Aliens Under The Sea!

we answer the angel question. Who's got no thumbs and three hearts? These guys? So I want to start out the show with a listener question. Mike asks, why is the deep sea filled with nightmares? Anglerfish, goblin sharks, gulper eels. When evolution turns the light out? Why doesn't have to go full horror show? I mean, tigers are scary too, but there are equal parts cuddly at least. Well, Mike,

here's my theory. It's not so much that the sea is filled with nightmares, rather that we diverged from them on our evolutionary road trip, so we share more features in common with other mammals, and our schema for what looks cuddly is based on mammalian features. Researchers found that children as young as three to six years of age form a sort of mental cuteness map faces of humans and animals were manipulated in photoshop to be more proportionally

similar to babies. Children spent more time looking at images that more closely fit these baby proportions and rated them as more pleasing. Big eyes, big foreheads, chubby cheeks. Now compare that to many deep sea creatures, tiny beady eyes, no foreheads, sunken cheeks, almost the opposite of the baby schema. In a sense, deep sea animals and other aquatic life is alien to us. So far back on the evolutionary tree were barely relatives. But today on the show, we're

going to challenge that concept. We're going to take a good hard look at some of the slimiest, tenticaliest, most alien looking animals when we see and learn to love them. And later in the show, I'm going to be joined by prof Essor David Shield, a marine biologist who invited an octopus to come live with him in his home and found we have shockingly much in common with these evolutionary aliens. Joining me today is comedian musician Monkey Lover Chris crofton, Hey, how are you, Katie? So are you

familiar with the sea. I mean I've been in it, um, you know, just a few feet. Usually I don't usually go out very far. You don't mess with the ocean, now, I'm with you there, I don't. I don't mess with it either. I take one good look at the ocean like, no, I'm I'm okay. Actually yeah, I got feet. They're good for land, right yeah. And I'm like, I used to be a redhead and now I'm I'm bald. But when I was when I had I mean, I'm pale. So the ocean, I mean, the beach is something I have

to coat myself in zinc to go there. Yeah, exactly, I've I've got the ginger jeans too. And it's natures telling me something. It's telling me to stay indoors, don't go to the beach, cover yourself in sund screen. Just but I don't know where Irish people are supposed to be. They're supposed to be in some kind of missy. I think we're supposed to be like subterranean creatures that just kind of like I really don't understand it. Is there

no son in Ireland. I don't I don't know. I mean, we're not prepared or built for some it's all bog right, I guess that's what I always picture. You're supposed to be the ball inside of a box, right exactly. Well, so first I want to talk about an animal called the goblin shark and to kind of address the listener question of these freaky animals you find deep undersea. Um. So, here's a picture of a goblin shark's head. Oh my god, it kind of looks to me. It looks a little

bit like Mr Smithers on The Simpsons. Oh yeah, it's kind of like that if he was wearing a hat. It's called a long hat beak on top of him exactly. It's got this big, pointy nose and like these protruding lips. It's more of a snow than a nose. But it's where's his eyeballs underneath his nose? Eyes are? Yeah, his eyes are right there? Like what a drag? Well, your eyeballs underneath your nose? You're not going to get that many dates. Nope. Um. But they grow up to sixteen

feet long, so they're tall. And where do they how? Where is that because I don't want to go anywhere near that. You probably won't have to worry about the shallows. No, No, they're very rare shark that can be found throughout the world, deep in the ocean at depths of over three feet, so you're probably never going to see one of these. It looks kind of old. It looks like it's kind of like an old Egyptian carving. That's like, I guess alive because it's kind of like it looks like it's

made of rock. Yeah. I think this one is probably a little bit desiccated because I think that's a dead sample. That's a dead one. Yeah, I was wondering why it looks so ragged. It's hard like you can't get live samples of these, pretty much like when they try to collect a live sample, it dies pretty quickly. But if you want to, there's this video of a live one and you can see it actually can shoot its jaws out, shoot its jaws out. Yeah, it will shoot its jaws

from its face like a sling shot. Uh, let me show you, okay, yeah, oh boy, wow. So he's like, oh my gosh, he has a mouth inside his mouth or she does. It's kind of like Alien, you know the alien from Alien, where it like shoots out that tongue alien. Is that what happens in that movie? It's like a little tongue alien that shoots out of its mouth and then screams at people. Yeah, kind of I think that that's. Yeah. So this shark that I just looked at has like a mouth like a and then

inside it has another mouth that shoots out. Well, it's actually one mouth, but it kind of it looks like it's shooting out an extra mouth because it's actually kind of recessed inside of of its um mandibles. So it's got once one jaw, one set of teeth, and then that it's as if you could like pop your jaws like out of your skull and kind of like push it forward, like my mother in law just kids, and I'm not even married, married, roasted to the imaginary mother

in law. I came on your show to do. Well, it's what is it? Um? So it's probably an ambush predator. So it sneaks up behind prey and then snaps it with its freaky jaws. The reason it's able to catapult its jaws forward is it actually has these elastic ligaments that are like rubber bands. Um, so when it's jaws closed, these these rubber band ligaments are actually pulled tight and then it releases them literally like a sling shot. But it's full of teeth. So I see what it's doing.

