Cool new report in Current Biology, Defensive tool use in a coconut-carrying octopus:
The use of tools has become a benchmark for cognitive sophistication. Originally regarded as a defining feature of our species, tool-use behaviours have subsequently been revealed in other primates and a growing spectrum of mammals and birds…Among invertebrates, however, the acquisition of items that are deployed later has not previously been reported. We repeatedly observed soft-sediment dwelling octopuses carrying around coconut shell halves, assembling them as a shelter only when needed. Whilst being carried, the shells offer no protection and place a requirement on the carrier to use a novel and cumbersome form of locomotion — ‘stilt-walking’.
No surprise that when we are looking to a violation of an old “human exceptional” character (though tool-use seems to have been violated a fair amount now by any interpretation) that the cephalopod would step up to the plate. I’ve heard of weird behavior by octopuses in laboratories which begs to be anthropomorphized, but no one denies that this is one taxa which has some brains. Who says you need a notochord to be a “higher animal”? Anyone who’s read a fair amount of science fiction also is aware that cephalopods are one of the more exotic, but still frequent, candidate earth lineages which might potentially rise to sapience. Fore all the aquatic species who have the glimmer of intelligence cybernetics might offer up some potential avenues of freedom and leveling the playing field with the terrestrials.
Citation: Defensive tool use in a coconut-carrying octopus, Finn, Julian K.; Tregenza, Tom; Norman, Mark D. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2009.10.052 (volume 19 issue 23 pp.R1069 – R1070)
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