Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert lamp and I'm Julie Douglas. You
Speaker 1: know Julie. Recently, we we're discussing something on here. I
Speaker 1: think it was something dolphin related, and we ended up
Speaker 1: talking a little bit about the ideosaurus, which do you
Speaker 1: remember I I refer to these as fright dolphins because
Speaker 1: they kind of look like nightmares dolphin's very sharp rows
Speaker 1: of teeth. Right. Yeah, yeah, they're a long extinct now,
Speaker 1: but but they're they're interest because they show up in
Speaker 1: the fossil record a lot, and and they're like bus size, big,
Speaker 1: big creatures. And uh, it was after the podcast was
Speaker 1: over I started looking at these guys again and I
Speaker 1: happened upon a really fascinating news story that came out
Speaker 1: about a year ago. And a number of you've probably
Speaker 1: already heard this, but uh, you had a man by
Speaker 1: the name of Mark mcminimon, who is a paleontologist at
Speaker 1: Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mansachusetts, and he was
Speaker 1: speaking at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of
Speaker 1: America in Minneapolis, and he was talking specifically about a
Speaker 1: site in Las Vegas in the Nevada's Berlin Ittheosaur State Park,
Speaker 1: which two hundred million years ago was in a desert
Speaker 1: but was a sea floor. So you have all these
Speaker 1: really cool fossils, and particularly you have I Thesaurus fossils,
Speaker 1: and you have this one area though that is really
Speaker 1: perplexed um scientists for a while, where you have remains
Speaker 1: of nine different forty five ft Athosaurus um. Back in
Speaker 1: the fifties, there was this theory that the that due
Speaker 1: to their position, we think they might have died in
Speaker 1: shallow water and this was actually a tile flat um
Speaker 1: or due to accident old um you know, toxic plankton
Speaker 1: looming in the area. But recently there's been a rock
Speaker 1: evidence to suggest this these bodies were actually much deeper
Speaker 1: underwater than previously thought. So it read mcmentimun to come
Speaker 1: up with a very fascinating theory, I mean not just fastening,
Speaker 1: just a mind blowing theory and kind of a controversial
Speaker 1: theory that we're still still waiting to for for the
Speaker 1: rest of the scientific community to officially chime in on. Well,
Speaker 1: these fossils had patterns that resemble suckers on a tentacle,
Speaker 1: right right, and that was the big mystery. And so
Speaker 1: mcmentimun came up with this idea that this crack and
Speaker 1: like creature nearly one ft long or thirty meters long,
Speaker 1: drowned or broke the neck of the thesaurus and then
Speaker 1: just like took them down to his layer. Yes, and
Speaker 1: then and then there are two additional layers of interest here. Okay, octopi,
Speaker 1: as we'll discussing this podcast another cephal occupied especially are
Speaker 1: rather smart creatures. They actually are capable of playing with things.
Speaker 1: They get bored and they take things apart, and they
Speaker 1: scrunch things up and they uh they can't keep their
Speaker 1: hands still, I mean they're tentacles still rather so, uh So,
Speaker 1: the argument here is that this ancient cephalopod giant that
Speaker 1: dined on the sars in the deep, that that to
Speaker 1: hear she also would play with his or her food.
Speaker 1: And then there's this added layer that mcmanimum adds to
Speaker 1: this where he suggests that these creatures might have actually
Speaker 1: that the crack and may have actually formed these dead
Speaker 1: ichthusars into the shape of a tentacle that they may
Speaker 1: have been playing with their bodies actually created art the
Speaker 1: first art like an artistic interpretation of itself, which is uh,
Speaker 1: which which is again controversial theory here. But it's just
Speaker 1: it's really mind blowing, and it just felt like we
Speaker 1: had to mention. Well, I love the idea of it
Speaker 1: because I immediately think the most scientific thing I can
Speaker 1: think of, which is of course Clash of the Titans.
Speaker 1: And I think about, you know, the cracking and being
Speaker 1: released from its under original or or the original of course,
Speaker 1: which granted that that creature well awesome wasn't like an
Speaker 1: actual squid it was, and yeah, yeah, hey, I was
Speaker 1: sort of disappointing when it actually did emerge. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: it does. It brings to mind creatures like that, the
Speaker 1: cracking of myth. It brings to mind Cthulhu. Uh. And
Speaker 1: it's intelligent, god like squid in the darkness. And just
Speaker 1: the idea that in an age, and in a in
Speaker 1: an age with so beyond human experience and in a
Speaker 1: place so beyond human experience, that you could have this
Speaker 1: intellect capable of of taking these grizzly remains and wrenching
Speaker 1: them into its own shape. You know, it's just a well,
Speaker 1: and I think the reason why you can't help it
Speaker 1: get caught up in this explanation as radical and it's right.
