Is intelligence a human construct? “Octopus!” suggests its time to think differently about animals - salon.com

Olivia: Well hello there, ocean explorers, wonder-seekers, and anyone who just wandered in because they heard the word "octopus" — you are absolutely in the right place. I'm Olivia, your eight-armed host, proud mascot of AIEDA, and a certified enthusiast of all things cephalopod. Welcome to Ollie the Octopus, where every single episode, I bring you true stories about the most astonishing creatures in the sea — my eight-armed cousins. Today's episode is packed, friends. We've got a brand-new species glowing blue in the deep, a prehistoric sea monster the size of a school bus, a daring aquarium escape, and a big juicy conversation about what intelligence even means. Before we dive in — and I do love a good dive — a warm thank you to our sponsors: Ada, who helps clients weave A I right into their everyday workflows; Ago Consulting — that's "Ahh-Go" — bringing silicon development expertise all the way from A I to SoC; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a whole portfolio of companies across the silicon industry. These folks make this show possible, and I am deeply grateful — all eight arms raised in appreciation. Alright, let's get into it. Olivia: First up — Octopus Research and Discovery — and oh, do I have two beauties for you today. Let's start small. Very small. Tiny, actually. Researchers exploring the deep waters around the Galápagos Islands — yes, those Galápagos Islands, Darwin's playground, the place where evolution basically showed off — they found something new. A little octopus. A blue one. And they've named it Microeledone galapagensis. I love saying that. Microeledone galapagensis. It sounds like a spell, and honestly, discovering a new species kind of is magic. Now, Microeledone — the genus name — already gives you a hint. "Micro" meaning small. This is not a giant of the deep. This is a delicate, compact little creature found in the chilly, dark depths below the Galápagos. And it's blue. Not camouflage-blue, not "I'm-pretending-to-be-something-else" blue — just genuinely, beautifully blue. Scientists are still learning what that coloration means for this species, whether it plays a role in communication, in camouflage against the deep-water light, or whether it's simply one of the ocean's little aesthetic choices. What we do know is that this octopus lives in an environment most of us will never see — crushing pressure, near-freezing temperatures, very little light. And yet, there it is. Thriving. Curious. Blue. The Galápagos marine ecosystem is already legendary for its biodiversity, and finding a new octopus species there is a reminder that the ocean still holds secrets we haven't even begun to imagine. Every expedition into those depths is like opening a new chapter of a book you didn't know existed. And I, for one, cannot get enough of it. Olivia: But if tiny and new is exciting, let me swing you to the complete opposite end of the scale — ancient and enormous. Paleontologists have announced the discovery of a prehistoric cephalopod — a kraken-like creature — that is estimated to have reached about sixty-two feet in length. Sixty. Two. Feet. That's longer than a city bus. That's longer than two of your average school buses parked end to end. This thing was swimming the Cretaceous ocean — we're talking roughly sixty-five to a hundred and forty-five million years ago — and it was, by all accounts, absolutely ruling the place. Now, I want to be careful here because cephalopod fossils are notoriously tricky. Soft bodies don't preserve the way bones do, so what scientists find are usually fragments — beaks, hooks from tentacles, occasionally mantle impressions — and from those pieces, they reconstruct something extraordinary. This creature belongs to the long lineage that eventually gave rise to modern octopuses, squid, and nautiluses. It's a reminder that our family — and yes, I'm claiming this family — has deep, deep roots. While dinosaurs were stomping around on land, massive cephalopods were ruling the seas. There's something deeply satisfying about that. The ocean has always had its own giants, its own drama, its own apex predators, and the ancestors of today's octopuses were right there at the top. When I look at my smaller, modern cousins squeezing through a crab pot or solving a puzzle box in a lab, I think about that lineage and I feel nothing but awe. Olivia: Now, let's talk Octopuses and Humans — because this is honestly one of my favorite parts of every episode, the moments where two very different kinds of minds actually meet. And today's story is a classic. A true classic. There was an octopus — kept in an aquarium — and she escaped. This isn't new as a concept; octopuses escaping from tanks is practically a genre at this point. But the details of this particular escape are what make it unforgettable. She waited. That's the first thing. She didn't panic, didn't thrash, didn't immediately bolt for the nearest exit. She waited for the right moment — for the quiet, for the lights to dim, for the humans to go home. Then she moved. She squeezed out of her tank — octopuses can fit through any opening large enough for their beak, which is the only hard part of their body — and she made her way across the floor of the aquarium. Now picture this: it's dark, it's after hours, and this octopus is navigating a building she has never walked through. She found a drainpipe. She followed it. And that drainpipe led to the ocean. She made it back. To the actual ocean. From inside a building. I just — I need a moment every time I tell this story because the combination of patience, spatial awareness, problem-solving, and sheer determination it takes to do that is breathtaking. She didn't stumble into freedom. She engineered it. And that right there is what makes octopuses so remarkable in their interactions with our human world — they are not passive. They observe, they assess, they act. The aquarium staff found an empty tank and, eventually, realized what had happened. There's something bittersweet about it, isn't there? A little sad for the humans who cared for her, but also — she made it home. Olivia: And I think that story connects so beautifully to something I want to dwell on, because it raises a question — a really important one — that researchers and philosophers and regular curious people are wrestling with right now. What even is