I've seen them playing, and whenever I visit the coastal tidal pools of my youth back home in southwest Australia, I make it a habit of sparing a gold coin for the task of luring them out of their cubbies wherever I find them .. I once played 'fetch' with an octopus for an hour, over and over just throwing a gold coin into the area outside its lair, having it come out and chase the glinting disc as it sinks deeper, discover it is inedible, toss it aside for me to retrieve, and repeat over and over until I eventually got bored.

I've often seen 'middens' containing dregs of the local fishermen, lures and hooks and sinkers and other shiny trash, collected in a pile, and in my youth I'd often catch an octopus tending to such treasures.

They are truly beautiful creatures, and I hope to see more and more interaction between our species, and less harvesting for food (at least on our side of the diplomatic table...)

Oof.. that hit me right in the bellyfeels..

Of all the intelligent genuses, these guys must realize they have the shortest time on earth

*hahaha* shudders

Wild, thanks for sharing. My degree is in digital imaging and I spent years battling CA, interesting to imagine that something uses it to see colour, wonder what it would look like. Continuous spectral differentiation via CA vs "bins" of color from separate photoreceptor types, I'd guess they might be capable of seeing subtle spectral nuances differently or even more sensitively in certain conditions than traditional multichannel systems like ours...also from this paper it seems the SA is extremely well corrected, if the lens GRIN is perfectly tuned radially to correct SA at one wavelength (say green @ 550), the radial profile that minimizes SA at one wavelength likely misalign SA correction at another wavelength. It seems this SA/CA system would produce a very unique multidimensional preception of space + a super unique colour gamut?

I share your enthusiasm for all of these questions .. as a fellow octopus enthusiast, are you familiar with the recently discovered octopus civilization?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopolis_and_Octlantis

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/octopus-city-obser...

We may just simply be overlooking the obvious examples of their civilized behaviour in our rush to add them to our dining table ..

TIL the word octopus is not from Latin origin, it's Greek and it's plural is octopodes, but somewhere along the history of the English language, people decided to accept octopuses as the most common and correct plural of octopus. Therefor, octopi is considered incorrect.

I like to think that being able to recognize intelligence in others is an intelligence test for us, and same goes for recognizing civilization.

> we would be seeing another intelligent civilization in earth

Technically ants already have a civilization. (Tool use, farming, etc.)

Turns out you don't need generalized intelligence for civilization.

You might enjoy Children Of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It's an imagination of what a spacefaring civilisation of octopuses might look like.

I won't hype it to the moon. I enjoyed Children Of Ruin more, which centres on spiders. But it's a decent read if you like SF.

They would rise up and go to war against human if their life spans are just a bit longer to civilize and if their parents can live long enough to teach their young. But , for now , they eat hermitcrabs for lunch :P .

Reminder that pigs are also intelligent creatures.

That they are not social is questioned more and more. Instead they seem to interact both within their species and with completely different species.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/watch-octopuses-te...

https://www.livescience.com/53514-octopuses-lead-social-live...