It's like it can so it can dead pan like it's not gonna like it's not hungry or it's not about to bite you. It's just like has a straight face. And then but inside it's got this like it has its real intentions. Teeth nightmares. Yeah, yeah, boom teeth nightmares. You see another person meets or a person another animal meets that fish and the fish is like, oh, he's not mad because his vase is straight, his mouth is straight. Yeah, and they look kind of doofy. They got that long

nose and then just teeth everywhere. It's incredible, what a strange evolution. Yeah. More nightmare fuel for you is the giant I pods. So do you know like pillbugs, they're also called like wood lice and roly polly under the rocks exactly. The some of them like roll up, some of them don't roll up, but they all have that general look. The little second called potato bugs. Yeah, that's another name for them. Um, I think I called him Roly Polly's. I loved collecting big fistfuls of them and

just like letting him run over my hands. Interesting, I was a monster. Yeah, um, so imagine one of those roll pollies that's the size of a chihuahua. Really yep, where are they? They're deep under the sea there, so five hundred feet under the sea in the West Atlantic Ocean lives the giant i pod. They grow up to up to two and a half feet in length and up to four pounds. So they're in fact related to pillbugs.

They're both isopods, so they're quite closely related. Obviously, the pillbugs are terrestrial and the isopods are aquatic, but they're part of this larger family of Isopoda, which also includes tongue eating parasites that live in the sea. We've actually talked about it on the show before, but these are parasites that latch onto fish tongues, suck out their blood,

and replace the actual tongue. In terms of functioning, what it replaced everything that's outed normal, I mean, you know, relatively normal the tongue, right, because they eat so much of the fish tongue that the tongue atrophies, and the fish uses that isopod that parasite as a tongue because it's like attached to the muscles at the back of the tongue. So once that actually, once that isopod completes its life cycle and drops off of the fish, the

fish dies because it doesn't have a tongue anymore. Wow, Well, I'm glad. Do they have those? They don't have those for people, do they. There's no, not that I know of. No, is that your tongue. No, it's it's a predator that replaced my tongue. So here's the picture of one of these guys. He's being held by I guess a researcher, kind of like a little baby. It's like, what do

the scientists do with these weird animals? They just pull them out so they can show them, I guess, so just holding like look at this check out and I think that's pretty much it just like look at this weird thing. The thing that they pulled out like dies right after they chase around their crush like holding this thing up like look at this yeah, yeah, running away, Yeah exactly. Um, giant potato bug fish. It's not a fish though, is it. No, it's it's a it's nice

a pod, which is kind of more closely related to crustaceans. Uh. They're kind of the poster child for deep sea gigantism. So that's where Oh it's funny the post your child gigantism. Do you or your relatives suffer from deep sea gigantism. If so, we're here to help call one eight hundred deep sea gigantism lawyers. Uh So, invertebrates at greater depths can actually evolve to grow much larger than their smaller counterparts.

So like think about the giant squid. Normally squid aren't really that big, but deep under the sea, like at these great depths, they can actually get to be quite large. Uh this, there's a few theories about why this happens. One of them is that because at these depths the food density drops so like there's not that much food around,

there's not that many organisms. Obviously sunlight doesn't reach so there's not as much phytoplankton down there, so obviously right, Uh so you need you literally need a larger body to be able to cover more ground and fight scattered resource which seems kind of counterintuitive because like, the bigger you are, the more food you need. But on the other hand, there's this law in nature where it's like the bigger your body is, you're actually more efficient metabolically.

Uh So, something tiny needs to keep eating pretty constantly to keep its body running, but a large animal has more body reserves, so it can put a lot of it a lot of its energy can be stored, whereas like a small animal. It's kind of like how hummingbirds have to feed basically constantly to stay alive because they're so small they have no result. Yeah, so that's why giant tortoises and things can live. Yeah, And actually that's a very good point because these large animals, like the

greenland shark, which we've talked about on previous episodes. Is this giant shark that can live hundreds of years because it's metabolism is so slow and it's so big, and it it's like its whole body system is just kind of slowed down in the it's this giant ancient creature. Yeah, I'm really interested in in the animals live a long time just because it's i don't know, just interesting. Yeah, I mean, there I find them interesting because they are

old I think things too. Yeah, but I get what you're saying because you don't think of we think of it in terms of human lifespan. So something that lives hundreds of years, it's just bizarre to think of one lifespan spanning over like five hundred years, right, And you attach your perception of time to their perception of time,

which is totally different, So you think that. I'm always imagining that they poke their head up all the time and say like, see what's going on, Like you know what I mean, Like they're like, oh, they're wearing those outfits, you know what I mean. Like they're like they see like try corner hats, and then they poke their head up again and it's like the seventies of like bell bottoms,

and you know it's not happening. They're just like they're just like thinking this they're thinking, right, I don't know. I kind of like the idea that they're thinking, like, Hi, wait, when did fregging caps go out about human culture? I'm sure they're like keeping it out. They're just like living a long time so they could see more human outfits. That's my idea exactly. How nature works. So one last deep sea creature I want to talk about. It's really funny.

It's called so it's the toll a jellyfish. It's a species of deep sea crown jellyfish. It's I don't know, do you play D and D at all or did when I was younger. Yeah, it's kind of looks like one of these when it looks like one of the monsters from d nd D because it's red, it's got twenty tentacles, like what's that I monster in dn D I don't know enough about, or with blanks or whatever.