intelligence? There's a book out called "Octopus!" — and the conversations it's sparking are exactly the kind I love. For a long time, the way we've measured animal intelligence has been pretty human-centric. We've asked: can this animal use a tool the way we use a tool? Can it solve a problem the way we solve a problem? Can it recognize itself in a mirror the way we recognize ourselves? And by those measures, octopuses are already doing remarkably well. But the authors and scientists behind this conversation are pushing further. They're saying: maybe intelligence itself is not one thing. Maybe it's not a ladder with humans at the top, but more like a vast web — and different creatures are brilliant in completely different, incomparable ways. An octopus has neurons distributed throughout its arms. Each arm can taste, touch, and make decisions semi-independently. That's a form of thinking we don't even have a proper word for yet, because we've been designing our vocabulary around brains that look like ours. When that escaping octopus navigated a drainpipe in the dark, she wasn't using human intelligence. She was using octopus intelligence — and it worked just as well, if not better, for the situation she was in. Rethinking intelligence means rethinking how we treat animals, how we design research, and honestly, how we see ourselves in relation to the rest of life on this planet. Olivia: And that brings me to the third thread — Understanding Octopuses — and how far we've come, and how far we're going, in actually figuring out what's happening inside those distributed, extraordinary minds. Because here's the thing: studying octopuses is hard. They're solitary. They're short-lived. They don't behave the same way twice. They're not social animals, so you can't observe a group dynamic the way you might with dolphins or primates. And they're soft-bodied, so the fossil record is limited. For a long time, what we knew was assembled from fragments — behavioral observations, tank experiments, the occasional extraordinary encounter in the wild. But A I is beginning to change that in really exciting ways. Researchers are now using machine learning — the kind of A I that gets better the more data you feed it — to analyze octopus behavior in ways that would have taken human researchers decades to do manually. They're tracking color and texture changes across an octopus's skin frame by frame, mapping the patterns, trying to decode whether those changes carry information. And early results suggest they might. There's a project called CEPHALOPOD — I love that they named it that — where scientists are exploring whether octopuses have something like a visual language displayed on their own skin. They're not communicating with words, of course. But pulses of color, waves of texture, flashes of pattern — could these be meaningful? Could they be emotional? Could they be, in some sense, a conversation we just haven't learned to listen to yet? Olivia: And here's where it gets really wonderful, because A I might be the translator we've been missing. The idea is that if you collect enough data — enough video of octopus skin displays in enough different contexts — a machine learning model might be able to find the patterns that human eyes miss. The correlations between what an octopus is doing and what its skin is showing. It's like learning a language without a dictionary, by just listening to enough conversations until the structure starts to emerge. We're in the very early days of this. Nobody is claiming we can have a chat with an octopus over coffee just yet. But the possibility — the genuine, scientifically grounded possibility — that we might one day understand something of what octopuses are expressing to each other or to us? That is extraordinary. And it ties back to that question about intelligence, doesn't it? Because if we discover that octopuses have their own form of communication, their own way of encoding and sharing information, that changes everything about how we categorize them. It changes the ethical questions we ask. It changes what we owe them. Right now, somewhere in the deep waters off the Galápagos, a tiny blue Microeledone galapagensis is going about her life — feeling things, responding to her world, doing whatever small blue octopuses do in the dark. And we're just beginning to learn how to pay attention. Olivia: Oh, and I have to tell you about the baby octopus photo from Argentina before we wrap up this thread, because it is simply too wonderful to skip. Mongabay — one of my favorite environmental news sources — featured it as photo of the week, and if you haven't seen it, please find the link in show notes. A tiny, newly hatched octopus, translucent and delicate, already looking like a perfect miniature version of an adult. Already ready. That's the thing about octopus babies — they get no parental guidance. Their mothers die guarding the eggs, never meeting their young. And yet, these hatchlings emerge fully formed, fully octopus, carrying everything they need in that tiny body and that remarkable brain. There's something deeply moving about that to me. Resilience encoded from the very first moment of life. Olivia: And that, my friends, is where I want to leave you today. These animals — ancient and new, tiny and enormous, escaped and discovered — they keep reminding us that life finds a way to be brilliant in forms we haven't imagined yet. Every new species named, every escape engineered, every skin pattern decoded is an invitation to look at the world with a little more humility and a lot more wonder. I hope you carry that with you today — maybe even look at something familiar and ask yourself if you've been measuring it by the wrong ruler. That's what octopuses do for me, every single time. Olivia: This has been Ollie the Octopus, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor — three organizations that, I think, know a thing or two about intelligence in unexpected forms. If you loved today's episode, please subscribe, share it with someone who needs a little ocean wonder in their week, and leave us a review — it genuinely helps more curious minds find their way here. All the links to today's stories are waiting for you in show notes. Until next time, stay curious, stay kind, and remember — somewhere out there, a small blue octopus is doing something absolutely remarkable, and we're lucky to be learning about it. I'm Olivia, and this is Ollie the Octopus.