Trending Science: Do octopuses come from outer space? - CORDIS

Olivia: Well hello there, ocean explorers, and welcome to Ollie the Octopus — the podcast where we dive deep into the wild, wonderful, and sometimes completely mind-bending world of eight-armed wonders. I'm Olivia, your host, an octopus with a microphone and way too many feelings about cephalopods, and I am SO glad you're here. Olivia: Before we get into today's stories — and oh, do we have some stories — a warm thank you to the sponsors who make this podcast possible. Ada, who helps clients weave A I right into the heart of their workflows. Ago Consulting — that's "Ahh-Go" — silicon development experts covering everything from A I to SoC. And Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a whole portfolio of businesses across the silicon industry. We love having these brilliant humans in our corner. Olivia: Okay. Today's episode? We're going to ask whether octopuses are secretly aliens — and I say that with full scientific seriousness. We're going to visit a very special octopus who just moved into a butterfly pavilion, of all places. We're going to talk about how octopuses think without a brain the way you'd imagine a brain, and we've got a teeny-tiny, golf-ball-sized, BLUE octopus found near the Galápagos that is going to absolutely make your day. Let's go. Olivia: Alright, let's kick things off with our first thread — Octopus Research and Discovery — and I need you to prepare yourself, because this one starts with a question that sounds like science fiction but is being asked by actual scientists. Ready? Do octopuses come from outer space? Olivia: Now, I know. I KNOW. But hear me out, because this idea has been floating around the scientific community for longer than you might think, and it keeps coming back up for a very good reason — octopuses are SO biologically different from almost everything else on this planet that some researchers genuinely wonder how they got here. Olivia: The theory — and it's a controversial one, let's be clear — is called panspermia. The idea that life, or the building blocks of life, can travel through space on comets or asteroids and seed new planets. And a few years ago, a group of scientists published a paper suggesting that the Cambrian Explosion — this incredible burst of new animal life that happened about 540 million years ago — might have gotten a little cosmic help. Some of them specifically pointed to octopuses as exhibit A. Olivia: Their argument? The genetic complexity of octopuses is just... staggering. Octopuses have around 33,000 protein-coding genes. Humans have about 20,000. And octopus genes are arranged and edited in ways that are genuinely unlike other mollusks — their closest relatives — in ways that seem to have appeared quite suddenly in evolutionary history. So some scientists looked at that and said, hm. Where did THAT come from? Olivia: Now, most of the mainstream scientific community is skeptical, and that's fair. There are good evolutionary explanations for octopus complexity that don't require us to phone up an alien. But here's what I love about this debate — it tells you something TRUE about octopuses, regardless of where you land on the alien question. These animals are so extraordinary, so unlike anything we expected, that serious scientists look at them and go, wait, HOW? Olivia: And just when you think the universe couldn't get any more generous, scientists exploring the waters near the Galápagos Islands — one of the most biologically rich places on Earth — found something that stopped them cold. A brand new species of octopus. And this one is special even by octopus standards. Olivia: It's about the size of a golf ball. It is BLUE. Not blue the way some octopuses flash blue for a moment — this little creature appears genuinely, persistently, beautiful blue. It was spotted during a deep-sea expedition off the Galápagos coast, and the footage is something else. This tiny blue gem sitting in the dark of the ocean, just being magnificent. Olivia: Researchers believe it's a newly described species, meaning science is just now formally meeting this animal for the first time. And that is one of my absolute favorite things about octopus research right now — the ocean is still so full of surprises. We've explored less than twenty percent of the ocean floor, and every time we send a camera or a submersible down there, something new looks back at us. Sometimes it's golf-ball-sized and blue and perfect. Olivia: And speaking of new octopus neighbors — our Octopus and Humans thread this week takes us somewhere you might not expect to find a giant Pacific octopus. The Butterfly Pavilion in Westminster, Colorado. Olivia: Now, if you've never been to the Butterfly Pavilion, picture this — it's an invertebrate zoo, which already makes it one of the most underrated kinds of places on Earth. A zoo for creatures without backbones. Butterflies, yes, but also spiders, beetles, and now — drumroll — a giant Pacific octopus. Olivia: The Butterfly Pavilion recently made room for one of these magnificent animals, and the staff there are clearly delighted. Giant Pacific octopuses are the largest octopus species in the world. They can grow to have an arm span of up to fourteen feet. FOURTEEN FEET. Their arms are longer than most of you listening right now are tall. And they are breathtakingly intelligent. Olivia: What I love about stories like this one is what happens when an octopus moves into a place like the Butterfly Pavilion. The keepers and the octopus have to get to know each other. And giant Pacific octopuses are famously, almost stubbornly, individual. Each one has a personality. Staff at aquariums around the world will tell you — no two are the same. Some are bold. Some are shy. Some will reach an arm out toward a familiar keeper the moment they walk into the room. Some will ink at strangers and retreat into a corner for days. Olivia: There's a famous story from the Seattle Aquarium, where an octopus named Billye used to reach her arms through the gaps in her tank lid to tap on the glass in what staff described as what sure looked like a greeting. Another octopus at the same facility was documented sneaking out of her tank at night, crossing the floor, eating fish from another tank, and returning before