FIELD NOTES Octopus Behaviour
National Geographic Explorer and Animal Psychologist Dr Alex Schnell has spent 15 years studying octopus behaviour and has been fascinated with the eight-limbed mollusc since first encountering one in a rock pool when she was five.
Their last common ancestor lived 550 million years ago, when acoels split away from other bilaterians (animals symmetrical on two sides, including humans). Yet Dr Schnell and colleagues have witnessed glimmers of intelligence in octopuses we might only expect to see in, say, chimpanzees.
‘To find brainpower in an octopus, which is so distantly related from humans, completely reframes how we view intelligence in the animal kingdom,’ she says.
After a mother octopus lays a clutch of eggs, she stops eating and is dead when her eggs hatch. Her offspring are born the size of a grain of rice, with no parental training and an average life expectancy of up to five years. But octopuses have one of the fastest growth rates of any animal and three times more capacity than humans to build neurons, critical brain connections