Speaker 1: Yet what you're doing is you're you're marrying the brains
Speaker 1: that we know about cephalopods with braun to come up
Speaker 1: with this idea of them sculpting underwater. Um. But let's
Speaker 1: talk about the fact that that there's some criticism obviously
Speaker 1: that you know about this UM Yeah, yessing. Well, for
Speaker 1: Sartis mcmanimum, he's he's still standing by what he said
Speaker 1: and he's working on like official um official studies regarding
Speaker 1: this theory. So so in his defense, he hasn't really
Speaker 1: had the chance to to really come out full force
Speaker 1: with his findings in his theory. He's just he's just
Speaker 1: roughly alluded to it at this conference and said I'll
Speaker 1: get back to you when I have these finished, and
Speaker 1: everyone waits with debated breath. But the critics have already
Speaker 1: pointed out that, well, that's a pretty imaginative explanation for
Speaker 1: what we're seeing here, and there are other explanations that
Speaker 1: don't involve intelligent cephalopod artist in the triastic age. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there was there was one person who said that the
Speaker 1: hypothesis was a lot, you know, looking at these etchings
Speaker 1: that The hypothesis is a lot like looking at clouds
Speaker 1: and being able to see what you desire, that this
Speaker 1: artifact isn't there, This specimen isn't really that well preserved
Speaker 1: in the first place. So there's that. UM. Then there is,
Speaker 1: of course the idea that there's no direct evidence of
Speaker 1: really large cephalopods at that size um And Glenn Stores,
Speaker 1: curator of vertebrate paleontology at Cincinnati Museum Center, told Live
Speaker 1: Science that circumstantial evidence is not enough. Totally agree with that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And what migmonimum is really gonna want to have here
Speaker 1: is he needs to produce a beak or fossil evidence
Speaker 1: of the beak because there because theoretically there could have
Speaker 1: been crackings everywhere back then they could have just been
Speaker 1: ruling the roofs, but there would have been so few
Speaker 1: of them, and they're mostly soft material. And as we've
Speaker 1: discussed before, fossilization is not a guaranteed process. It's more
Speaker 1: of the exception to the rule that we actually see
Speaker 1: fossil evidence of a creature that once lived. Now, I
Speaker 1: will play Devil's advocate here and I will mention the
Speaker 1: book called krack And by Wendy Williams that that you
Speaker 1: lent me and she does talk about this idea of um,
Speaker 1: cephalopods is is very mysterious creatures that wore for a
Speaker 1: long time in the category of cryptozoology. She says that
Speaker 1: even up until like I think the eighteen seventies, they
Speaker 1: had a specimen. Uh, but it was until the eighteen
Speaker 1: nineties when when the specimen was you know, wildly widely
Speaker 1: then vetted, that people began to say, this is a
Speaker 1: real thing. So of course you have to produce the
Speaker 1: evidence in order to get there. Um. But I did
Speaker 1: want to play Devil's advocate a bit to say that
Speaker 1: there's there's still you know, this idea that a giant
Speaker 1: cephalopod could have existed a long one. It's kind of
Speaker 1: a wild theory, but wild theories, like dreams, sometimes come true.
Speaker 1: Oh it was beautiful. Um. So okay, we're gonna talk
Speaker 1: obviously a lot about cephalopods today because they are fascinating
Speaker 1: in because their brains are just a wonder um. In
Speaker 1: fact um, you know, the brain of the cephalopod has
Speaker 1: really advanced our understanding of ourselves right, our our own
Speaker 1: neuroscientists can definitely give a nod to cephalopods um and
Speaker 1: even like a gerontology that the study of aging, so
Speaker 1: the brain of the cephalopod. It's it's interesting because cephalopods
Speaker 1: are really not that far removed from saying you're you're
Speaker 1: common gardens slug. But we don't really look to the
Speaker 1: garden slug for any kind of staggering intellect. It's a
Speaker 1: pretty simple creature and pretty disgusting um that really shouldn't
Speaker 1: exist at all. Whereas the cephalopods their jobs, what is
Speaker 1: their job? They're like turning up the dirt they're they're making,
Speaker 1: they're helping it to be more nutrient rich. Okay, well, disclaimer,
Speaker 1: I kind of have a thing against garden slugs. Snails
Speaker 1: are fine, and then cephalopods are amazing, even though they're
Speaker 1: they're they're all basically buddies and probably email each other
Speaker 1: on the weekends. And uh, in the in the cephalopods
Speaker 1: of like, hey, sorry, dude, I don't know why I
Speaker 1: lamb is such a jerk about climbing on things to
Speaker 1: climbing up the domain. But um, like once one gotten
Speaker 1: the sink and I almost threw up it was disgusting,
Speaker 1: but not a cephalopod. Yeah, so yeah, please don't nail
Speaker 1: me slugs people, But but the brain of a cephalopod
Speaker 1: is pretty amazing because while compared to the human brain,
Speaker 1: it's not really that impressive and it's not that big,
Speaker 1: but for an invertebrate and then certainly for for a mosque,
Speaker 1: these are amazing brains that they're packing. Also, you have
Speaker 1: to keep in mind cephalopods were generally talking about creatures
Speaker 1: that live only one to two years, and but they're
Speaker 1: still there's still have an incredible brain activity going on well,
Speaker 1: and that one to two years is key in studying
Speaker 1: aging because you can see it in real time right there. Um.
Speaker 1: This is from Science Magazines article tackling brain evolution fall
Speaker 1: eight arms short of Martians showing up and offering themselves
Speaker 1: up to science, cephalopods are the only example outside of vertebrates,
Speaker 1: of how to build a complex, clever brain, says neuroscientists
Speaker 1: Cliff rag Cell of the University of Chicago and Illinois.
Speaker 1: For that reason, rag Seal says, these creatures have much
Speaker 1: to teach us about brain evolution. So just how impressive
Speaker 1: is the cephalopod brain? Um? Okay, so yeah, some some
Speaker 1: general modern cephalopod stats here. Um, they do have the
Speaker 1: most complex brains of any invertebrates. An octopus brain has
Speaker 1: fifty to seventy five lobes and at least as many
Speaker 1: neurons about one million as a mouse brain, and that
Speaker 1: is not taking into the account the smaller brains in
Speaker 1: each arm, the still smaller brains called ganglia technically associated
Speaker 1: with each sucker. Cephalopods like octopus um or octopi think
Speaker 1: we the the what do we decide on octopi as
Speaker 1: the plural? Sure, cephalopods like octopi, Uh, they're unique, and
Speaker 1: that all these ganglias have condensed, that they form a
Speaker 1: centralized brain. And the other thing that's unique is there
Speaker 1: are two areas of the brain that have developed that
Speaker 1: are specialized for memory storage. And we we see this
Speaker 1: even in nautilus. But that's jumping ahead a bit. Um.
