most of the animals competing for IQ are mammals, while octopus is a mollusk. Some people will definitely say that dolphin is also very smart. They are fish, but in fact dolphins are animals of the dolphin family , and they are marine mammals.
octopus has 500 million neurons in the brain (85 billion people have), and the brainization index is 1.23, higher than the gorilla 1.15, pig 1.10, zebra , lions and rabbits, etc. Of course, the more neurons the more intelligent the. For example, there are more elephants than humans. Are they smarter than humans?
The brain of the octopus only concentrates 40% of the whole body's neurons, and the remaining 60% are distributed in the 8 brachiopods to form independent neural cords. This independent method reduces the burden on the brain. After all, it is too troublesome to coordinate the eight legs. Now it is controlled by the independent brain. The brain just sends them some tasks to handle high-level tasks, which are decomposed by the eight brains themselves.
Scientists have found that in addition to the division of labor between primary and secondary, octopus also uses 500 million neurons to match 168 procadherin species involved in the construction of the brain circuit (there are only 70 procadherin species in vertebrates), as well as the "zinc finger" gene in the octopus gene that may be involved in the regulation of the brain gene network. There are about 413 zinc fingers in the cap shell, 764 in humans, and 1,790 in octopus! So the octopus actually used these neurons to build a brain with higher IQ than the number of neurons of the same scale or even higher number. If humans had such a high "zinc finger", what would happen?
octopus also has instantly changed color. This skill is beyond the reach of other animals. Only the chameleon on land can match it, but the IQ octopus directly crushes the chameleon. In addition, according to biologists' discovery, octopus also has a personality!
The development path is completely different from humans
The recent common ancestor of humans and octopus lived about 800 million years ago, but both of them embarked on the path of high IQ development. It is obvious that octopus is taking a completely different path from humans. This way of using limited neurons to the extreme seems to be a shortcut to high IQ!
If they develop breathing with their lungs, then walk onto the land and use 8 flexible hands to deal with everything on the land, it is probably nothing humans will do. It is worth mentioning that the prototype of the alien in "Independence Day" may be an octopus, and there is also an artificial exoskeleton outside!
But the lifespan of an octopus is very short, generally not more than 5 years, but it has short-term memory and long-term memory that is not needed at all. It is really puzzling why this species of Cephalossa, which cannot be understood by scientists, does not require any high IQ behavior as a support except for mating and reproduction of the next generation. It is really puzzling why it evolved a high IQ brain that does not match its living environment!
So some biologists joked that octopus is originally a creature from aliens! Edinburgh University physiologist Andrew Packard believes that the high IQ of octopus was forced out by the environment under the complex living conditions of the past, but have other marine organisms at the same time faced a complex living environment?