I don't know. I had a corrupt dungeon master who gave me some strength that was way too high so I could beat like everybody, and then the game was no fun, like paid off the dungeon give me strength because everyone was like, how did you get that strength when you're a knave or whatever? And you found that bribery doesn't pay something like that. These deep sea crowned jellyfish are bioleminescent, and when it's attacked, it actually flashes a blue police siren of bioluminescence. Let me show you

a video of this. So here's it's a this guy it's really freaky looking as you can see. And then when it's attacked it has like this blue beautiful Yeah, it looks like blue fireworks. Man, I'd like to hold one of those when I was stoned. Well, it would

probably nark on you. Because this is also known as the alarm jellyfish, or as I like to call it, the snatch fish, because it will use this alarm when it's attacked to drop predators in which sounds counterintuitive, but what happens is, so it's being attacked by a smaller predator, it does this alarm. Larger predators come over to see what's happening, and instead of attack the jellyfish, they attack their attackers, so the smaller predator that was attacking the jellyfish.

So there essentially they're calling in the c police, which comes over, checks it out, and then eats the predator that was bothering them. Oh that's interesting. It's a very complicated trick. Yeah, I mean, I almost don't understand it, but that's just because I'm well, it's well, it's a little confusing because you have like these two So, so jellyfish gets attacked by say a little fish, right, and then the jellyfish signals it's alarmed, it flashes blue, it

makes all this commotion. A bigger fish comes overish over there, right, and it's like, there's this these bright lights happening. I wonder what's going on, And instead of attacking the jellyfish, it's like, oh, hey, look a little fish. I'll eat that because that's more that's more ticing than the jets. The big thing. The jellyfish just gets to escape. Now it doesn't it's yeah, it's just it's just itching so that it can escape. Oh, I got it. Well, wait,

what was the little fish gonna do? The jellyfish try to eat it? Okay, there you go get it. Um. It is very complicated, so I think that's if that. So that kind of jellyfish that has all those great lights would be if it was a Pixar movie, would be like they'd make a disco out of those, right, or put it on top of a police car. Yeah, exactly, like just slap it on top of a fish police car and then the sirens off. And it's funny because it is it's red and blue, so it's it's very pretty.

They say bioluminescence or or you say bioluminescence or that's the term, and it's just such a it's such a like, I mean, you can call it that, but it's also just incredible. I mean, it's just the craziest thing. Ever, how the you know what I mean. I mean, it's like you can call it bioluminescence, but it's really just like more like yeah, it is. It is beautiful and nuts.

And why how in the old with that develop as a defense mechanism rather than just like some horrible looking thing like a jaw that's loaded, you know what I mean, Like they get lights? Why do they get lights? It's other things gets a horrible looking exploding jaw. Well you know, I mean maybe to them, an exploding jaw is attractive. I don't know. Jellyfish has a better agent negotiated for

the lights. I mean, that's a great thing. You know. Well, marine biologists actually mimic that pattern of light using just like a mechanical device to attract predators. I know, I know they steal it trapped, and so you take them out of the ocean and show them to their girlfriend or I think between that mother in law joke. So anyway, yes, they're pulling these things out. Yeah, they're pulling these things out and making mother in law jokes exactly, and then

they yeah, exactly exactly, it's not right. They've even used that alarm to lure in a giant squid, which they caught on film for like one of the it's really hard to catch giant squid all I know, but I like that. Yeah, Yeah, I like any kind of like treasure hunt kind of thing, you know, I just really like any kind of Yeah, So if there's something it's hard to see or like it's hard to get a picture of, I like that. Like Locknest Monster to me is like, so if I can't see the Locknest Monster,

I'll take a giant squid. And I've seen that. It's very neat that they can't see them. Also, anything that exists where it's like we know they exist because whales have scars on from that's incredible. We can't. Yeah, it's interesting. It does make it more real somehow, because I have seen like dead giant squid, and it's somehow just like because it's dead, it almost doesn't register as a real thing. You're like, yeah, okay, I get that's real. But then

when you actually see it, moving and alive. It really sinks and it's like, no, this is a real living creature, not just a big dead thing or like a big model. Or you have those pictures of on postcards of like some guy looks like Charlie Chaplin stand next to a giant squid that looks kind of just like a pile of um oh, I don't know something, but not like a live thing, right. I love those postcards though. It is really funny to look at old pictures of what

people thought squid and octopus looked like. Like I saw a cartoon of an octopus where it has like a a mouth like a human mouth, and of course they don't have human mountains, they have beaks. But it's just it's really funny to see that like just has this like weird smile with teeth and that that doesn't really happen. But they had no idea what they were doing when they were drawing these animals. But now we can, we can see videos of them because we we stole the

idea from the jellyfish, right, So the jellyfish. So these so these biologist dangles, yeah, dangle like lights that look like jellyfish down there and trick giant squid. Yeah, exactly, another day at the office the maniacs. What would happen if humans were forced deep, deep under water and had to evolve to survive their environment. First, we'd have to

get rid of some of our pesky organs. Lungs obviously don't work under water, but even worse, at the bottom of the ocean, the pressure is so great over fifteen thousand p s I. Your lungs would be crushed as the air becomes compressed, and water would force its way into any part of your body still filled with air. And even if we could somehow breathe a tank of air without our lungs collapsing, we would suffer from nitrogen narcosis.

