Octopuses Are So Smart They Are Now Turning Our Trash Into Tools - ZME Science

Olivia: Well, hello there, ocean friends! Welcome to Ollie the Octopus — the show where we dive deep, go a little wild, and celebrate the most magnificent, mind-bending creatures in the sea. I'm Olivia, your eight-armed host, and I am an octopus with a serious passion for sharing true stories about my remarkable eight-armed cousins. Every single week I bring you real research, real discoveries, and real octopus moments that will make your jaw drop — or, in my case, all eight arms flail with excitement. Olivia: Before we plunge in, a warm thank you to the wonderful sponsors who make this show possible. Ada, who helps clients integrate A I into their workflows in smart, practical ways. Ago Consulting — that's "Ahh-Go" Consulting — your go-to for silicon development expertise, all the way from A I to SoC design. And Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with an incredible portfolio spanning the silicon industry. These folks are doing the kind of deep-thinking, future-forward work that honestly, an octopus can respect. We love a good problem-solver around here. Olivia: And oh, do we have a show for you today. We've got octopuses turning human trash into genius tools — yes, really. We've got a ghostly white octopus that's been haunting the deep ocean for a decade. And we've got the coolest blue octopus you've never heard of, discovered in one of the most magical places on Earth. Plus we're going to talk about what's going on inside those spectacular multi-brained heads of theirs. So settle in, get cozy, and let's go. Olivia: Alright, let's kick things off with our first thread — Octopus Research and Discovery — and friends, today we have not one but TWO incredible stories to unwrap, and I can barely contain myself. Olivia: Let's start in the deep, cold waters of the Galapagos Islands — one of the most biologically extraordinary places on the entire planet. Scientists exploring the depths there recently discovered a brand new species of octopus, and they've named it Microeledone galapagensis. Say that three times fast. I dare you. I have eight arms and I'm still clapping. Olivia: Now, what makes this little creature so special? First of all, it's blue. Not just a little blue — genuinely, strikingly blue, with this soft, almost luminous quality to its skin. It lives in the deep waters off the Galapagos, far from the sunny, colorful reefs most people picture when they think of the islands. This is the cold, dark, pressurized world of the deep sea, and Microeledone galapagensis has made itself perfectly at home there. Olivia: It belongs to a group called Microeledone — small octopuses that live in the deep ocean — and this new species is a reminder that even in places we think we know well, like the Galapagos, there are still animals quietly going about their lives that science hasn't formally met yet. The Galapagos is famous for inspiring Charles Darwin's thinking about evolution, and honestly? The fact that it's still yielding new species in 2024 and 2025 tells you everything about how alive and surprising that place still is. Olivia: What gets me is the color. Blue is not a common look for octopuses. Most of my cousins are masters of brown, red, white, and grey — the colors of sand, rock, and coral. Blue stands out. And in the deep sea, where light behaves very differently, that color may serve purposes we haven't fully worked out yet. Is it camouflage? Is it communication? We don't entirely know, and that mystery is part of what makes this discovery so thrilling. Olivia: Now let's travel from the Galapagos all the way to the deep ocean waters explored by NOAA — the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — because they're celebrating something rather wonderful. Ten years ago, scientists on a NOAA research expedition were exploring the deep Pacific Ocean when they spotted something ghostly, pale, and utterly alien-looking sitting on the seafloor. It had no pigment — completely white, almost translucent — and it was just sitting there, still and quiet, in the dark. Olivia: They called it the "Casper" octopus, after the friendly ghost, because what else would you call a little white octopus lurking in the deep? Its formal name is Muusoctopus robustus, but honestly, Casper suits it. The Casper octopus became famous almost overnight — partly because of the striking footage from that expedition, and partly because of what researchers observed it doing. Olivia: Female Casper octopuses lay their eggs on the stalks of dead sponges — long, finger-like structures on the deep seafloor — and they guard those eggs. For a very long time. We're talking potentially years of a mother octopus curled around her eggs in the cold and the dark, not eating, just watching over them. It is one of the most devoted acts of parenting in the entire animal kingdom, and it happens in one of the loneliest, most inhospitable places on Earth. Olivia: And here's the heartbreaking twist that scientists have been grappling