Yarrow House

I Met an Octopus on My Way to Alpha Centauri

If humans ever managed to travel between our solar system and other stars and found planets circling those stars, we’d immediately begin looking for advanced life. A few key questions for any creatures we found would be: Are you conscious? Are you intelligent? How should I treat you?

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Most intelligent science fiction aliens look vaguely human — think Worf in Star Trek or Jabba the Hutt in Star Wars. But there’s no rule that says intelligent beings have to come with fingers and a head. In the classic 1937 science fiction novel Star Maker, for example, Olaf Stapledon describes a symbiotic creature composed of two non-humanoid species. The likelihood of humans ever getting to some other star is negligible, of course, but if I were to find myself on a planet circling another star, how would I recognize an intelligent being through the fog of my assumptions about what intelligence looks like?

 I don’t need to go as far as Alpha Centauri, though, to meet up with intelligent nonhuman aliens. Plenty of creatures here on earth have some level of intelligence. Take colonial beings, like ants and bees, for example. Researchers think their nests or hives, taken as a whole, manifest a kind of intelligence greater than that of the individual ants or bees. Or what about octopuses?  

Octopuses are particularly interesting subjects for reflecting on the question of nonhuman intelligence. One stormy day on our vacation along the Oregon coast, my husband and I spent a couple of hours at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport. Luckily it was one of the days Center staff fed the octopus, Olson, named for the researcher who donated her to the Center. She was around 14 pounds. Size isn’t an indicator of octopus age, only of an individual’s access to food, so the Center staff aren’t sure how old she is. They feed her just enough to keep her healthy but growing slowly so she’ll remain a good, smallish display animal. She lived in a glass tank of seawater about 6 x 10 feet, with 3-foot high sides. Various rocks and hiding places were distributed around the tank along with sea anemones and a selection of plastic toys.

Jen, the young woman who tended Olson, leaned over the tank with her dish of chopped up seafood as she described octopus habits and life cycle, every now and then handing a piece of clam or shrimp to Olson. While Jen talked, Olson climbed up the tank wall and twined around Jen’s arm. She had to keep untwining Olson during the half-hour talk and feeding session. After she’d fed the octopus bits of seafood, Jen used a toy watering-can to sprinkle her with water. Olson spread out on the surface receiving the sprinkled water, her mouth area and the underside of her arms exposed, suckers relaxed and open to the ceiling. Maybe it tickled, maybe the stimulation was pleasurable. It’s impossible to say how this member of the mollusk family felt, but she stayed like that for as long as Jen sprinkled her, maybe 10 minutes, clutching her ring of baby’s plastic teething keys with one arm the whole time.

Are you intelligent?

Unfortunately, there is no generally agreed upon definition of intelligence. Shane Legg, of the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence, in Switzerland, and Marcus Hutter, of the Research School of Computer Science at the Australian National University, surveyed a range of literature in psychology, artificial intelligence, and animal research and came up with a list of 70 different definitions of intelligence for their paper “A Collection of Definitions of Intelligence.” Synthesizing the elements most common to these 70 definitions, the two authors proposed that  intelligence is the measure of “an agent’s ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments.”  This definition covers a lot of territory, from robots and many animals to humans.

Octopuses are intelligent enough to be able to escape unsecured containers, so the net that covered the tank was velcroed securely to the tank’s sides. In order to keep Olson happy, the Center gave her new toys each week—balls, the watering can, the teething ring of keys, and such. She got bored with a toy after a while, and when she was bored, she became destructive or lost interest in eating. So, the ability to become bored might be one indicator for intelligence.

The capacity to plan, to use tools, and to play are other indicators. Octopus behavior suggests that they can plan ahead. They will travel some distance from their den, sometimes repeatedly, to gather an armful of rocks and sand and use the material to barricade their den entrance. Some small octopuses hide in coconut or clam shells and carry the shell around with them until they need to hide under it. They hug the shell to their body and walk on the ends of their legs as they go hunting for food.