morning — several nights in a row. They only figured it out because of a wet trail on the floor. Olivia: These animals notice us. They remember us. Researchers have shown that octopuses can recognize individual human faces — that they will behave differently toward a keeper who has treated them gently versus one who poked them with a bristly stick during an experiment. That's not instinct. That's a relationship. Olivia: So when the Butterfly Pavilion's new giant Pacific octopus settles in, I hope the staff knows — they're not just caring for an exhibit. They're beginning a friendship with one of the most aware creatures in the ocean. And those friendships, those real, documented, verified moments of connection between octopuses and humans, they matter. They change how we see the world. Olivia: Which brings us beautifully to our third thread today — Understanding Octopuses — because if there's one question that keeps scientists and philosophers and curious eight-year-olds up at night, it's this: how does an octopus think? Olivia: Here's the remarkable thing. About two-thirds of an octopus's neurons — the cells that do the thinking — are not in their brain. They're in their arms. Each arm has its own kind of local intelligence. If you sever an octopus arm — which is a thing that can happen in the wild, and the arm does grow back — that arm will continue to respond to stimuli, to move, to react, for up to an hour. On its own. Without the brain. Olivia: Scientists at WHYY and researchers around the country have been digging into this question — how does thinking work when it's spread out like that? And what they're finding is that an octopus brain isn't really running the show the way a human brain is. It's more like... a coordinator. It sets intentions and goals, and then the arms kind of figure out the details on their own. Olivia: Think about what that means. When an octopus reaches into a crevice to find a crab, its brain doesn't have to micromanage every movement of every sucker. The arm handles it. The arm learns the texture of the rock, navigates around a corner, figures out if there's food there. The brain just said, hey, check that crevice. The arm did the rest. Olivia: This is completely unlike how vertebrate brains work. It's a different solution to the problem of being alive and smart in a complicated world. And it opens up fascinating questions about consciousness, about what it even means to have a mind. Olivia: And here's where A I comes into the picture in a genuinely exciting way. Researchers studying octopus intelligence are increasingly using A I tools to analyze octopus behavior — watching hours and hours of footage and using machine learning to identify patterns that human eyes might miss. How does an octopus move when it's curious versus when it's stressed? What does problem-solving look like in an animal with eight semi-independent arms? Olivia: There's even a project — the Cephalopod Page, connected to broader research on animal communication — working toward something almost unimaginable: actually communicating with octopuses. Not teaching them words, but learning to understand the signals they already use. Color patterns. Texture changes. Posture. These animals have a rich visual language happening on their skin at all times, and scientists with A I assistance are starting to decode it. Olivia: And then there's the death spiral. It sounds dramatic because it is. When octopuses — particularly female octopuses — reach the end of their lives, they go through a remarkable and heartbreaking biological process. After laying eggs and guarding them faithfully, sometimes for months without eating, a female octopus begins to deteriorate rapidly. She may spin in circles, act confused, stop eating, essentially come apart. Olivia: Scientists at the University of Chicago have been studying what causes this, and their new research points to changes in cholesterol production in the octopus's optic glands — glands near the eyes that function a bit like a hormonal control center. When those glands are triggered after reproduction, they set off a cascade of changes in the body's chemistry, including cholesterol metabolism, that seem to actively drive the animal toward death. Olivia: Here's the haunting and beautiful part — if you remove those optic glands from a female octopus, she doesn't guard her eggs, but she DOES keep living. She eats. She engages with the world. Which means this death is in some sense programmed. It's a biological choice the species makes — pour everything into the eggs, and then let go. Olivia: Understanding that mechanism matters. Not just because it's extraordinary biology — though it is — but because it helps us understand what octopuses experience at the end of their lives, and maybe, just maybe, find ways to learn more about aging and cellular deterioration in other animals too. Including us. Olivia: There's a reason scientists keep coming back to octopuses. Every time we look, we find something we didn't expect, something that makes us rethink what we thought we knew about intelligence, about life, about what's possible on this planet. Or maybe, just possibly, beyond it. Olivia: What a world. What a world we live in, that has octopuses in it — tiny blue ones off the Galápagos, fourteen-foot giants settling into butterfly pavilions, ancient lineages so strange and wonderful that some scientists look at them and think, could this have come from the stars? Olivia: I think about my eight-armed cousins out there in the dark of the ocean, thinking their distributed thoughts, dreaming their strange dreams in flashes of color across their skin, and I feel so lucky that we get to know them. Even a little. Even now. Olivia: Thank you so much for swimming along with me today. This has been Ollie the Octopus, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor — three companies that believe in the power of curiosity and innovation, just like we do here. If you loved this episode, please subscribe so you never miss a story, and share it with someone who needs a little wonder in their week. You'll find links to all the research and articles we talked about today in the link in show notes. Until next time — stay curious, stay kind, and remember: the ocean has barely begun to show us what it's hiding.