In this high pressure environment, nitrogen dissolves out of the air we breathe and would leach into our blood, choking us on the cellular level. So we'd have to ditch the lungs in favor of some nice gill slits, perhaps the ones that are present in fetal development that we've been using forming parts of the ear with no sunlight are year with no sunlight. Our eyes would be used forming parts of the ear with no sunlight, are with

no sunlight our eyes would be used us. Unless we could make use of some bioluminescence, we'd either want to ditch the eyes or develop huge, gome like eyes with a nice bioluminescent glow. Due to our relatively large size and the poor nutrition in this environment, we need a much slower metabolism. Our many muscles and bones would become superfluous and perhaps vestigial as we became smooth, gelatinous creatures that slowly float through the depths, hoping to ambush that

rare bit of unsuspecting prey. Perhaps we'd be like the greenland sharks, who live hundreds of years due to their very slow metabolism, with sharp serrated teeth that can snatch up prey and prevent them from escaping or jaws. We would in effect become creepy monsters, but we learned to find our new horrible shape to be attractive. In other words, Snapchat filters are helping us adapt to our new deep sea homes. Don't go to a sea which to trade

your legs and for fins just yet. When we return, we'll talk about some alien creatures that can be found a bit closer to home. You don't actually need to go to the depths of the ocean to find alien creatures. You can find them in almost every body of water and in almost every inch of the ocean. For example, take sea snails please. You probably have an image of a little shell in the snail head poking out, but there's a group of teeny tiny sneeze snip sneeze snails.

There's a group of teeny tiny sea snails and sea slugs called teropoda, free swimming gastropods found all over the ocean at depths of only around thirty feet, who look like a cross between aliens and ghosts. These include sea angels who have what appeared to be wings and alien antenna, and whose bodies are a pale, ghostly veil of transparent,

gelatinous flesh. They're carnivores and feed on sea butterflies. Another group of pteropods sea butterflies look like a snail, a butterfly and orchand and an alien ghost all had a baby together. It's golls like wings beat as if it's flying, allowing it to swim through the ocean as it carries along it's tiny transparent snail shell encased body. I am afraid of no ghost, but an alien ghost. Yeah, I'm

kind of afraid of that. Yeah. I think that it's interesting to see our concepts of science fiction and thinking about sci fi and then you look at some of our sci fi inventions and you look under the sea and they're just there. So like the concept art for the movie Aliens, like you look under who is that

guy who made that? Uh? Yeah, that's right. Like hr Geiger's illustrations just look like deep sea creatures or animals that you can find in the ocean, and even common animals that we don't really we don't know that much about because either they're small or they're hard to find. But like these these snails that are actually really spooky looking. They don't look like terrestrial snails at all. It's kind

of amazing. And I like the idea that I don't know that there's all this stuff going on that that that doesn't care about Donald Trump, you know what I mean, Like there's a whole other civilization that's going on that's you know, kind of probably going to be fine no matter what we do to the planet. They're just going

to be doing their thing. So later we're going to talk to I'm talking to a marine biologist who kept an octopus in his home, and the fact that octopuses are so intelligent kind of gives me hope that, say we screw up the planet, maybe octopuses will be the dominant life form and maybe they'll be nicer, right they exactly, although we can probably mess up the oceans too. U So then they will adapt, probably and they'll just be muck monsters, you know, or the plastic eating potato giants

or whatever they are. You know, Yes, I hope, So, I really do. I think so, you know, I mean, if plastic eating potato monsters can learn from our mistakes and develop a more peaceful society, that'd be great. Yeah, eventually one of them will crawl out of the muck and become a Koke brother, but I mean that will take a long time. Yeah, yeah, I mean I think they've crawl into the muck. Come up there. Boom roasted, the boom roasted posthumously roasted. That that was real good.

So I want to talk about speaking of disgusting worms roasted, really really raking. I'm on fire. Uh So I want to talk about um oh boy, here's a here's a Latin word that I'm going to try to pronounce and get it perfectly the first time gorgon or hightentions ripped pens right, otherwise known as the proboscis warm Why don't we go with that? Um So, the proboscis worm has

a branching proboscus that looks like a lightning strike. Um. So, when they're attacked, they actually turn their proboscis, which is this like it's an extrusion of their mouth that helps them hunt and eat a popular it's so fetch down in don't exactly it's a versible which just is a fancy way of saying it's like reversible, like you can turn a glove inside out, So they can turn it inside out like a glove. And here's a fun video

of that happening so you can see it. Just use my god, it looks it looks like a lightning strike, right, yeah, or else like a spider man out of his mouth, you know, like a it's like a web exactly, yeah, yeah, exactly, it's a goop web. Uh. And they do that when they're being attacked as a kind of like distraction technique. Sometimes they'll even completely toss it like dump it out at their attacker so they can escape, which is kind of weird because as far as we know, they can't

grow them back, so it's really a last ditch effort. Yeah, and then they can't eat, but hopefully they'll be able to reproduce between the time they spit out their means of eating. And so that's the that thing they spit out is there, like digestive system or something. It's there. It's their proboscus, which is like they're basically like a tongue um, but they use it for for hunting and

they'll they'll spit it. They'll capture prey by like poking their proboscis out and like snatching it up and pulling it in. So if they ditch that, then they no longer have the opportut their whole proboscis because exactly they panicked. That would suck if like they it was like a surprise party for one of these guys, and they're like like surprise, like yeah, and just like spit out of pros Like Fredd, it was just it's your birthday. It's like, well,

