Muse Article Summary: Octopi

Today I read an article about octupuses also known as octopi and was fascinated by how smart they are and what they can do. They've got over 200 suction cups on each arm and some scientists are thinking that they can have a mind of their own. They think that the octopus doesn't know how long it's arm actually is and that the arm can know things that other arms doen't know how to do. Their brains are roughly only the size of three walnuts but they are one of the smartest animals on earth. Most scientists would say that some kind of sea turtle is smarter which may be true but octopi are really smart creatures. For example, there was an aquarium and fish were mysteriously disappearing and they found out that the octopuus was actually getting out of it's cage and crawling all the way over to the holding tanks of the fish and then crawling back to it's cage. This is considered natural behavior because octopus are known to go from tidepool to tidepool crawling all the way. If they're out of the water too long, they will dry out and die so it isn't like they can live out of the water. In another case, a woman was feeding them and the shrimp were a little bit old and she went down the line of tanks feeding them and when she got back to the first one, it looked her in the eye and while maintaining eye contact it put the shrimp down the drain. In another case, a person locked the octopus in it's cage so it wouldn't crawl out anywhere and it remembered her face and whenever she passed by it's cage from then on, she got an accurate shot of water right at her. That proves that they have good memory. One of the pictures it showed was of an octopus with a huge shark in it's mouth and although it was a really strong animal, it couldn't escape from the octupus' amazing grip. They ran a test to see if they could find their way around and what they did was put a crab in different parts of the tank in a maze and at first they had it climb a wall and somehow they had the octopus momorize it's way to the crab then see if it could find it's way through the maze and it did.