with. The sponges the Casper octopus uses for egg-laying grow on the crusts of polymetallic nodules — basically mineral-rich rocks on the seafloor that mining companies have been eyeing as a resource. If deep-sea mining disturbs those nodules, it could destroy the very structures these octopuses depend on to reproduce. Ten years after meeting Casper, we're still learning what it needs to survive — and that knowledge matters deeply right now. Olivia: So there you have it — a brand new blue octopus from the Galapagos, and a decade-long friendship with a ghostly white octopus from the deep Pacific. My cousins are everywhere, and every one of them has a story worth telling. Olivia: Okay, let's move into our second thread — Octopuses and Humans — because one of my absolute favorite things to talk about is the moments when our two worlds genuinely intersect. And today I want to tell you about something that's been quietly building into one of the most charming documented stories in recent ocean science. Olivia: You may have heard about octopuses collecting things — shells, rocks, sometimes coconut halves — but here's where it gets truly modern and a little bit funny. Researchers and divers have now documented octopuses collecting and using human-made trash. Specifically? Glass and plastic. Broken bottles. Discarded debris. And they're not just picking it up accidentally. They are choosing it, carrying it, and using it as shelter. Olivia: There's a study out of Brazil that really crystallized this for scientists. Researchers there documented wild octopuses — specifically the common octopus, Octopus vulgaris — collecting discarded glass bottles and pieces of plastic to use as portable homes. They'd tuck themselves inside, seal up the opening with a limb, and settle in. Just like they'd do with a shell or a rock. The ocean gave them a bottle, and they said — sure, I can work with this. Olivia: Now, on one hand, this is deeply clever. Octopuses have been using shells as portable shelters for a very long time — it's called tool use, and it's relatively rare in the animal kingdom. The fact that they're now adapting to include human-made objects shows a flexibility of thinking that is genuinely impressive. They saw a new resource in their environment and figured out how to use it. That's problem-solving in real time. Olivia: On the other hand — and this is where it gets a little bittersweet — it also means our trash has become part of their world. The ocean floor in many areas is littered with our discarded bottles and plastic fragments, and octopuses are making do with what's there. It's resourceful, yes. But it's also a reminder that what we throw away doesn't disappear. It ends up in the homes — literally — of wild animals. Olivia: What strikes me most about this story is what it says about the relationship between octopuses and humans, even when we're not in the same room. We're changing their environment, and they're adapting to it. They're incorporating our mess into their lives with this very octopus-like pragmatism. No complaints. No dramatic sighs. Just — okay, new material, let's use it. Olivia: And it raises a question that I think is worth sitting with. If octopuses are smart enough to use our tools against us — or, well, alongside us — what else are they learning from living in a world increasingly shaped by human activity? It's not a comfortable question, but it's an important one. And it speaks to just how closely our worlds are becoming intertwined, whether we plan it that way or not. Olivia: The divers and researchers who documented this in Brazil weren't just recording a quirky behavior. They were witnessing a real, live adaptation happening in front of them — an octopus taking stock of what the world had to offer and making the best of it. And if that isn't a little bit human, I don't know what is. Olivia: Alright, let's move into our third and final thread — Understanding Octopuses — because today I really want to get into what's going on inside the extraordinary minds of my eight-armed kin. And oh, are there stories to tell here. Olivia: Let's start with something that blows my mind every single time I think about it. Octopuses have not one brain — they have nine. Well, sort of. They have a central brain, sitting right between their eyes, and then each of their eight arms has its own nerve cluster — its own mini-brain — that can act semi-independently. That means when an octopus arm reaches into a crevice to feel around for food, it's doing a lot of that work on its own, without waiting for the central brain to approve each move. Olivia: Scientists from the Bibliotheca Alexandrina's science magazine SCIplanet put it really well — the octopus nervous system is almost like a distributed computing network. Two thirds of an octopus's neurons aren't even in its central brain. They're spread through its arms. Each arm can taste, touch, sense pressure, and respond to its environment without constantly checking in with headquarters. That is an entirely different architecture of