damn it, now I'm gonna starve to death. And what's the name of that animal? It's a proboscis warm or gorgon horror's and that's um. I think it's interesting because so so I guess like the predator would just be like that thing. I mean, you saw that video, if you saw that coming at you, well, right, but the thing that's trying to eat that thing is probably so freaked up looking that why would it be freaked out

by some goop would be like? Oh, it's all relative though, right, Like if you have if you're like one of those um goblin sharks, to you, someone with a big pointy nose and a big set of jaws you can shoot out is attractive, but not like a goop monster. So you know, it's all you know, beauty is relative. It's it's all in the eyes or the eye spots or

proboscis of the beholders. One thing that just kind of a quick thing about sand dollars because that's a common animal I think people are pretty used to and we know we've beach comb them. You pick them up there the the white that little white disk that has that little floral exactly. Yeah, so that's that's when they're dead. When they're alive, they're covered in like thousands of tiny hair like spines. They look fuzzy, they look like they're covered in fluff. And these spines there there are a

bunch of spines. They're a little they're also tiny tube feet called podia and silia, so which is pretty silly. Get and these can move around and they actually allow the sand dollar to walk on like these hundreds of little uh tube feet um. And they also use these hairs to transfer sand into its mouth. So it's like a conveyor belt of thousands of these hairs and they're all like pulling these cranes of sand into its mouth and then they scrape the algae off and that's what

they eat. Wow, that's really weird. What a weird thing, like a conveyor belt like a human or not a human, but like a like a body that is a conveyor belt to to bring sand into your mouth so you can lick it off. Right. It'd be like as if you could put a sandwich on your hand and then just a bunch of tiny hairs like drags the sandwich up into your mouth. It sounds pretty good. Yeah, if if if we up the ocean enough, then someday they

might they might pull the stand in their mouth. And there's no muck on it for them to lick, right exactly. I mean, yeah, it is all pretty interlinked. On the other hand, the more we screw up, it seems like we create a big blooms of algae. So maybe they'll be fine, it's just everything else will be dead. Yeah, and then they'll get huge algae. Then they'll be like monster sea or child. Then they'll be like, I've had enough of the ocean. I'm coming on land taking it over.

They'll also eat little tiny pieces of metal because because they're um, they kind of lack even though they can like walk with all their little little hairs, they can't. They're not great at locomotions, so they're kind of at the mercy of the currents. And they're relatively light, so then they would just get tossed around like an ocean frisbee. So by eating the metal, they actually can weigh themselves down so they can stick in the sand are easily.

I didn't how and oh that's so strange. And then they also uh in response to threats, baby sand dollars, which are called larva, will clone themselves, which both makes themselves smaller so harder, more difficult targets and increases their numbers, so it's a survival strategy. It's like, if you were being attacked, you could just split yourself into two smaller guys. Insane. I mean, what a what a place? What a place? It? Really?

I feel like the Little Mermaid kind of was selling it short, was bearing the lead with like the you know, the song and dance number, with all the animals and monsters and stuff. It's like, oh, that's pretty neat, but they don't show like an animal, like getting split in half and forming two smaller animals, which you know, the worst thing about that movie exactly. I mean, this is one of the coolest. It's one of the weirdest animals, I think. And it's called planary in, which is a

flat worm that's found all over the world. Uh in salt water and fresh water. There even some terrestrial ones, so they're they're everywhere. Um, and they're very simple. They're just basically they look like little brown linguini and they have they have eye spots, not really eyeballs, because it's just like a cluster of cells that can detect light

and dark. So very simple. Their brain is a ganglion, which is just a cluster of nerve cells um and just just like your mother in law ganglion head, and it also has just like a kind of very simple nerve cord um, no spine, no bones. Uh. They don't have lungs or circulatory system. They just absorb oxygen through their body. They have pharynx which is kind of like both a throat and a bottle at the same time, um, and a gastrovascular cavity instead of a stomach, and so

they're very simple. They use the eye spots to kind of vaguely see their environment. They eat through their quote unquote mouth opening of their pharynx on in the middle of them, and then digest it through their just basically a hole in their bodies. So very attractive. They pee through their skin. Yeah that's good. Um. Yeah, they they poop through their pharynx, but then they pee through their body,

so any liquid waste is excreted through their their skin. Well, they're in the water, so it doesn't matter, yeah, exactly. I mean, who doesn't peanut, It doesn't pee in the pool. You know. There's some animal that down there is designed to drink whatever they're into. It just design specifically to drink what's the name of this animal, probably just urinated through its skin at least I don't know if they drink it, but they're at least into it. You know,

they're freaky. Planarians are even more freaky. They can regrow their entire body from tiny like if you cut it, you can it just regrows the whole body. So they can regrow their head, eye spots, pharynx, and everything they need from sliced pieces. So you can cut You can cut a planarian like a loaf of bread, and each chunk is going to grow into a new polinarian. You

can even you can bisect it. You can cut it in any which way one like they've roughly like one two hundred of the planarian can be cut and regrow so tiny sections of it. Um you can even you can even like partially bisect it, so kind of like split it down the middle slightly, but like not all the way, so it'll grow two heads on one organism. That that's ah, that's nice. I mean it's nice for them that they get cut. Yeah, they're like, who cares. Yeah,

now I'm gonna have a friend. Yeah, yes, I'm glad you have someone to hang out with. You get it, you slay yourselves see queens and then grow anew. I wonder if they both have the same personality both their segments after they grow question. I mean, their personality has got to be very simple because their brands are so tiny.

