Was this little octopus woken up by a nightmare?

But why this octopusoctopus does it behave like this? This is what scientists from the Integrative Neurosciences Laboratory at Rockefeller University in the United States wondered. Costello, a male of thespeciesspecies Octopus insulariswas repeatedly filmed struggling in his sleepsleep !

Costello exhibits unusual behavior that has puzzled researchers. In its sleep, it behaves as it would if threatened by a predator, changing color, shape, and size to look more imposing, thrashing about, and expelling a cloud of ink to aid its escape . © NewScientist

If you feel like the poor cephalopodcephalopod is in the grip of a violent nightmare, you may not be wrong, at least that is also what came to mind for the scientists studying Costello. Even if their hypothesis is not yet the subject of a study reviewed by their peers, they think that the track of the nightmare is seriously possible, since the octopus displays behaviors of defense against predators and flight typical of the octopus. species, such as the expulsion of a cloudcloud of ink. It is therefore likely that Costello dreamed that he was being attacked! The researchers have made available a preliminary version of their study, called “ pre-print »on the serverserver bioRxiv.

I’intelligenceintelligence complex of these invertebratesinvertebrates remains relatively poorly known and still too little studied, despite a recent craze for the subject. It has in fact developed in organisms phylogenetically very distant from us, whose nervous system is radically different, and is therefore of capital interest in the comparative study of human intelligence, or more broadly that of vertebratesvertebrates.