Speaker 1: So their brains are larger and more condensed, and they
Speaker 1: also have an area dedicated to learning. Um. But here's
Speaker 1: the coolest thing. There are more neurons and the tentacles
Speaker 1: than in the central brains with the ability to make
Speaker 1: really lightning fast decisions, right they have to. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's really where you get get down to the some
Speaker 1: of the reasoning here um specifically with the octopus. Uh
Speaker 1: going on and moving into the octopus section of the
Speaker 1: podcast here, I guess um. The theory is that since
Speaker 1: the octopus has to live in oftentimes like a tropical
Speaker 1: coral leaf environment, they're in a very complex environment. These
Speaker 1: are this is the these are the streets of like
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies in New York. These are this is the jungle,
Speaker 1: this is the you know, this is the warriors. And
Speaker 1: they have to have a lot of street smarts to survive.
Speaker 1: So this is kind of like animal streets smarts. They
Speaker 1: have to they have to be dexterious, they have to
Speaker 1: be mass there's a disguise. They have to be stealthy,
Speaker 1: they have to be killers. They have to be seductive,
Speaker 1: well a little seductive. Well there's some seductive Um when
Speaker 1: you get into the various coloration and hunting schemes, I
Speaker 1: guess you can. You can make that argument. But but
Speaker 1: they have to they have to to really be on
Speaker 1: their game. And so the arms race is to be
Speaker 1: this is not to simply hide, not to simply hunt,
Speaker 1: but to to manage all of these skills. And to
Speaker 1: do that you need a pretty impressive brain. And UH
Speaker 1: and pretty impressive nervous tissue to boot. Yeah, let's talk
Speaker 1: about their tool use. We have mentioned this before, but
Speaker 1: they are master tool users. Yes, um there there, there's
Speaker 1: some fascinating footage you can find online up to of
Speaker 1: octopi using coconuts for shelter. Basically a coconut half turn
Speaker 1: it up. You got yourself a house, which is not
Speaker 1: that big of a level as that revelation for for us,
Speaker 1: but for a creature like this, it's pretty that's pretty
Speaker 1: phenomenal because tool use is uh is generally a mark
Speaker 1: of a pretty advanced organism. But here's just the essentially
Speaker 1: a sea slug that is uh, that is not really
Speaker 1: a sea slug, but just to the slander it a bit.
Speaker 1: This is a creature that that is is akin to
Speaker 1: a sea slug, and it is it is figured out
Speaker 1: how to use tools. Other examples, you have the blanket octopus,
Speaker 1: which is immune to the man of war jellyfish sting.
Speaker 1: So what he does he or she does is uh,
Speaker 1: the octopus will glide down to the jellyfish, to this
Speaker 1: man of war and a rip off a few tentacles,
Speaker 1: and then it has this poisonous whip that it can
Speaker 1: use to protect itself. In some of the tentacles too,
Speaker 1: they float away and there's some bioluminescence involved as well. Right,
Speaker 1: it's distract to make it say to the prey, well,
Speaker 1: you know, am I going this way? Where am I
Speaker 1: going that way? Yeah? I mean it's uh, I mean
Speaker 1: it's it's rather simple tool use. They are not uh
Speaker 1: and and we have a whole episode on tool use
Speaker 1: that if you really want to get into like the
Speaker 1: different levels of tool use and what they mean in
Speaker 1: terms of a creature's intellect. So they're not doing anything
Speaker 1: like like creating true our effects. They're not building bow
Speaker 1: and arrows yet, but they are. But they are saying, hey,
Speaker 1: that appendage on that creature there's is pretty uh, pretty hostile.
Speaker 1: Uh and uh and it makes some pretty colors. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna rip that off and I'm gonna use it for
Speaker 1: my own purposes. Or that shell of that coconut is
Speaker 1: actually pretty useful as a shelter for me. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: take it and use it for that. Here here's one
Speaker 1: thing that I think they completely lap us in in
Speaker 1: terms of our own pincer grasp. As I had mentioned before,
Speaker 1: they've got the ganglia on their tentacles and uh so
Speaker 1: gangling are controlling every sucker, right, and they have exquisite
Speaker 1: control over their body in that way, and they can
Speaker 1: fold the two sides of it suckered together to form
Speaker 1: a pincer grasp, and so it can do that with
Speaker 1: every single one. So it has like a hundred pincer
Speaker 1: grasp to our to our one little clumbing. It's pretty
Speaker 1: pretty impressive. And like I said earlier, occupy are capable
Speaker 1: of playing like their their minds are advanced enough that
Speaker 1: they're constantly learning. They're they're they're they're geared to again,
Speaker 1: live on this reach, live in the jungle nineteen seventies
Speaker 1: New York. So if you take them out of that
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies New York and you put them in suburbia,
Speaker 1: they're gonna go a little stair crazy and started just
Speaker 1: messing with stuff just to be messing with it. And
Speaker 1: that's exactly what happens in aquarium environment. The stories are
Speaker 1: just numerous. Anytime you if you talk to someone who's
Speaker 1: working in an aquarium, or you know, look up any
Speaker 1: accounts online and people say, oh, yeah, we found out
Speaker 1: that this this octopus was sneaking out of the the
Speaker 1: aquarium at night and eating sharks, or we we have
Speaker 1: to constantly keep the octopus from taking the entire aquarium apart,
Speaker 1: taking apart, uh you know, suction equipment, taking apart, cameras,
Speaker 1: taking apart, submarine taking apart a robot submarine in one
Speaker 1: of the tanks, part by part, which I thought was awesome.
