While there is no IQ test for an octopus, divers and biologists have come to appreciate the intelligence of the three-heart, eight-arm cephalopod.
“It’s the most intelligent invertebrate, the most intelligent animal without a backbone and certainly the most intelligent mollusk,” said Roland Anderson, a Seattle Aquarium biologist who will celebrate Octopus Week Saturday through Feb. 27 with visitors.
The focus will be on the giant Pacific octopus. It and the red octopus are the only octopus species found in Puget Sound.
Octopuses have personalities, so the aquarium names them: Emily Dickinson, who hides behind her group; Leisure Suit Larry, named after a video game character and candidate for arrest for sexual harassment; Lucretia McEvil, who pulled out her undergravel filter and chewed it up, Anderson said.
Two octopuses will be released (at noon Saturday and Feb. 26): Socratette, a thinker who turned out to be a female; and the male Titan, named after a Roman sea god. Divers will follow them with cameras for 45 minutes and broadcast it on a big screen TV in the aquarium.
Other activities include octopus feedings and talks on the cephlapods, divers swimming with octopuses, ask-the-expert sessions, dissections and Octopus Play Day.
Recently Anderson and a colleague published a paper on octopus play behavior. “Play behavior is the domain of higher animals, vertebrates (with backbones). We were looking at how octopuses habituated to new and novel objects.
“A couple of our octopuses blew a pill bottle back and forth across the tank like a ball, blowing it with their water funnel across the top of the tank, and it was carried back in the inlet and they’d blow it across again, for up to an hour,” Anderson said.
This weekend, volunteer divers will count octopus in Puget Sound and report their findings in the sixth annual count to the aquarium staff.
“Last year we had 198 divers and 72 giant Pacific octopuses in four major locations, the Tacoma Narrows, Elliott Bay, Hood Canal and Admiralty Inlet.”
Dissections will be held at 2 p.m. Monday and Wednesday.
“We do it to show what the internal organs look like. It’s extremely popular and not with just the kids,” Anderson said.
Seattle Aquarium photo
Seattle Aquarium celebrates Octopus Week beginning Saturday.
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