One of the most indicative examples of intelligence is the ability to play. Our simian cousins play. Dogs play. And even crows, known to be some of the more intelligent of the bird family, appear to play. If you watch crows swooping and diving in the wind to no particular purpose, it’s hard not to think that they’re just goofing off. But when it comes to an octopus, what would this cousin of a clam do that would be called play, let alone how would you notice that it was doing it? This turns out to be somewhat easier than you’d think. Marine biologist Jennifer Mather, who teaches at the University of Lethbridge, in Alberta, Canada, described two of her research octopus subjects each, separately, appearing to play with a plastic bottle. First, an octopus moved to the far end of the tank, away from the outlet that brought in fresh saltwater. Then it used its funnel to shoot a jet of water at the bottle, pushing it toward the outlet, where the flow of fresh water would bring it back. One of them pushed it back more than 20 times in a row. That sounds playful to me, an activity done for no apparent purpose other than amusement or enjoyment. Do they play in the wild? We don’t know.

You might think that octopuses are hampered in tool use by their lack of hands and fingers. But octopus suckers are each individually flexible and can fold, grasp, and flick things away. They can make quite delicate manipulations. For example, one octopus with a wound that was sewn up with fine silk sutures, in knotted stitches, managed to untie the knots overnight. In the morning all the sutures were lying untied on the tank floor. Octopuses can also use their flexible funnel as a tool to groom their hiding holes, blowing out small rocks and fish or crabs too little to bother eating. If a larger undesirable creature comes in, they blow water on it to drive the intruder away.

One  measure of intelligence is the ability to communicate with another creature. Even birds will recognize humans who fill their feeders, so it’s not surprising that octopuses recognize their handlers at feeding time. But do they know that they can communicate with the handler? An experience reported by behavioral researcher Jean Boal, who studies octopus behavior at Millersville University in Pennsylvania, suggests that maybe they do. One day, while she was feeding somewhat stale squid to each of her octopuses, she noticed that one of the octopuses had apparently hidden the food. This octopus kept its eyes focused on Boal while it moved to the drain in the front its tank. At the outflow, still keeping its eye on Boal, it shot the rejected piece of squid out of its arms and down the drain, continuing to lock eyes with Boal. It obviously had an opinion about the quality of the food, and it appeared to want Boal to know that opinion.

Whatever else they might have to say to us, it undoubtedly wouldn’t be in the context of our world as we understand it—except for times when intentional communication happens along the lines of “I hate this stale squid you gave me, and I want you to know that,” a moment that leaps out of the interspecies mist and says, “I have something to say to you.”

Aquariums report that octopuses can take a dislike to certain people, some keepers, for example, and will remember that person even after their absence. What is it the octopuses dislike? If they can dislike, you might think they could also like a particular person. But how would you know? And there’s the crux of the problem. Who can know about their likes and dislikes, their experience of pleasure or pain, their capacity to communicate? First, we’d have to assume a potential for any of those things before we could see them in whatever manifestation they appeared. Marine scientists at the Seattle Aquarium regularly look for indicators of octopus intelligence. They conduct experiments to test octopuses’ capacity to solve problems and remember sequences over time, and they think octopuses are about as intelligent as a two-year-old human. This assessment brings me up flat up against the issue of how I should think about a responsible relationship with octopuses. 

Are you conscious?

As soon as we raise the question of intelligence, we run into an even more fundamental question. At what point do we recognize that something is conscious? Definitions of consciousness vary from the physical to the metaphysical but broadly, consciousness is the sense or awareness of an external object or of something within oneself. This seems to define consciousness in human terms, but for now that’s all we have to go on.

Whether animals are conscious is a wide-ranging and unresolved question, although possible answers are stated with much certainty by scientists and philosophers. French philosopher Descartes, writing in the mid-1600s, maintained that animals reacted only to external stimuli and, therefore, were not conscious. But that assumption has changed over the years, and recent neuroscientists have concluded that enough evidence exists that animals do have the necessary neural substrates for consciousness as well as a capacity for intentional behaviors. After reaching this conclusion, participants at a 2012 neuroscience convention signed the “Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness in Non-Human Animals” officially declaring that mammals, birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, are conscious.