Speaker 1: There was other another account, um that one of the
Speaker 1: keepers had given um some of the octopus, uh, some
Speaker 1: shrimp and there was a slightly spoiled one, and so
Speaker 1: the octopus actually stuffed it down the drain, whelming maintaining
Speaker 1: eye contact with her as if to say, really, you're
Speaker 1: gonna try to pass that by me. Yeah, And we've
Speaker 1: actually studied this too, it's not all just like uh
Speaker 1: sort of back room accounts. Uh. Read an interview with
Speaker 1: Jennifer math Or, who's a comparative psychologist University of Lethbridge
Speaker 1: in a bart of Canada, and um, she was part
Speaker 1: of an experiment where they gave a pair of octopy
Speaker 1: in an empty tank, a floating pill bottle. That's it,
Speaker 1: just a floating pill bottle and two board occupy and uh,
Speaker 1: they watched them in a seat like in twenty different
Speaker 1: times like in a sequence. Uh, they watched them do
Speaker 1: the She said, exactly the kind of thing that we
Speaker 1: would do if we were to, say, bounce a ball
Speaker 1: off a wall, like Steve McQueen in The Great Escape.
Speaker 1: Just out of boredom. They started just bouncing this stuff
Speaker 1: pill bottle around and flipping it around the tank, which
Speaker 1: you know, of course, when you're in captivity, that's that's
Speaker 1: going to happen. They're going to go a bit store crazy.
Speaker 1: So it's important to have things to enrich and and
Speaker 1: certainly they've shown themselves capable of solving mazes. Uh. They
Speaker 1: like puzzles that Generally, if you see an octopus on
Speaker 1: display and an aquarium, it will not be an empty container.
Speaker 1: They'll have various things to interact with. They will be
Speaker 1: given food inside of a toy of some kind where
Speaker 1: they have to actually work at it because they're active
Speaker 1: creatures and they need an active environment. Or sometimes they
Speaker 1: are asked to predict the World Cup winner, like our
Speaker 1: friend Paul the octopus who have born January eight died
Speaker 1: October two, ten um. Anyone who follows um soccer or
Speaker 1: cephalopod h news probably caught this one. But Paul lived
Speaker 1: at the Sea Life Center in Oberhausen, Germany, and they
Speaker 1: had this, uh, this gimmick set up where um he
Speaker 1: was he was able to correctly predict the winner of
Speaker 1: each of Germany's national football teams seven matches in the
Speaker 1: two thousand ten f i f A World Cup as
Speaker 1: well was the outcome of the final? Um didn't he
Speaker 1: have like the for the outcome of the final wasn't
Speaker 1: like accuracy? Yea and yeah. And then the other level
Speaker 1: that you just said before that was like a six
Speaker 1: or six yeah, And it was based on like where
Speaker 1: you would pick food from one or one of two places.
Speaker 1: It wasn't It's not like the octop I had a
Speaker 1: Twitter account or a blog he was he was just
Speaker 1: making basically a random choice. And then that's the big
Speaker 1: criticism here. He wasn't actually making predictions and and there
Speaker 1: was all there also been accusations that there was some
Speaker 1: bias involved on the part of the people caring for
Speaker 1: the octopus. But the food container had the team's logo
Speaker 1: on it, right, Yeah, but but it was still an
Speaker 1: exciting day in uh in cephalopod media, Hey, I mean
Speaker 1: I gave some attention to cephalopods. So there you go.
Speaker 1: That was a win. All right, Well, we mentioned the
Speaker 1: nautilus earlier. Yes, so let's let's discuss the nautils, and
Speaker 1: Nautilus is a much older organism and it's less advanced,
Speaker 1: it's less bright compared to other cephal pods. It's tiny. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're the soul surviving family of an not alloids in general,
Speaker 1: which includes like the nautilus and the paper nautilus, which
Speaker 1: we mentioned in the previous episode. Soul surviving members of
Speaker 1: the externally shelled cephalopod family that live that thrived in
Speaker 1: tropical oceans four dred and fifty fifty million years ago. Yeah.
Speaker 1: They diverge from the from their cousins squid, octopus and
Speaker 1: cutlefish four hundred million years ago, which makes them more
Speaker 1: i should say, on the tiny scale in comparison. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And they're fascinating organisms, just beautiful to to look at,
Speaker 1: and the shells are amazing. But they have tiny, tiny
Speaker 1: brains and they lack that dedicated learning region that we
Speaker 1: see in other cephalopods. Yet what's amazing is that we've
Speaker 1: in experiments, we've shown that they do have a form
Speaker 1: of short term memory that we're still trying to really
Speaker 1: understand how it works. Because they shouldn't really be capable
Speaker 1: of any kind of higher brain function. UM. There again,
Speaker 1: they're kind of the dull knife and the cephalopod drawer um.
Speaker 1: But in experiments they found that if they use flashes
Speaker 1: of light UM paired with with the food, they'll actually
Speaker 1: be able to train the cephalopod to extend its tentacles.
Speaker 1: Whenever there's that light, it begins to associate the light
Speaker 1: with food, and it will retain this memory for about
Speaker 1: twenty four hours and then it's gone. So these guys
Speaker 1: are kind of like a guy Pierce in Memento. They
Speaker 1: only have the short term memory and then it fades. Well,
Speaker 1: what I liked is that I get that right Memento. Ah,
Speaker 1: well Memento, everything is in sort of reverse right like yeah, um.
Speaker 1: But I really like the way new scientists described it.
