Does octopus have a high IQ?

Octopus, also known as octopus, Shiju, dead cattle, and so on, does not belong to fish. it is considered to be the most intelligent invertebrate in the octopus family, and one of the creatures that once appeared most different from human beings. widely distributed in tropical and temperate waters around the world, let's take a look at how intelligent the octopus is.

Does octopus have a high IQ?

Octopus has a high IQ. The octopus has 500 million neurons in its brain and some very sensitive chemical and tactile receptors, a unique neural structure that makes it more capable of thinking than the average animal. Through gene decoding, scientists found that octopuses have a set of genes similar to those of humans, which allows them to build neural networks, which explains why octopuses have the ability to learn. Octopus, like humans, has a large brain, a closed circulatory system, and a pair of eyes with iris, retina and lens.

The performance of octopus with high IQ

Jim Cosgrove, an octopus expert who has been studying octopus for many years, points out that octopus has "conceptual thinking" and can solve complex problems on its own, which gives it the ability to walk on two feet. In order to avoid being hunted by predators, in addition to using the well-known mimicry camouflage and wrist protection techniques, US scientists have also found a "high intelligence" octopus that can walk on two feet to escape in the Indian Ocean.

Christine Hefard of the University of California, Berkeley, and his team photographed an octopus called Maginettes in tropical Indonesia, about the size of an apple. In the face of danger or divers, the octopus will bend and fold six of the eight claws upward to make a coconut shell, while the remaining two claws will stand on the seafloor ground and move back secretly. Like a small coconut that can move, it escapes in a backward stride with a funny posture.

Another kind of octopus, the size of a walnut, also walks on two feet, but the other six legs stretch out to simulate the appearance of seaweed. The team found that walking on two wrists and feet was much faster than using eight feet, and the former had a maximum speed of about 0.14 meters per second.

Octopus IQ test experiment

Scientists have conducted intelligence tests on an octopus named Murphy in order to find out whether the octopus can form a stable conditioned response. Pei Fei is busy building a new house. He picks up a lot of broken glass and stones that people throw at him to build a defensive fence. The construction work was carried out at night, and by morning, a transparent house had been built. Behind a crystal wall of thousands of shattered mirrors, Murphy sat high, satisfied with his masterpiece by all signs.

In this way, octopuses do not know that glass is transparent. They choose materials by touch, whatever is hard. It was instinct, not wisdom, that prompted the octopus to drag the broken glass into its nest. Obviously, a shelter made of glass is not much better than a "king's new clothes" to cover the eyes of the curious.

After starving Murphy for a few days, he began his next experiment by taking a glass tube containing crabs and putting it in the crystal palace where the octopus lived. His greedy eyes stared at his prey for a moment, and his wrists protruded one after another from behind the pointed glass wall, "and then suddenly folded up and bumped against the glass tube. Although it is close to the ruler, it is separated by glass, which makes it unable to achieve its purpose.

Murphy wriggled, trying in vain to catch the salivating crab. The color of the skin is constantly changing because of exasperation. It cannot judge that as long as it climbs 30 centimeters up the glass tube, it can smoothly drill from the upper mouth to the crab's hideout. However, Murphy's greedy eyes could not take away from his prey, and he stubbornly attacked the crab according to the law that a straight line was the shortest between the two points.

The futile attack lasted for a long time, and occasionally a wrist reached out to the edge of the glass tube, and the tip of the wrist went into the tube. At this time, McPhee immediately changed tactics, turned her wrist into the glass tube, and unswervingly stretched out to the crab, and the whole body climbed up with it. When the wrist touched the crab, it suddenly shrank back, and then Murphy rushed into the barrel like a rocket and dragged the crab. It seems that the tip of the wrist can detect the smell of crabs, which makes the blind lead the way for the discerning.

By this time, of course, McPhee knew exactly how to get a crab through the glass, one time enough to make the octopus form a conditioned reflex in the center of the brain. But it is a pity that it cannot learn the lesson and overcome unnecessary twists and turns, but can only repeat the whole process of the first time accurately, rushing to the glass tube in an attempt to catch the crab through the glass, and then drilling in through the upper mouth of the wrist.

Under the same conditions, octopus has a much higher IQ than squid. When scientists experimented on a squid, they put the shrimp in a glass jar without a lid, but the squid bumped its head against the jar for 30 hours without any circuitous strategy. A few days later, after McPhee created a performance incomprehensible to his close relatives with ten hands, a more complicated experiment was carried out, covering the cylinder of crabs with a piece of glass, however, the wrist, who has studied the approach, has overcome this obstacle effortlessly.

After several unsuccessful attempts, the wrist finally found a small gap between the bottle and the glass lid, lifted the lid, and the octopus got in. After a seven-day pause, people repeated the original experiment, and McPhee still mastered the correct method he had learned a week ago. But the squid forgot all about the method of foraging through the glass after 18 hours. Obviously, in the cephalopod mollusk family, the intelligence of each member is not the same, and nature gives the octopus the strongest ability.