So, what can we know about that consciousness? Thomas Nagel, a contemporary philosopher who wrote the paper “What Is It Like To Be a Bat?,” maintains that animals are conscious but since consciousness is a subjective experience, we can never even know what it’s like to be another person much less a bat. Daniel Dennett, a philosopher and cognitive scientist on the other end of the argument, claims that since consciousness stems from physical attributes, it can be tested for and identified. Other creatures are on the same spectrum of consciousness as we are, and therefore we can indeed have a sense of their consciousness. To tread a middle line between what’s known and what’s theorized, if we start with basic sentience (the capacity for sensation or feeling), we can move along the consciousness spectrum to awareness of the environment then awareness of other things, for example, creatures in the environment, and then to opinions about the other creatures in the environment—mostly in the categories of food/not food and dangerous/safe.
Animal trainers, pet owners, and mystics tend to assume many nonhuman creatures are conscious, with a felt life that we can easily fall into anthropomorphizing. Octopuses definitely appear to be conscious. But how would we know that some totally other kind of creature was conscious? Take ants, for example. Are they conscious? What about an ant colony as a whole? Could it be conscious? A classic science fiction example of a hive-like society is the Borg Collective in Star Trek: Next Generation. The individual Borg are ant-like in their behavior, with only the queen consciously directing their focus on converting all creatures into more Borg—“Resistance is futile,” as they claim. But is the Borg Collective, as an entity, conscious? The writers don’t explore that possibility.

The ant species with the largest colonies on Earth are the leafcutters. Leafcutters have an organization so complex that renown ant researchers Edward O. Wilson and Bert Holdobler describe their colonies as superorganisms. They define a superorganism as a colonial species with a variety of castes of workers with overlapping generations in which the colony is larger and more complex, in a sense more intelligent, than any individual ant.

Ants have been around for 150 million years. Leafcutters evolved 50 to 60 million years ago, apparently sometime after the African and South American continents separated, since they are found only in the Western hemisphere. In Costa Rica, my husband and I saw leafcutter mounds 25 feet across. The biggest leafcutter nests can extend to 24 feet below the surface, although in most nests their fungus chambers are only about 6 feet deep.

The leafcutters are farmers. Their entire social organization is focused on growing and tending a certain type of fungus in their underground chambers. A single worker ant may live for only a few months to a year or so, depending on its caste, but the queen, and therefore the colony itself, can live 10 to 15 years. After a queen is fertilized and goes off to establish her own nest, she spends the rest of her life laying eggs at a typical rate, Wilson and Holdobler estimate, of 20 eggs a minute—28,800 in a day and 10,512,000 in a year. Over the ten years of an average queen’s lifetime, she will have produced 150 million offspring, mostly daughters. The queen’s eggs develop primarily into female workers, although eventually some of them become virgin queens, and some few, males. Researchers have identified three castes of workers: the large soldiers, the medium-sized general purpose workers, and the tiny minims. The general purpose workers are further separated by size into those who tend the queen and larvae, those who tend the fungus gardens, and those who forage for vegetation for the gardens. The minims help fend off parasitical flies, and also tend the fungus and small larvae and help prepare harvested vegetation to feed to the fungus beds.

In Costa Rica, I was obsessed by the steady stream of leafcutter ants carrying little pieces of leaves, over their heads like parasols. The workers are very organized. Some foragers snip off pieces of leaves and drop them to the ground where other foragers pick them up and carry them to the nest. The ants don’t eat the leaves they harvest. The green stuff is only the medium on which the fungus grows. In the nest, gardener workers snip the leaf segments into smaller pieces, chew them to soften them, and then work the vegetative mass into the fungal clumps. The ants don’t eat the fungus directly, either. Instead they eat little ball-like outgrowths of the fungus. Other workers, often the older ones, remove all the garbage—unusable leaf litter, unwanted fungus, dead ants, and such. Some leafcutters have garbage chambers underground, some pile the refuse outside at a distance from the nest.

The leafcutters have a symbiotic relationship with their fungus. By now, the fungus couldn’t exist without the ants’ attention. They constantly groom the fungus to remove other invading growths or parasites. They also exude antibacterial and antifungal substances that impede the growth of other fungi and molds. The effectiveness of their care can be measured by the speed with which invading funguses overgrow abandoned ant nests, sometimes within weeks.

Ants constantly communicate with each other and the nest as a whole through pheromones—chemicals they secrete from various parts of their body—as well as through sounds they make by rubbing parts of their body together. One researcher reported that when he held an ant up to his ear, its sound resembled a cricket chirp. They also tap and smell each other with their antennae. Using these pheromones, sounds, and touches they signal good foraging spots, mark their trails to food locations, communicate alarms to defend their nest from invaders, recognize nest mates, and even call for help when trapped under fallen dirt.

Ants are surprisingly intelligent, for their size. Researchers have discovered that an ant can learn to maneuver through a maze almost as fast as a rat can. But unlike a rat, the ant can’t apply what it learned to an unfamiliar context. For example if the maze is reversed, rats quickly recognize the similarities and find their way through the reversed maze, but for an ant it’s a whole new configuration. This suggests to  researchers that perhaps the ants are learning the maze by laying one-way pheromone trails through it.