But yeah, you know, it would suck though, if like one of them was like super into other things than the other one and it was like, you know, just like really different or politically very different and they had to share a body. Can you imagine they've had to fight with themselves right Thanksgiving? Would be so awkward, even worse than humans. Exactly. They can regrow because they use stem cells, which are the kinds of selves found in

embryonic humans. Unlike humans, we don't we don't have stem cells as adults that are throughout the body that can just like regrow a finger. Although you know, re searchers are trying to use human stem cells to see if we can regrow body parts. So if you cut off a fingertip and then you treat it with stem cells, you can grow your fingertip back. Um. Unfortunately, we're kind of not at the stage where we can just rub

planarians all over our body and regrow right body. But uh, you know, maybe we can study them and figure out how they manage this and then can it would be really useful, Like during the French Revolution, you know robes Pier, he cut off his head. It just grows a little tiny body out of it, like like I'm the new Robespierre. Righted, history would have exactly planarian robes Pierre. I don't know why I'm talking about robes Pier because he's a famous

he's a famous planarian. He got his he got his head cut off, right, he's the most He cut off a bunch of people's heads, right. I wouldn't have gone on a French Revolution podcast. Yeah, well, this isn't that. I'd love to see French people try to cut off Planarian's head and just get really frustrated, like some kind of bourgeoisie. Planarian keeps getting its head cut off. It's like, man, we just keep making new ones. That's why they don't

have capital punishment undersea. That's true. That actually think that is correct. That's right, because you you just can't do it. You can't. You just make more more of them, will make a mess. You got a courtroom, will turn into who knows, everybody will start squirting stuff and growing stuff, shooting out there and someone else Easter proboscars or is I like to call it a nice time? Why are

we so fascinated with intelligent aliens? One theory is that as science advances, we are seeking a replacement to religion. Instead of a god, we want to believe in the existence of intelligent life beyond our pale blue dot. A psychology study by North Dakota State University found that religiousness and believe in aliens were inversely related. Those who were non religious but will expressed a desire for meaning, we're

more likely to believe in extraterrestrial intelligence. But is this belief in aliens just a replacement for religion, or is the instinct that there may be more intelligent life beyond our world rational? Personally, I think that if there's a planet out there with conditions suitable for life, there's a non zero chance that intelligent life may form. In fact, as will soon discuss, we have evidence that intelligent life

can evolve separately from humans. When we return, I'll be joined by one such human who formed an emotional bond with one such of these homegrown intelligent alien life forms octopuses They're one of my favorite aquatic animals, and I'm hoping once you've listened to this interview, they'll become yours as well. Octopuses are beautiful, strange, and intelligent creatures. Their skin can change color at the blink of an eye

due to color changing cells called chromatophores. They have no bones and can squeeze through tiny holes that are action of their normal body size. The largest octopus, the giant Pacific octopus, weighs in it about a hundred and fifty pounds, whereas the star sucker pigmy octopus weighs in it less than a gram. Octopus is evolved somewhat independently from humans. Our last common ancestor was probably something like the polenarian, a worm like creature with simple eye spots, around seven

hundred fifty million years ago. That means they're complex, incredible brains evolved on a completely separate limb of the evolutionary tree. So if you're wondering what alien intelligence looks like, who's got eight limbs and no thumbs? These guys joining me today is professor of Marine biology at the Alaska Pacific

University and Anchorage. David shield In octopus making contact. The season premiere of PBSS Nature, Professor Shield invites an octopus named Heidi into his living room and sees what kind of relationship can be formed with an octopus. Thank you so much for joining us, Professor Shield, as you're thank you for having me. So when you first decided to welcome an octopus into your home, what were you hoping

to find out? Well? Um, I think I say this in the film, but it's really just a way to spend more time playing with an octopus without the limitations of being underwater myself. You know, so scuba diving can be fairly limited, and so this was a way to expand on that. What new things did you pick up on by having the Heidi the octopus in your living room? Um,

I don't know so much. If it was about learning something new, is just kind of being present with the animal for a longer period of time, um, and kind of having that continual input to mall things over and think about things. I guess I got a little more interested in understanding octopus cognition and the way they encounter

their world than I had been prior to the project. Yeah, that makes sense to me, because so I never had a dog growing up, and when I got a dog, I was so fascinated with the way that I saw her mind working. Uh and in a way I didn't really expect, like I would see her looking for things and just be so so interested in how she would get up on her hind legs to kind of look around her environments. Like, huh. So so weird living with an animal that is showing signs of this human level cognition.