Speaker 1: It's called simple minded natolyst reveals Flash of Memory. That's
Speaker 1: the article title. They say that first of all, the
Speaker 1: food that was offered with the flash of light was
Speaker 1: an irresistible mixture of pulverized telapia heads and water, So
Speaker 1: the first of all it was ei um. And then
Speaker 1: they said that that when um, when they were reacting
Speaker 1: to it, that their tentacles were crazy. Now keep in
Speaker 1: mind too that in comparison to the octopus is eight
Speaker 1: arms um that Annalist has for for the females fifty
Speaker 1: arms and males have nineties. So it is quite a
Speaker 1: display when they are waving them around. Um. And that
Speaker 1: they were panting too, which was interesting, the panting nautilus
Speaker 1: by Rabbit Lamb. All right, well, we're gonna take a
Speaker 1: quick break and when we come back, we're going to
Speaker 1: deal with some squid intelligence. Specifically, we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about the Humboldt squid also known as the blows rocks.
Speaker 1: All right, we're back. The Humboldt squid also known as
Speaker 1: a jumbo squid, also known again as say it for
Speaker 1: us there much better than me? Yes, uh. In fact,
Speaker 1: they were named that by Nexkin fisherman who who noted
Speaker 1: their very aggressive behavior. Yeah occasionally. I mean their tales
Speaker 1: of sailors dying at the hands of these guys, right,
Speaker 1: I mean though they slit their throats. I don't think
Speaker 1: they have shanks. They don't have shanks, but anyway they
Speaker 1: have there have been some definite violent encounters with with
Speaker 1: Humboldt squid, and they have this reputation as being a
Speaker 1: very aggressive creature. Now there's been some fascinating experiments where
Speaker 1: they like put they take decoy Humboldt squid down into
Speaker 1: the deep and they actually they're able to explore. Then
Speaker 1: they're not just mindlessly aggressive creatures and they're still very
Speaker 1: intelligent animals. But um, under the right circumstances, they can
Speaker 1: be extremely aggressive. But what's more interesting here for us
Speaker 1: as we're discussing cephalopod intelligence, is that the idea that
Speaker 1: they are able to coordinate with each other when yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: they hunt in schools containing as many as twelve hundred
Speaker 1: other squid. They swim at speeds from three to fifteen
Speaker 1: miles an hour, and they can eject themselves from the
Speaker 1: water and glide through the air to escape nitors. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: they have huge brains for their body size. And uh
Speaker 1: and it's been suggested that they might actually be as
Speaker 1: smart as dogs. Oh that's what William Gilly, who who
Speaker 1: is featured in the book Cracking by Wendy Williams, actually
Speaker 1: talks about that, and he studies them of course, um
Speaker 1: it has a research center. But uh, yeah, as smart
Speaker 1: as dogs, he claims. And uh he even says that
Speaker 1: or not. He doesn't, but Wendy Williams does says that
Speaker 1: divers Scott Castle once sall when fiddling with a latch
Speaker 1: of an underwater cage he had just closed. So so
Speaker 1: they have that same curious nature, that same problem solving ability. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is from the National Zoo form equals functioned. Uh.
Speaker 1: These squid actually have two large optic lobes and the
Speaker 1: squid brain, and that testifies the importance of vision for
Speaker 1: locating praise for the prey for these guys and gals
Speaker 1: and um, you know, they also rely on taste and
Speaker 1: texture to locate food, and they have highly developed lobes
Speaker 1: for storing chemical intact information. So that's interesting to hear
Speaker 1: about the diver who was witnessing the squid trying to
Speaker 1: open the lock, and the idea that you know it
Speaker 1: is it has this ability to plan, and it has
Speaker 1: this ability to store the tactile information and try to
Speaker 1: figure out this lock. There are accounts of them actually
Speaker 1: stealing car keys and driving as far as Mexico City. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I read that. Definitely. Supposedly there's a there's a whole
Speaker 1: pack of them that have like an apartment there. I
Speaker 1: don't know what they do for a living. But oh fish,
Speaker 1: of course, yeah, of course, um, and real quick, we
Speaker 1: we mentioned the colossal squid in our our other episode
Speaker 1: that we recorded this week on gigantism. But I found
Speaker 1: it really interesting that the the the brain of the
Speaker 1: colossal squid is actually donut shaped and the esophagus passes
Speaker 1: straight through the center of it. So it's just a
Speaker 1: different way of thinking about the brain of an organism
Speaker 1: and how it fits into the overall morphology. Well, and
Speaker 1: I think a lot of times too that we come
Speaker 1: at it from our human centric um fashion and we
Speaker 1: don't necessarily think about cephalopods um in this way. But um,
Speaker 1: it is interesting to see that their mouths are encircled
Speaker 1: with arms, whereas we sort of think about our own
Speaker 1: flailing tentacles on either side of us. And that does
Speaker 1: certainly um the color, the way or actually order the
Speaker 1: way that their brains are arranged. So there is this
Speaker 1: difference of arrangement in the in the brains of cephalopods
Speaker 1: obviously versus humans. And we already talked about ganglion on tentacles,
Speaker 1: but then you start to look at the eyes of cephalopods,
Speaker 1: and this is where there is a major difference. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of similarity, right. Cephalopods have camera eye camera
Speaker 1: like eyes like ours, with a lens that projects images
Speaker 1: onto the retina. The difference between humans and cephalopods, or
Speaker 1: vertebrates and cephalopods in this case is that our many
Speaker 1: armed friends don't have blind spots like we do, because
Speaker 1: when we look at an image, there's a blind spot
Speaker 1: in the middle, and that is owing to the fiber
Speaker 1: optic nerve which is going in front of the retina
Speaker 1: as opposed to behind the retina like a cephalopod. And
Speaker 1: this is actually an upgrade. This is you know, this
Speaker 1: is an advantage. This is something that we don't have
Speaker 1: um And I also wanted to mention that another difference
Speaker 1: is that cephalopods have horizontal pupils. So because the eyes
Speaker 1: can rotate thanks to a balancing organ that they have
Speaker 1: called a statusist, they can always keep their pupils horizontal
Speaker 1: and it doesn't matter what position their body is, it's
Speaker 1: always horizontal. So they just have fantastic visual coverage of
Speaker 1: the world around it. Yeah, their brain can interpret visual
Speaker 1: information no matter what their position is. They don't have
Speaker 1: to account for the position of the eye like we do.