Leafcutter ants  can strip a tree overnight, and consequently are regarded as major pests in orchards. James Montoya-Lerma, a biologist at the Universidad del Valle, in Calle, Colombia, and his co-authors report in a paper that leafcutter ants are difficult to control because their physical and behavioral mechanisms allow them to withstand almost all chemical, biological, and mechanical methods that have been used to date. Short of poisoning the nest with banned pesticides or digging it out—which can involve excavating as deep as 24 feet while being attacked and ferociously bitten—growers have had some occasional success in protecting their orchard trees by sprinkling soil and litter from the ants’ garbage pile around each tree. Since the garbage pile is where dead or dying ants are dumped, perhaps the dead bodies are the ants’ signpost: Danger! Don’t go there!

But what about the colony as a whole? Is it conscious? Ant colonies may go to war against other encroaching colonies, but the colonies don’t appear to interact in any other way. Although ants are aware of their environment and rise to the defense of their nest, they don’t appear to play, nor does it look like the colony itself plays. Although what would a playful ant colony behave like? Or perhaps the question should be, what would it smell like?

If I think of the colony as in some way conscious and capable of communication, what would I talk about with it, aside from “Stop eating my orchard trees?” I can’t imagine having a philosophical conversation conducted in pheromones. It’s much easier for me to assume that a colony is more like a computer than a person, solving immediate problems but unaware that it’s solving them.

Do you have a me?

Our metaphors, our understanding of who we are as individuals, that we are, is embedded in having a body with a head that holds our brain, which holds our mind. Unlike in humans and most other animals, the octopus brain is distributed throughout its soft, vulnerable body. The octopus’s arms and suckers have scent and taste receptors. It crawls along feeling, smelling, and tasting for prey. Each arm has its own supply of brain cells and is capable of crawling away if cut off from the body. The arm will even capture food and move the food item along its suckers toward its now detached mouth. The arm apparently doesn’t have enough of a sense of itself as part of a body to notice it that it’s missing a mouth.

I, on the other hand, have a mental image of my body, an awareness of where I am in space and in relation to things in my environment. This awareness, or feedback mechanism, tells me where the parts of my body are in relation to each other and whether my body is moving with an appropriate effort. One reason I was so clumsy when I was 14, for example, was that my sense of my body’s extension in space lagged well behind my body’s growth spurt. Taken all together, my body awareness, and the mental image I have of it, generates an objectified sense of myself. I call that objectified sense me.

Researchers aren’t clear whether the octopus is aware of its attached arms crawling along or that it knows at some level that it is taking up a certain amount of space extending to the tips of its arms. It’s a pretty good guess, though, that octopus awareness is distributed in such a way that it would be completely foreign to us if we could experience being an octopus. But who’s to know for sure?

Superorganisms, like ant colonies, take the question of body awareness to a whole new level.
Unlike the Borg queen, the ant queen doesn’t run the colony. She’s the colony’s reproductive organ. The workers perform their roles driven by instinct—actions triggered by pheromones or other ant signals, going about their tasks without any awareness of the colony as a larger intelligent being. Despite the constant communication and activity, nobody is in charge. The colony’s complicated, coordinated efforts work much like my body. My cells go about their individual tasks, following their genetic coding and, collectively, making up an intelligent, conscious me.

The bigger question, beyond that of the ant colony’s or octopus’s sense of its body, is do they have an objectified sense of themselves? In other words, do they have a me? The classic test in animal research for awareness of the self is to see if an animal recognizes itself in a mirror. The typical test of self-recognition is to put a mark of some kind on an animal’s forehead and see how it responds when shown itself in a mirror. If it examines the mark and maybe tries to remove it, the animal is assumed to recognize itself, in other words to have an objective sense of itself. How would that test be replicated with an octopus who, for one thing, doesn’t really have a forehead? Roland Anderson, of the Seattle Aquarium, and Jennifer Mather, of Alberta’s University of Lethbridge, note in a research paper that on seeing their reflection in a mirror, octopuses may increase activity and change color, but otherwise give no irrefutable evidence of being aware of themselves. However as Mather and Anderson also point out, no one knows how an octopus would behave if it did recognize itself.

How would we know if a leafcutter ant colony had a me? Is this question even relevant with regard to an ant colony? The individual ants recognize nest mates from their collective odor. But if an ant colony, the colony itself, is intelligent, does it have a consciousness of the world and, even more importantly, of itself within or separate from its environment?

