When Jules Casey, a diver who frequently dives in a spot where Maori Octopuses like to hang around, pulled on her fins and started her dive, she didn’t expect to have such an intimate interaction.
The octopus, as you’re no doubt aware, is a very intelligent creature. A million and one studies have been done to discern exactly how intelligent they are, but “intelligence” is a bit of a hard thing to define. Human intelligence can be much different than animal intelligence, but researchers have tried different methods to make things clear.
There are a few things that they do that show just how brainy they are. “Octopuses play, and play is something that intelligent animals do,” Jennifer Mather, a comparative psychologist who has been studying studying octopuses for 35 years in an effort to gain insight into the evolution of intelligence told Scientific American. “At the Seattle Aquarium, my colleague Roland Anderson and I figured out a situation in which they might play: a boring situation. We gave them an empty tank and a floating pill bottle and waited to see what would happen. Nothing happened the first time, but, after the fourth time, a couple animals did something we call ‘play.’ The octopus blew a jet of water at the pill bottle and that caused it to go over a water jet in the tank and come back to the octopus. These two individual animals did it in a sequence over 20 times. That’s just exactly the kind of thing we do when we bounce a ball. When you bounce a ball, you are not trying to get rid of the ball, you are trying to figure out what you can do with the ball.”
Interestingly, they also have distinct personalities. Mather and her colleagues designed a handful of tests that were intended to put names to some of the most basic of those personalities.
“We put them in three common situations: alerting (opening the top of the tank), threatening (touching the octopus with a test tube brush) and feeding (the octopus was given a crab to munch),” Mather continued. “This takes awhile because we tested 33 animals, each for two weeks. We found there are three dimensions and we settled for names: activity, reactivity and avoidance. Avoidance is how shy you are. Activity is if you are very active or passive. And reactivity indicates whether you are very emotional or more blasé. Octopuses can have any mix of those traits. We didn’t take it any further, but there’s a former graduate student in Australia looking at the extent to which personality affects ecology.”
Anyway, all that is to say that yes, octopuses are smart, no matter how you define it. Casey, who posted the video you see above on Instagram, got a up-close-and-personal example of it when an octopus took her by the hand and seemingly led her to something it found interesting.
“This encounter happened towards the end of my dive,” she wrote on Instagram. “I don’t know if I found him or if he found me. He reached out his arm to hold my hand and in that moment it felt like he wanted me to follow him.”
This particular octopus is familiar with Casey. They’ve met a few times in the past and Casey has developed a bit of a fondness for him.
“Since we last met he has lost the tips off most of his arms and has a few white patches,” she wrote. “I’m guessing that he’s been mating and is getting close to the end of his life.
I followed him for several minutes and he took me to a location I’d never visited before. There was a headstone tied between to steel posts. On the headstone was a picture of a young man holding his white fluffy dog. I’d love to know the story behind this but for now it’s all a mystery.”
Peoplesmind