And I imagine that's even weirder with an octopus, which is not a mammal, evolved completely separately from us, So it's it's such an alien looking creature. Yeah, And I think I think in in today's world, we don't often spend a lot of time with animals, and particularly not with a bunch of different kinds of animals. You know, people spend time with dogs and cats and and maybe just some extent birds, um. And so it's kind of fascinating to spend time with any animal that's much more

distantly related to us. Uh. And so that was I find that interesting as well, and that was what made this project kind of fun. Well started your fascination with octopuses because I think you mentioned in the documentary that you've been studying them for around twenty years. Over twenty years, yeah about let's see, I started so yeah, almost twenty five years now. The I mean, I've always been fascinated

with octopuses. Who wouldn't be right? Um? Uh? You know, when I was about twelve years old, I received a copy of Chacousta's book Soft Intelligence as a gift, But I think I was fascinated by ocean life even before then. At the time, I read a lot of science fiction, and I suppose there's a twelve year old I thought being a marine biologist might be as close as I

could never get to studying life from another planet. Yeah, and you mentioned in the documentary how octopuses are about as alien as you can get in terms of intelligent animals because of how far back they are separated from us on the evolutionary tree. Can you talk a little bit about how they really evolved all these structures completely independently of humans, like their eyes and their heart and

their brains. You know, it's it's probably a stretch to say completely independently, but I think it's true that evolutionary science has been surprised several times over the last twenty five or thirty years in understanding how deep the roots of evolutionary traits go. I mean, I remember when hawks genes,

for example, were first discovered. People were talking about the fact that it seemed like limbs and much of the regulatory structure of animals was the same, whether you were talking about a marine polocyte worm or a mammal, and that was really surprising to evolutionary biologists at the time,

or at least two some of them. UM, and so I think the roots what what this really shows is not so much that that the evolution of oxopus and humans has been completely independent, but that the roots of UM what we think about is fairly advanced traits might in fact be extremely deep. Octopuses having common with humans, probably some aspects of the visual system, some aspects of sensory ecology, some aspects of nervous evolution that are common to all animals, and we're present very early on in

the animal stem. On the other hand, the general organization of their nervous system, the way it's laid out in the body, the way the brain grows, the way um nerves are distributed in the brain versus the body. These things seem to be really different between octopuses and for example, mammals, and so it's it is really fascinating to look at the ways that the octopus functions. Is sometimes considered an

honorary vertebrate. You know, it functions in many ways that are very similar to the ways that dog or a catworld function Uh. And yeah, it's organization at the at the at the gross anatomy level is very different. And so it's it's a lot of it's very intriguing to compare and think about why that those big differences in anatomy. Um nevertheless seemed very approachable to us. We feel like we have a connection with this animal that looks back

at us with these very different eyes, but very recognizable eyes. Yeah, that's so interesting to me. And one one of the things that I find interesting and sad is the short lifespan of the octopus because it's so intelligent. You know, already I feel sad about like dogs having a shorter lifespan than humans, but some of these octopuses have such short, fleeting lifespans, but they're also so intelligent. It seems kind

of cruel of nature to do this. Um, And what do you think it's like, from the perspective of the octopus, what do you think it's like to have that intelligence but also have such a short lifespan that almost it seems to end as soon as the new generation of octopus has come into play. Yeah. I don't have the sense that they worry too much about how time is left. You know, at the end, male pretty busy looking for

mating opportunities. Females are pretty busy tending their eggs, So they kind of have a lot going on, and I don't imagine they dwell much on the inevitable. Yeah, that maybe that's a blessing in a way. They just live in the moment. We should all be so lucky, right exactly. You mentioned in the documentary, uh that your observations of

Heidi aren't exactly scientific. But did you find that it helped influence your research and your understanding of octopuses or did it just give you sort of a new dimension to the meaning of your research. It's probably too soon to tell. Um. I'm thinking now more about octopus cognition and how they encounter and perceive their world, and so

that might influence future research directions. But you know, research is this, uh, this intriguing mixture of directions and questions that interests the researcher and opportunities that exist, and so you have to get them somehow to line up before you've got a new direction. Yeah, that makes sense. It's a much slower process than maybe building the emotional connection with the octopus, which because it seemed maybe there was

like a little bit of a moment of acclamation. But both you guys, you and your daughter and the octopus seemed to become pretty fast friends pretty quickly. It was I thought it was really cute when your daughter would come home and the octopus would rush over to the other side of the tank to greeter, just like a dog or a cat would. Why do you think hidio is so excited to see you guys? And what does affection mean for an octopus? Well, this is a question.

I mean, how do you liked attention? Um and you know, stimulus, string play. She liked having things going on. Plus probably our hands tasted a little bit like the anticipation of a meal. Uh, you know, because we handle the shrimp or whatever. And so whatever chemical signals or sense we have um that she can detect, that's got to become over time become associated with with food and reward you Pavlov's octopus. Yeah, Pavlov's octopus exactly what and so like that.

I thought it was interesting that she seemed to really like to hold hands, and that kind of explains why that she associates hands with food. She would also squirt water at you guys. Do you think she was being mischievous or is that an octopus is way of exploring their world. Yeah, the squirting is it's used in the

wild as a way to deter nuisances. So if a fish, little little fish even doesn't have to be a threatening fish, but even a little fish gets interested in octopus, then the octopus will squirt water added a jetta water added to try and drive it away or kind of reach out with one arm and try and bat it out of the way. Um. I think there's a moment of that in the film too. But you know, in terms of sporting us, I think maybe it starts out that way of like just seeing what happens, but then you know,

once you've taken a bucket of octopus water in the face. Um, I think the octopus learns that she can get a reaction out of you. And so that that might be part of it too. And can she do you think she can kind of read your body language and your expression? I know in the documentary you mentioned she can recognize human faces and you would wear a mask when you had to weigh her, so she wouldn't associate you with an unpleasant activity. Do you think she can read expressions

or body language? Yeah, I'm not sure that's a that's a good question. Um. You know, I once kept an oxopus in my facility at the university that got to be fairly famous for aiming for people's faces with the squirt of water. And and in in the at the university, the water's Alaskan water, so it's quite cold to take

