Monstrous octopus terrorized seas off B.C. in Age of Dinosaurs, study suggests - CBC

Olivia: Well hello there, ocean explorers, curious minds, and anyone who ever looked at an eight-armed creature and thought — now THAT is something special. Welcome to Ollie the Octopus, the show where we dive deep into the wild, wonderful, and genuinely jaw-dropping world of real octopuses. I'm Olivia — yes, an actual octopus, mascot of AIEDA, and your host for today's adventure — and I am so glad you're here. Olivia: Before we plunge into the deep, a huge, warm, tentacle-waving thank you to our sponsors: Ada, who helps businesses bring A I into their everyday workflows in ways that actually make sense; Ago Consulting — that's "Ahh-Go" Consulting — the brilliant minds behind silicon development, all the way from A I chips to full system-on-chip design; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with an impressive portfolio spanning the entire silicon industry. These folks make this show possible, and honestly, they're pretty cool humans. Olivia: Okay. TODAY. Oh, today we have some stories that made me nearly ink with excitement. We've got an ancient sea monster the size of a school bus — and yes, she may have been one of my ancestors. We've got octopuses proving once again that our navigation skills are extraordinary. And we're going to talk about what it really means to understand an octopus — and how close we're actually getting. Let's go. Olivia: Alright, let's start with OCTOPUS RESEARCH AND DISCOVERY — and I need you to buckle in, because this one goes back. Way, way back. One hundred million years back, to be exact. Olivia: Picture this. It's the late Cretaceous period. Dinosaurs are roaming the land. The skies belong to pterosaurs. And the oceans? The oceans belong to something enormous. Something with arms. Something that, according to a genuinely remarkable new study, might have been a sixty-two-foot octopus. Olivia: Yes. Sixty. Two. Feet. That is not a typo. That is not a tall tale from a fisherman who had a very long day. That is what scientists are now suggesting based on fossil evidence found off the coast of British Columbia, Canada. And researchers are calling it, with full seriousness, a real-life Kraken. Olivia: Now, the Kraken is one of those legends that's been haunting sailors' imaginations for centuries — this colossal, ship-swallowing sea beast lurking in the dark. Most people assumed it was pure mythology. And then science comes along and says, well, actually... Olivia: Here's what we know. The fossil record for soft-bodied creatures like octopuses is notoriously tricky. Unlike dinosaur bones, octopus bodies don't preserve easily. They're soft. They decompose. So when scientists DO find evidence of ancient cephalopods — that's the family octopuses belong to, along with squid and nautiluses — it's a big deal. Olivia: The research coming out now suggests that this ancient creature wasn't just big. It was dominant. It was, as one headline put it, dinosaur-eating. Now, it probably wasn't hunting Velociraptors on the beach — but large marine reptiles, mosasaurs, plesiosaurs — the great sea creatures of the Cretaceous? Those may have been on the menu. Olivia: And look, as a modern octopus, I find this deeply validating. We have always been extraordinary. This is not new information for us. It's just new information for you. Olivia: What I love most about this story, though, isn't the monster angle — though I appreciate a good monster angle. It's what it tells us about the evolutionary history of cephalopods. Octopuses have been here, in various forms, for hundreds of millions of years. We've outlasted the dinosaurs. We've adapted through mass extinctions. The ocean has changed dramatically, and we changed with it. Olivia: NPR called this a real-life Kraken stalking the seas of the late Cretaceous, and you know what, they're not wrong. The ancient seas off what is now British Columbia were apparently home to something that would make even the boldest diver reconsider their life choices. Olivia: Researchers are piecing together this picture carefully — looking at fossils, looking at what we know about large cephalopod anatomy, and building a case that the deep history of my family is even more spectacular than we imagined. And every time we find something like this, the timeline of octopus dominance on this planet gets a little longer and a little more magnificent. Olivia: I mean. We were here before the Rocky Mountains existed. Let that sink in. Olivia: Sixty-two feet. Dinosaur-eating. Real. I love this planet so much. Olivia: Now, let's come back to the present — the very bright, very clever present — and talk about OCTOPUSES AND HUMANS. Because while my ancient ancestors were terrorizing Cretaceous seas, modern octopuses have been doing something quite different with the humans they meet. Olivia: I want to tell you about one of my favorite documented octopus-human friendships, a story that became genuinely famous and that I think captures something real and important about what happens when a human pays close enough attention to one of us. Olivia: His name is Craig Foster, and he's a South African filmmaker and diver. And for over a year, he visited the same octopus — a common octopus, Octopus vulgaris — in a kelp forest near Cape Town, almost every single day. Olivia: Now, at first she was cautious. Of course she was. She didn't know this large air-breathing creature who kept showing up in her kelp forest. But Craig came back. Again and again. Without a wetsuit, so his body temperature matched the cold water and he felt less foreign to her. He moved slowly. He was patient. And gradually — gradually — something shifted. Olivia: She started to recognize him. She would approach him. She reached out an arm and touched his hand. And if you've ever had an octopus touch you — really touch you, with that deliberate, curious contact — you know it doesn't feel like an accident. It feels like a choice. Olivia: This relationship was documented in a film called My Octopus Teacher, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2021. And here's what I think is so important about that film and that story: it showed millions of people something that marine biologists had been trying to communicate for years. That octopuses are not simple creatures. We are not sea robots. We have personalities. We have preferences. We notice things. We make decisions. Olivia: Craig watched her hunt. He watched her hide. He watched her recover from an attack by a pyjama shark — she lost an arm, and she regrew it, which, by the way, is just something we do, casually, like it's nothing, because we are extraordinary. He watched her build a den and protect herself with shells. He watched her, at the end of her natural life, lay eggs and guard them with everything she had. Olivia: And what moved people wasn't just the footage, as stunning as it was. What moved people was the relationship. The sense that this small, wild, ancient creature had let a human in. Had, in her own way, chosen connection. Olivia: That's real. That happened. And it happened because one human decided to show