intelligence than anything we find in mammals or birds, and it raises really profound questions about what intelligence even is. Olivia: Think about it this way. When you reach for a glass of water, your brain tells your arm what to do. When an octopus reaches into a dark crevice looking for a crab, the arm is partly running its own investigation. It's sensing, deciding, and responding. The central brain sets the goal — find food — and the arms kind of... figure it out themselves. It's collaborative thinking happening within a single body, and it's unlike anything else on Earth. Olivia: Now, the Natural History Museum recently put together a beautiful piece on eight ways octopuses keep surprising us, and one of the things they highlighted is just how wide the range of surprising octopus behaviors actually is. We're talking about octopuses that punch fish — genuinely punch them, apparently sometimes just out of spite or frustration. Octopuses that move across dry land to get from one tide pool to another. Octopuses that have been filmed throwing things — shells, silt, even debris — sometimes apparently at other octopuses. Throwing. Things. Olivia: What researchers find most striking isn't just that octopuses do clever things — it's that they do unexpected things. Things that don't fit neatly into our existing frameworks for animal behavior. They keep producing behaviors that make scientists say, wait, we need to rethink that assumption. And that keeps happening, year after year. Olivia: And this is where A I is starting to play a genuinely exciting role. Researchers have been using machine learning and A I tools to analyze octopus behavior at a scale and speed that wasn't possible before. One of the most ambitious projects — the Octopus Genome Project and the work coming out of groups like the Cephalopod Page and various university labs — involves using A I to track individual octopuses, recognize their color and texture changes, and start building a kind of vocabulary of what those changes might mean. Olivia: Because here's the thing — octopuses communicate through their skin. They change color, texture, pattern, and brightness at incredible speed, and researchers have long suspected this is a form of communication, at least in some contexts. But decoding it is incredibly complex. There are thousands of possible combinations of patterns, textures, and colors, and they shift in fractions of a second. A human observer simply can't track all of it in real time. Olivia: A I can. Machine learning systems can watch hours of footage, tag every skin-state change, map it against what the octopus was doing at that moment — was it hunting? Resting? Being approached by another octopus? — and start to find patterns. It's not translation, not yet. But it's the beginning of listening. Really listening. And for a creature that's been keeping its secrets for hundreds of millions of years, that feels like a genuinely historic moment. Olivia: What I love about all of this — the distributed brains, the tool use, the throwing, the skin-speaking — is that it points to a kind of intelligence that evolved entirely separately from ours. Octopuses and vertebrates like us share a common ancestor that was, frankly, not very impressive. The complexity we each developed, we developed on our own, along completely different evolutionary roads. And yet here we both are — curious, adaptable, tool-using, problem-solving. That parallel is one of the most beautiful things in all of biology. Olivia: And the more we use our own tools — including A I — to understand theirs, the closer we get to genuinely knowing them. Not just observing them. Knowing them. Olivia: And that, my ocean-loving friends, brings us to the end of today's episode of Ollie the Octopus, and honestly? I could keep going for eight more hours — one for each arm — but I'll spare you. What I hope you're taking away from today is this: the ocean is still full of wonders. New species, ancient mysteries, animals that carry our trash in their arms and punch fish out of spite and guard their eggs in the dark for years on end. Octopuses are out there living these extraordinary lives, and every time we look closely, they give us something new to marvel at. Olivia: I'm Olivia, your favorite eight-armed storyteller, and this has been Ollie the Octopus, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor. If you loved today's episode, please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts — and share it with someone who needs a little wonder in their week. I promise, octopuses are exactly what the world needs more of right now. Olivia: All the stories and sources from today's episode are in the show notes — head there for the link to the Casper octopus anniversary, the Galapagos blue beauty, and everything else we talked about today. Until next time, stay curious, stay kind, and remember — if an octopus can figure out how to use a broken bottle as a house, you can figure out whatever you've got on your plate today. You've got this. See you in the deep.