Why Octopuses are badasses

There's a lot of shit about octopuses that most people don't know and *should* know. After all, they might be the smartest animal on the planet, humans included. This is a long-ass post, so buckle up.

First of all, these fuckers are goddamn invincible. Sure, you can kill one, but nothing can kill all of them. They're fuckin old as shit in a world full of noobs. If the world was an MMO, they'd have finished all the end game content before we invented computers. Heard of Jurassic Park? That's got some dinosaurs shit in it. What you didn't know is that the latest dinosaurs were way further from the first dinosaurs then they were from today. Dinosaurs were around for the Mesozoic, until they got their shit wrecked by mass extinction. Octopuses come from the Carboniferous; they were as long before the first dinosaurs as we are long after the last ones. Except they're still here being badasses when all those flightless big birds couldn't keep their shit together.

Part of why octopuses stuck around while most everyone else couldn't handle it is that they have all the fucking superpowers. You might know that octopuses are smart (you almost certainly have no goddamn idea how smart they really are, but we'll get to that later), but did you know they have basically every other advantage too?
They have hard beaks for biting shit, but they rarely bother. This is why.
Fucking shapeshifting. Not just color, but texture, size, movement, pattern. It doesn't stop there. They can memorize the shapes/patterns/colors/textures/movements of creatures nowhere around them and imitate them well enough to fool members of the same species.

Shrinking/growing. Octopuses can fit through any hole they can get their beak through, which means even the really huge ones can get out of their cells. Or aquaria, if you want to use non-person terms.

Grappling. Octopuses can kill Great Whites or basically anything else without any risk of attack back. It's no wonder they have no natural predators (anymore).

Jets. These things can go from practically still to their top speed in a couple seconds, including changing directions faster than most sea life can keep up with. And that top speed? Up to 25 fucking miles per hour (40 kmh for the rest of the world, 11 m/s for my fellow scientists, 22 knots for whoever the fuck uses knots).

Cold resistance. They've got adaptive neurochemistry that keeps them conscious and active in water that's near or just below it's normal freezing temperature.

Regeneration. Like some sort of mythical creature, they can regrow entire limbs, and unlike every other creature that can regrow parts, theirs are identical in structure to the originals, with no loss of effectiveness. More than that, they have incredible pain tolerance, generally showing no sign of inconvenience mere hours after losing a fucking limb.

Now let's get to intelligence. This is a really hard topic to quantify and explain, but holy shit is it exciting. Octopuses have powerful brains like humans, and that's very important to note. They escape human confinement frequently, have their own personalities, can memorize routine schedules, and can solve complex spatial reasoning problems with a moment's thought. However, they also seem sometimes aware that they are being studied and refuse to participate in challenges that they can ignore. In the above example, the octopus is being threatened with suffocation (the water in the jar would run out of loose oxygen) and responds by immediately solving the problem. Octopuses also seem aware of biological weaknesses of other creatures after very little exposure time. Within hours of first encountering a great white, an aquarium octopus was recorded grappling it and holding it still. Since sharks, unlike most creatures, need to keep moving forward to breathe, that's all it took. Notably, the octopus didn't do this for food or because it was directly threatened. In fact, the shark was likely completely unaware it existed until it struck. However, it perceived a potential future threat and enacted a calculated preemptive strike. It did not know whether the shark meat would be edible so it left the corpse to float slowly up as it went back home.

But brains are not the only way that octopuses are smart. You may be asking what the hell I mean by that, and you have good reason to. Let's start by explaining what a somatic nervous system (SNS) is. When you're at a scary movie and something pops out and you jump and tense up, that's your SNS. When you put your hand over something hot and recoil back from it, that's your SNS. When the doctor his your knee with a reflex hammer and your leg jerks forward, that's your SNS. The SNS is the system of nerves spread throughout your body that take control when urgent shit happens. They do this because it takes a fraction of a second to send a signal to your brain, then wait for your brain to decide what to do, then send that signal back. The SNS cuts out the middle man and controls the body during what most people call reflexes. Well that's not just a human thing, but humans are exceptional at it. Almost all animals on earth do something like that, but humans are the cream of the crop. Our phenomenal SNS was developed so we can throw things, and it's the reason we're the best throwers on the planet.