Speaker 1: If you think about it. If we turn around quickly, uh,
Speaker 1: you know we have we are very disoriented and we
Speaker 1: have to sit there and figure out our location in
Speaker 1: space before we can begin to take in data in
Speaker 1: a way that's meaningful to us. But not these guys.
Speaker 1: They can, I mean, this is an amazing piece of
Speaker 1: machinery for them. They can also see polarized light and
Speaker 1: this allows them to communicate by creating changing patterns on
Speaker 1: their skin and uh, and this I thought was fascinating. Um.
Speaker 1: The reason for this that they can see the polarized
Speaker 1: light is because the sephalo cephalopod eyes started out as
Speaker 1: light sensitive skin cells that folded in words, to form
Speaker 1: the structure that they have now, rather than as an
Speaker 1: extension of the brain as as we have. So that's
Speaker 1: again another difference between the way ways that their brains
Speaker 1: and eyes work. So while we've both species, or not
Speaker 1: just species, but both vertebrates and squid, they have reached
Speaker 1: sort of similar conclusions with with their eyes, but from
Speaker 1: different starting points. Yeah. Just to know that the eyes
Speaker 1: that the root material there came from from skin, from
Speaker 1: skin cells is very interesting, fascinating. So let's move on
Speaker 1: to the last real cephalopod. We're gonna discuss here um
Speaker 1: and we're really talking about the faberge egg of the
Speaker 1: cephalopod world, the cuttlefish. Now, back in the stuff in
Speaker 1: the Science Flave days right at the end, we did
Speaker 1: in an episode on cuttlefish, and there's a lot of
Speaker 1: great information that's cuttlefish specific in there. But we're gonna
Speaker 1: talk about it a little bit here, especially as it
Speaker 1: as it deals with intelligence, because the cuttlefish has one
Speaker 1: of the largest brain to body size ratios of all
Speaker 1: invertebrates and UH, and you see a lot of the
Speaker 1: the the the really impressive attributes UH involving intelligence and
Speaker 1: nervous systems in cephalopods are really highlighted in the cuttle
Speaker 1: fish is design because you have uh rapid shifts in color. Uh.
Speaker 1: They they're fairly social creatures. I mean, they're not social
Speaker 1: and in the in a way that's really comparable to say,
Speaker 1: you know, dogs or or primates, but there are there
Speaker 1: are some very interesting social interactions here. There's a certain
Speaker 1: amount of communication that takes place through the use of
Speaker 1: their colorful skin, which contains these chromatophors that can lighten
Speaker 1: and darken, and they can shift just really rapidly from
Speaker 1: different colors and intensities, so it red, black, and yellow
Speaker 1: are some of the chromatophores that emerge. But in addition
Speaker 1: to that, there's this luminosity, so it gives a greater range.
Speaker 1: And in fact with with other sea creatures like fish,
Speaker 1: they have four rods in their eyes and they're able
Speaker 1: to perceive more color than say our three rodded eyes.
Speaker 1: So when when we see these incredible displays of color
Speaker 1: from cephalopods, keep in mind that we're not even really
Speaker 1: seeing the full spectrum, right, And these creatures that cuttle
Speaker 1: fish are just remarkable to to see at an aquarium. Now,
Speaker 1: generally you have to wait for a large pack of
Speaker 1: people with cell phone cameras to get out of the
Speaker 1: way because you go to an aquarium you want to
Speaker 1: take a really bad, direct flash cellphone photo of everything there.
Speaker 1: Apparently that's the apparently the big thing these days. But
Speaker 1: if you can actually get the tank to yourself for
Speaker 1: a little bit, they're just really fascinating to watch the
Speaker 1: color shifts that they kind of hover. For starters, they're not,
Speaker 1: they're a lot they're a lot more interesting to look
Speaker 1: at an aquarium because octopi uh you know, you may
Speaker 1: catch them when they're active, but they're they're gonna be
Speaker 1: sticking to the corners and and and all that. Where
Speaker 1: the cuttlefish is going to hover out there in in
Speaker 1: in the middle, and he's gonna kind of here, she's
Speaker 1: gonna kind of hover around, has this little hover skirt
Speaker 1: that goes around the edges. Um. And then they're gonna
Speaker 1: slowly change colors, and then there may be a drastic
Speaker 1: change in color. Yeah, and all of that is predicated
Speaker 1: on the fact that they are controlled by nerves, so
Speaker 1: it gives them that instantaneous color change. And when we
Speaker 1: talk about those chromatoporce we are talking about tens of
Speaker 1: thousands of organs here that are controlling that. And so
Speaker 1: think of it similar to the way that pixels form
Speaker 1: on images of a computer screen. That's what you're seeing
Speaker 1: on their skin basically. Um, you talked about their communication
Speaker 1: and their their level of social ness, and I wanted
Speaker 1: to bring up Gene Bowl of Penn miller's Ville University.