We do not have any idea how to begin to communicate with an ant colony in order to test for colonial consciousness. Communicating with it through individual ants would be like trying to communicate with another human through an individual cell. Neither the cell nor the ant has a large enough viewpoint to see itself as a part of a larger collective—in a sense, a lot like me in the universe.

Are you a person?

Beyond the question of recognizing intelligence in nonhuman beings, there’s the question of the value of that intelligence. So what if an octopus or a leafcutter colony is conscious, intelligent, and might even have a me? At what point do intelligence and awareness equal personhood? The criteria we use to decide if a creature is a person and deserves to be treated as a person, with all the rights and protections of legal persons, depends on how we define personhood.

What would Olson have to do to acquire personhood? Octopuses are short-lived. Most octopus species live three to five years, some live for only six months. The Hatfield Center will keep Olson until she matures to the point where she’s ready to lay eggs and then release her. When an octopus begins to change color, she’s ready. In the Seattle Aquarium, the female and male octopuses are introduced to each other when the female is ready to breed. Olson will be on her own for finding a mate. After laying and then tending her eggs until they hatch, Olson will die. She doesn’t eat during that time and basically starves to death. (In Olson’s species—the giant Pacific octopus—after mating, the male just goes off and dies within a few months.)

Olson seemed to me to be a tragic creature, intelligent but short lived. My first, and very human-centric, thought was what a waste of that intelligence. But since we can’t know what Olson’s sense of time or perception of her world is, I can only judge her short life as tragic from my point of view— how I would feel, not how Olson feels.

We can interact with Olson but in a fundamental way—I’m with Thomas Nagle on this—how she experiences the world is something I can’t know but can only imagine. What then is my ethical and moral obligation to Olsen and the many other creatures with whom I share this Earth? With a marginally familiar creature like an octopus, the question is fairly simple. But when it comes to something like a leafcutter colony, the ethical complexities rival the complexity of the colony structure.

Many native people have traditionally regarded animals as persons, but for centuries Western philosophers, have categorized animals as things, with no basic rights. Lately some contemporary philosophers have argued that nonhuman animals do have basic interests that deserve recognition, consideration, and protection. The Australian philosopher Peter Singer and the American philosopher Tom Regan represent two major currents of philosophical thought regarding the moral rights of animals. Both of these currents of thought emphasize that we have to take into account other creatures’ pain, suffering, pleasure, and thriving in order to know how to act toward them.

Regan makes the argument that at least the animals that have the same advanced cognitive abilities as humans have the same basic moral rights as humans. He doesn’t refer to them as persons, but he does say that such animals, by virtue of their similar abilities, have inherent value. In Regan’s words, they are “the subject of a life.” Operating on the same thinking, the Spanish national parliament adopted resolutions in 2008 urging the government to grant orangutans, chimpanzees, and gorillas some statutory rights previously allowed only to humans, including the right to life, freedom, and not to be tortured or used in experimentation.

Singer, taking a larger view, holds that the key consideration is whether or not an animal is sentient and whether it can suffer pain or experience pleasure. In other words, the question should be not whether a creature has advanced cognitive abilities but can it suffer? Marine biologists Mather and Anderson remark in their paper on evaluating pain and suffering in invertebrates, such as Olson, that bodily responses to stress are similar throughout the animal kingdom and that most animals do show behavioral responses to potentially painful stimuli. Given that non-human animals appear to be able to suffer, Singer’s argument is that humans have a moral obligation to minimize or avoid causing such suffering in other animals, regardless of whether we consider them persons or not, just as we have a moral obligation to minimize or avoid causing the suffering of other humans.

If we ever did reach other inhabited worlds—and there are likely to be many of them out there in the billions of galaxies we can see from Earth— we would need to arrive open to unrecognizable forms of intelligence and with a broad definition of personhood. Sadly, I will never have that extraterrestrial opportunity, but I certainly do have the opportunity to explore this question with my fellow creatures. Unbeknownst to Olson, but available to me if I pay attention, she channels a message from intelligent life out there in space, with the added advantage that communication with her is not across light years, but within easy reach here at home. With her help I can continue to refine my understanding of a responsible relationship with my fellow creatures on this first interstellar planet I’ve encountered.

One-time reproduction for non-resale purposes permitted with the following credit line: by Judith Yarrow, © 2019