Well human SNSs are incredibly powerful for animals, but they're shit tier free-to-play bullshit compared to octopus SNSs. Octopuses have by far the best SNSs in the world, to the point where a single tentacle detatched from their brain is potentially more intelligent than some mammals. This allows them to process far more information at the same time and coordinate methods such as changing color patterns with minimal effort. Additionally, it makes multitasking inconsequential. Locating, testing, picking up, and carrying half a dozen different supplies or foods takes as little thought to an octopus as jumping at a scary movie.

Octopuses also build houses, showing advanced planning and several mental capabilities that are unique to them and humans, but I'm not going to get into all that individually. They construct, modify, and use tools for more abstract purposes than early hominids, certainly beyond any other animal living today (except maaayyybe humans).

Octopuses also go so far as to build cities. Now these aren't cities in quite the same sense as you're used to above water, because the domiciles extend down into the ground with a layer of shells above them for concealment, privacy, and mostly protection. This image is from Octlantis, one of the two (the other being Octopia) such cities discovered. Neither appear to have any man-made components inside of them, and appear to have originated from the octopuses themselves. There's also a lot of shit to do with coconuts for constructing personal homes, as well as armor (see the first gif). I'm losing people's focus here and there's a bit more cool shit to explain so I'm moving on. Google it or whatever.

You're probably thinking, 'RedClaws, how can you say octopuses might be smarter than humans when their cities are so shitty and we've got wifi and air conditioning?' Good question. You see, cities don't come from being smart. That's not how that happens. Humans have been just as smart as today for about a million years, and we only started living in long-term buildings in the last 1-2% of that time. For all we know, octopuses might've been living in cities before humans existed (or before dinosaurs existed) but that's not the point.

The point is that cities or any urban centers exist because of cooperation. Humans, more so than almost any other species on Earth (exceptions include bees and ants), can cooperate in massive numbers for a greater cause. This leads to division of labor, which leads to agriculture, which leads to cities, and inevitably leads to wifi and air conditioning. We developed from great apes that have complex social structures and yada yada.

Octopuses on the other hand, don't cooperate. At all. Ever. As a human, you cannot possibly comprehend how much octopuses viscerally hate each other. Humans are so social, they befriend their own goddamn natural predators like wolves and that one post about adopting a bear. Octopuses don't raise their children, they don't live near their children, they never want to see their children. When they're horny and see a hot girl, sometimes they opt to fill their dick (which is also one of their arms) with cum, tear off the entire fucking arm, and throw it at the hot chick because they'd rather tear off their own fucking arm than fuck a hot girl.

It should be noted that this is only sometimes. Other times, male octopuses inseminate the girl at arms' length (fully outstretched), and occasionally they get close and personal. However, the guys aren't the only ones who hate all other octopuses. The girls will often suffocate a guy who gets too close during sex, drag his corpse off to their house, and eat him for the next few days. Octopuses also generally kill and eat each other for the deadly sins of 'getting in their territory' or 'being within sight range'. This is part of why octopus cities are such an oddity.

TL;DR: Octopuses are the ultimate badasses and the only reason they didn't take over the world before dinosaurs existed is because they all hate each other so goddamn much.

This is my dilute torty named Thesis.

Cat Tax - This is my dilute torty named Thesis.

#the_more_you_know #science_and tech #octopus

FP Edit: It has been pointed out that a few of the statements above are not entirely correct. The great white bit I cannot supply a solid source for and at least some species do have natural predators. Also, octopuses is one of the correct plurals for octopus. I also forgot to mention their ink defense. I have left the post above in its original form to preserve the validity in a scientific way while still acknowledging inaccuracies.