Speaker 1: She's a scientist and she says that they the males
Speaker 1: have all kinds of really impressive displays and that in fact,
Speaker 1: the cuttlefish can signultaneously just one side of his butdet
Speaker 1: body to show a dominant display towards other males, while
Speaker 1: um the other side of his body shows a calm
Speaker 1: display towards a potential mate. So really aggressive pattern on
Speaker 1: the left where where a foe is. And on the right,
Speaker 1: I don't know exactly what it would be. Let's say
Speaker 1: a little heart design. It's not really hard, but it's
Speaker 1: kind of like he's flexing the muscle and looking all
Speaker 1: bad on one side, but then he's he's kind of
Speaker 1: smiling and winking out of the other eye. And this
Speaker 1: is interesting. During mating, they display a zebra pattern, which
Speaker 1: I just automatically always associate with wrestlers bodybuilders because always
Speaker 1: wearing the pants with the zebra patterns are popular with
Speaker 1: some of the boys. But but this is intricate, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, this is ah, this is a whole language
Speaker 1: that we don't necessarily have access to, that we can
Speaker 1: witness and it can tell us something about ourselves to
Speaker 1: some degree, but we can't even fully imagine we don't
Speaker 1: have the language ourselves to it. There's another interesting thing
Speaker 1: that goes on with cephalopod I mean not sephal pod,
Speaker 1: cuttlefish mating that's really fascinating. And that's where you'll have
Speaker 1: these dominant cuttlefish, like these big, brutish looking cuttlefish that
Speaker 1: are that are not the cute little guys that you
Speaker 1: didn't see the aquarium, the big, rugged, old man catulu
Speaker 1: looking cuttlefish, and they're they're really bossy and they're getting
Speaker 1: the fights over the females because you know, they're like
Speaker 1: they really want to mate with the with the females.
Speaker 1: But then you'll have the smaller males that will that
Speaker 1: will disguise themselves as females, like they'll like a lot
Speaker 1: of cephalopods. The cuttle fish has a has a lot
Speaker 1: of control over just how drug queens I'm thinking boosom bodies. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's that kind of thing. Like they know that they
Speaker 1: don't stand a chance walking in there as a small
Speaker 1: male because they're just gonna get beat up and tore up,
Speaker 1: and then the big male is gonna mate. So they
Speaker 1: disguised themselves as a female and then they move in close.
Speaker 1: And then the big beefy cuttlefish he looks at this
Speaker 1: and it's like, oh, yeah, it looks like I got
Speaker 1: two days for the night. Uh. You know, that's a
Speaker 1: total win. For me. Meanwhile, the disguised smaller male actually
Speaker 1: gets in there in mates with the female. Okay, so
Speaker 1: you really just did um talk about the premise for
Speaker 1: the sitcom Boom Bodies was Queen. Well, actually, the premise
Speaker 1: was really that the rent was much more or a
Speaker 1: favorite at this all women's boarding. But they use that
Speaker 1: to their advantage to to advance their agendas with the
Speaker 1: ladies there. The other really awesome thing about cuttlefish, um
Speaker 1: that that that I may have mentioned on here before
Speaker 1: is their use of ptomorphs, which means false form. And
Speaker 1: what they'll do is a pseudomorph is a bubble of
Speaker 1: ink surrounded by mucus, and it occupies the same amount
Speaker 1: of space as the cuttle fish. It's a decoy. So
Speaker 1: what will happen If they're in a situation where they're
Speaker 1: they're threatened, they will shift their color suddenly to where
Speaker 1: they're really dark like the surrounding. Then they'll shoot out
Speaker 1: the pseudomorph and then they'll they'll turbo out of there
Speaker 1: with their jets. Yeah. Their jet propulsion, by the way,
Speaker 1: is amazing. So they create a copy of themselves more
Speaker 1: or less. I mean, it's not it's not like an
Speaker 1: artistic expression. But they'll they'll create, you know, appropriate mass
Speaker 1: replica of themselves that is just ain't conside of mucus,
Speaker 1: and then they'll jet away really fast at the same time,
Speaker 1: so it's like slide of hand where they leave the
Speaker 1: decoy where they just were and they're already jetting away.
Speaker 1: And then when something tries to eat these pseudomorph of course,
Speaker 1: then they just get a whole bunch of ink, which
Speaker 1: also contains dopamine and el dopa, a precursor to the dopamine,
Speaker 1: which may temporarily paralyze the sense of smell uh the
Speaker 1: creature that so it's just a fantastic uh and deceptive
Speaker 1: means of self defense in terms of their intelligence again
Speaker 1: gene bowl Uh. The scientists devised a couple of experiments
Speaker 1: to study this, rather than just sort of the stimulus
Speaker 1: response experiments that you see sometimes um again. In the
Speaker 1: book Crack and Winny, Williams describes this experiment as a
Speaker 1: tank in the shape of a clock with escape routes
Speaker 1: two of them, only one open at a time, and
Speaker 1: that's at the three o'clock position, and the six o'clock
Speaker 1: excuse me, the nine o'clock, three and nine three and nine.
Speaker 1: And so the cuttlefish enter through the six o'clock position
Speaker 1: and then immediately they see a queue at the twelve
Speaker 1: o'clock position. So the que is either algae or brick.
Speaker 1: Algae would indicate like, hey, on the right, that's your
Speaker 1: escape hatch. Um the brick would indicate on the left,
Speaker 1: that's your that's going to be your escape hatch. So
Speaker 1: they actually get to learn these cues that hey, okay,
Speaker 1: when I see the algae, I know to take a
Speaker 1: ninety degree turn to the right. And it's fascinating. She said,
Speaker 1: this was um, this process of if then propositions that
Speaker 1: we learned, and that in humans that's represented as the
Speaker 1: first steps in development of logic and our ability to
Speaker 1: use reason and decision making. It's fascinating, alright. So one
Speaker 1: final squid to mention, and this one is is even
Speaker 1: even more dubious than the idea of of ancient krakens
Speaker 1: creating art out of dead right dolphins, and that is
Speaker 1: the idea of the mega squid, which was featured on
Speaker 1: the TV show Future Future is Wild uh and which
Speaker 1: you can believe occasionally catch on various Discovery Channel, UM
Speaker 1: Discovery Channel or Animal Planet just check local listings that
Speaker 1: pops up from time to time. But it was this
Speaker 1: you know, sspeculative episode where they're talking about the future.