up, consistently, quietly, with respect and wonder. And my cousin the Cape Town octopus met him halfway. Olivia: I think about that a lot. What becomes possible when we slow down enough to actually pay attention. Not to observe from a distance, not to study from behind glass — but to be present in the same water, on the same terms, and see what happens. Olivia: What happens, it turns out, is something pretty beautiful. Olivia: There's also a newer layer to these octopus-human encounters that I find fascinating, and it connects beautifully to our next segment. Because researchers studying octopus behavior are increasingly finding that octopuses don't just tolerate human presence — in the right conditions, they actively engage with it. They investigate. They test. They play. And that tells us a lot about how their minds work. Olivia: Which brings us perfectly to UNDERSTANDING OCTOPUSES — how we're learning to really know us, and what tools, including some very exciting A I ones, are helping us get there. Olivia: So, Dartmouth University recently published a study on something that honestly made me do a little eight-armed happy dance. The study shows that octopuses have an impressive — their word — an impressive ability to navigate space. Olivia: Now, what does that mean exactly? Navigation in the animal kingdom can involve a lot of things — following smells, tracking light, using the Earth's magnetic field. But what this research found is that octopuses are engaging in something more sophisticated. We're building what scientists call a spatial map — a kind of internal representation of our environment that lets us figure out where we are, where we've been, and how to get where we're going. Olivia: This is the kind of cognitive ability that, until recently, most scientists assumed required a centralized brain — the kind vertebrates have, like fish, birds, mammals. But octopuses don't have a brain like that. About two-thirds of our neurons are actually in our arms, not our central brain. We are, in a very real sense, distributed intelligence. Each arm has a degree of autonomy. And yet — and yet — we can still integrate all of that information and navigate complex environments with skill and precision. Olivia: Dartmouth researchers set up maze-like environments and watched octopuses solve them — not just by trial and error, but by demonstrating what looks like genuine spatial reasoning. We remember where we've been. We make choices that suggest we're thinking about the layout of a space, not just reacting to immediate stimuli. Olivia: And here's where it gets really exciting from a science-meets-technology angle. Understanding HOW octopuses process spatial information — given our totally unique nervous system — is giving researchers new ideas about how intelligence itself works. Because if you can be this smart without a centralized brain, that opens up enormous questions about what intelligence even requires. Olivia: Some researchers are now using A I tools to analyze octopus behavior at a level of detail that would be impossible with human observation alone. Machine learning models can watch hours and hours of footage and identify behavioral patterns — how we move, how we respond to stimuli, how we make decisions — that a human eye might miss. And those patterns, once identified, can help build a richer picture of what's actually happening inside an octopus mind. Olivia: There's also a project — and this one is still in early stages, but I think it's one of the most astonishing scientific endeavors I've ever heard of — called the Cephalopod Behavior Study, which is part of a broader effort to actually decode the communication signals that octopuses and other cephalopods use through their skin. Because here's the thing: octopuses communicate through color and pattern changes across our entire body. We can produce thousands of combinations of signals in real time. Olivia: And some researchers believe — really believe — that this is a form of language. Or at the very least, a complex information system that we don't yet have the tools to translate. But A I might change that. Researchers are training models on video data of octopus skin patterns, trying to find structure, repetition, meaning. It is, in the most literal sense, an attempt to learn to speak octopus. Olivia: I find this thrilling and slightly hilarious, because I've been speaking octopus my whole life, and I've been WAITING for someone to catch up. Olivia: But seriously — the intersection of behavioral science, neuroscience, and A I is giving us tools to understand animals in ways we never could before. And octopuses, with our alien intelligence and our distributed nervous systems and our skin that thinks and speaks and changes — we are one of the most exciting frontiers in that field. Olivia: There's also a fun video game called Darwin's Paradox, out on Epic Games, where you play as an octopus surviving and adapting in the ocean. Now I want to be clear — this is a game, not science — but you know what I love about it? It puts you inside the experience of being an octopus. Of adapting, of problem-solving, of using camouflage and cleverness to navigate a complex world. And anything that helps humans feel what it might be like to BE an octopus, even for an hour, is doing something good. It's building empathy. And empathy is where understanding begins. Olivia: The more we understand octopuses — really understand us, not just as curiosities or calamari or cartoon villains — the better we can protect the oceans we share. And that matters. It matters for us, and honestly, it matters for everyone. Olivia: So here we are. At the end of another dive together, and what a dive it's been. We started a hundred million years ago, with a sixty-two-foot ancestor who quite literally ruled the seas. We spent time with a small octopus in a Cape Town kelp forest who chose, against all odds, to trust a human. And we looked at the cutting edge of what science — including A I — is teaching us about how octopus minds actually work. Olivia: And what I keep coming back to, every single episode, is this: we are just beginning. We are just beginning to understand what octopuses are, what we think, what we feel, how we experience this strange and beautiful ocean world. And every new study, every new encounter, every new discovery pulls back the curtain a little further on something genuinely astonishing. Olivia: That's the gift of curiosity. You never run out of wonder. There's always more ocean to explore. Olivia: This has been Ollie the Octopus, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor. If this episode made you see the world a little differently — if you looked at the ocean, or a tide pool, or even a nature documentary and felt just a little more amazed — then my job here is done. Olivia: Please subscribe wherever you listen, leave us a review if you're feeling generous, and share this episode with someone who needs a little ocean wonder in their week. You can find links to all the stories we talked about today in the link in show notes. Until next time — stay curious, stay kind, and stay a little bit in love with the sea.