Speaker 1: What if humans weren't around, what might evolve and fill
Speaker 1: that void? What would become the dominant species? And so
Speaker 1: they had some some c g I stuff going on
Speaker 1: and some some fabulous ideas of what might happen. And
Speaker 1: one of the cooler things that they introduced was a
Speaker 1: mega squid, which was a twelve foot tall, eight ton
Speaker 1: terrestrial air breathing squid that roams the northern forests of
Speaker 1: a humanless Earth. And it's a pretty cool design. Mean,
Speaker 1: it's on one level's kind of ridiculous because with the
Speaker 1: whole air pressure issue first of all, right, going from
Speaker 1: from from the the the pressure in the ocean to land. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's crazy to think. But that their their argument
Speaker 1: was that it's not just a situation of a giant
Speaker 1: squid crawling out or a giant octopus crawling out of
Speaker 1: the water. It would have been like a slow evolutionary
Speaker 1: procession years later. Yeah, And they and it had legs,
Speaker 1: which they they made the case that each of these legs,
Speaker 1: which looked kind of like an elephant leg Uh contain
Speaker 1: a network of circular and vertical muscles that form these
Speaker 1: limbs and make them strong enough to carry this eight
Speaker 1: ton weight. Uh. They have vocal sac that vibrates to
Speaker 1: produce sound. That was the other thing that they came
Speaker 1: up with for the mega squid. And uh they also
Speaker 1: have two large tentacles that they grab things out of
Speaker 1: the woods to eat. So it's kind of neat. It's
Speaker 1: it's like I said, don't don't make any any hard
Speaker 1: vegas bets on on mega squids taking over the planet
Speaker 1: any time in the distant future even, But but it's
Speaker 1: a cool idea, and it's it's interesting to think of
Speaker 1: cephalopods not merely as this interesting creature confined to the ocean,
Speaker 1: but one of ours more remarkable creatures that maybe could
Speaker 1: become the primary player in a future Well in that context,
Speaker 1: it is really interesting to to imagine what the brain
Speaker 1: would look like once it became terrestrial, because as Bull
Speaker 1: had said before, is that one of the things that's
Speaker 1: really exciting to her about sufflage seplode intelligence is that
Speaker 1: we know that their relatives are arms and snails. Yeah,
Speaker 1: not not so smart. They're um so whatever happened to
Speaker 1: the cephalo cephalopods was different, and she wants to get
Speaker 1: to the bottom of why they're using their intelligence, Why
Speaker 1: why their brains developed in the way they that they did,
Speaker 1: and um, what does that tell us about ourselves? As
Speaker 1: we discussed in the Gigantism episode, as animals get bigger,
Speaker 1: they have fewer predators and and certainly the mega squid
Speaker 1: is not going to have the survival challenge that the
Speaker 1: smaller cephalopods have evolved to deal with. So you can
Speaker 1: imagine this thing might be pretty stupid. Yeah, I mean intellectually,
Speaker 1: it just might. And there might not be a lot
Speaker 1: going on because I don't have to do is wander
Speaker 1: around the forest and eat other c g I creatures.
Speaker 1: So little Jar Jar here, you know, all right? As
Speaker 1: we close out here our episode on the Mind of
Speaker 1: the Crack, and I thought it would be fun to
Speaker 1: bring in Jonathan Strickling, co host of the Tech Stuff podcast,
Speaker 1: to read The Cracking by Alfred Lloyd. Yes and his
Speaker 1: poem is based on an old Norse legend of gigantic
Speaker 1: sea monsters who prey on ships and drag them underneath
Speaker 1: the ocean, below the thunders of the other deep, far
Speaker 1: far beneath in the abysmal sea, his ancient, dreamless, uninvaded
Speaker 1: sleep the krack and sleepeth. Faintest sunlights flee about his
Speaker 1: shadowy sides above, and swell huge sponges of millennial growth
Speaker 1: in height and far away into the sickly light from
Speaker 1: many a wondrous, grotten, secret cell, unnumbered and enormous polypi
Speaker 1: winnow with giant arms the slumbering green. They're happy lane
Speaker 1: for ages and will lie battening upon huge seaworms in
Speaker 1: his sleep until the latter fire shall heat the deep. Then,
Speaker 1: once by man and angels to be seen in roaring,
Speaker 1: he shall rise and on the surface die. So there
Speaker 1: you go. Fantastic reading from Jonathan Strickland if you if
Speaker 1: you haven't checked out tech Stuff, be sure to check
Speaker 1: that out. It's a great podcast. UH. Chris and Jonathan
Speaker 1: tackle all sorts of gadgety, techy nerdy topics in UH
Speaker 1: in awesome form, and they are wonderful punsters. So if
Speaker 1: you have something you would like to share with us
Speaker 1: about the mind of the kracking, about the possibility that
Speaker 1: this cracking theory is is true, or maybe you have
Speaker 1: thoughts about the mega squid. Maybe you have worked with
Speaker 1: the cephalopods at one point or another and have some
Speaker 1: some yeah, or you know, if you have some occupied
Speaker 1: escate stories, let us know about those. If you have
Speaker 1: ever um snuck away from work and left a bunch
Speaker 1: of squid ink inside of a thin layer of mucus
Speaker 1: in your place as a decoy, we would love to
Speaker 1: hear about that as well. You can find us on
Speaker 1: Facebook where we are stuff to blow your mind, and
Speaker 1: you can find on Twitter where our handles blow the mind,
Speaker 1: and you can drop us a line at blow the
Speaker 1: Mind at discovery dot com. For more on this and
Speaker 1: thousands of other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com.