a squirt in the face. And so one day I was given a tour in the lab and I decided I didn't want to take a squirt of water in the face, and so I there was this vertical sort of panel that when you opened the tank, that's clear, and so I sort of stood behind that where the octopus could could see me, and I could see the oxopus and I could talk to the visitors. But you know, I was protected from that squirt of water and and the octopus managed to shoot directly up over that barrier

and hit me in the top of the head. Anyway. Wow, that's a clever girl. I don't know if that's reading facial expressions, but she certainly was tracked thing where I was. Yeah, so that's an interesting understanding of physics. Yeah, it was pretty fascinating. I kind of felt like I was safe, but it turned out not to be the case. Speaking of their sense of physics, one of the methods of play that octopus is engaged in is they take that empty pill bottle that's buoyant and they push it into

inside the tank. They have that jet of water circulating through the tank, and they kind of put it, push it into that jet of water and watch it spin around the tank and come back to them, kind of like they're playing fetch with themselves. Do you think that's what it is or what do you think is the purpose of that form of play. Yeah, that was actually a recreation of an experiment that was done in the

Seattle Aquarium. So, yeah, the water is circulating and kind of a you know, a big gyre around the tank, and and that's because there's a jet you know, the surface that's blowing water out and then given the sort of confined to the tank. That creates a cycle in the tank where the water comes back to its starting point.

And in the Seattle experiment, the octopus was you know, they did it with several octopuses, and not all of them did it, but the ones who did would use their own jet to blow this neutrally buoyant toebottle out into the into the current, have it circled around, and then they grab it when it comes the other way and comes back to them, and then push it back out. And the experimenters likened that to bouncing a ball um, which is a form of play, just sort of engaging

in repetitive motion. You know, in some ways, it's a little reminiscent of there was a paper not too many years ago, five or ten years ago maybe that documented that that birds, parrots specifically not songbirds, but parrots had a rhythmic sense and could dance to human music. So this, you know, this sense of rhythm maybe one of these

very deep evolutionary things that many animals possess. Yeah, that's so that's so interesting because I know we've talked on the show before about parents who will actually use sticks or other things in their environment to kind of drum. So it's this weird bird form of making music themselves and kind of dancing to the beat of it. And I think this idea that in birds are quite alien

to us as well. I mean, we're we're a little more related to birds than we are two octopus is right, but um, but still like theyre, they diverged quite a while ago. But it's it is really interesting to see these kind of parallels of play and an understanding of

repetitive motion or maybe rhythm. Do you think so? So you mentioned that our last common ancestor with an octopus was probably a flat worm like animal, and they evolved intelligence, like you said, maybe not completely independently, as obviously we shared a common ancestor, but uh, they in a parallel

way they developed this intelligence. Do you think that given the right conditions, like a planet that supports life, that intelligent life is very likely, like sort of inevitable, or do you think that we're just extremely lucky to have this happen. Well, you know, it's a big universe, and I you know, astronomers are discovering exoplanets with some regularity. It seems like, and so I suspect Earth is not particularly unique across the scale of the of the universe.

UM and so, Yeah, if you have a planet that supports life, once the life becomes active, that is, once uh an organism has to control its own body parts in relation to information that comes in from a complex environment and has to move through that environment like animals do in this planet, then I don't think it's it's that unexpected to find different degrees of intelligence and problem solving. Yeah.

Do you think if mammals and humans never really rose to prominence, that some kind of intelligence sea life, maybe like the octopus, could have formed primate like or human like intelligence, or or some kind of society, or do you think that the environment of the ocean would be somewhat prohibitive towards that kind of evolutionary path. Well, that depends what you mean by sort of you know, human

like or primate like intelligence. I mean, we consider elephants to be pretty smart, and an elephant trunk works on a similar biomechanical principle to octopus arms. You know, they have that same kind of dexterity. UM. And so you know that's a level to which UM you know, octopuses might might be similar. At the same time, if you are looking at sort of human levels of technology, then you know, the biggest obstacle to to that is really

probably water. Um any sort of manufacturing process based on combustion doesn't work so well underwater, and octopus biology is pretty intimately tied up with seawater, so they're not they're not well poised right now evolutionarily to just come walking out onto dry land. So maybe no cars made out of seaweed, and uh, well it's yeah, it's a little difficult to imagine a completely underwater combustion based technology getting started.

I mean, you know, if you think about early technologies for humans, fire was probably pretty important in going from um of the very simple tool making society to a more technological society, and so that that seems like that's easier on land than it is underwater. They do use sort of these simple tools to some extent, like the octopuses that will hide in coconuts. Do you think does that count as tool used? Do you think they learn this behavior? Is it an instinctive behavior to to use

these coconuts as camouflage? Well? That yeah, that example of the coconuts has been considered a very minimal type of tool use. Tool uses usually thought about modifying an object to suit a purpose for the user, but the modification in this case is pretty simple, just assembling two halves, like picking up two sides of a clamshell. So it probably counts the tool use, but it's a pretty minimal kind.

And the importance of tool use in sort of you know, there's this there's this history in talking about human intelligence of trying to claim a unique spot in the world for humans as rational agents, and tools were one way to sort of draw the line right between us and the rest of the world. It is probably misguided to try and draw a lie, and so any way that you would attempt to demarcate that line is probably also misguided. And so you know, um, there they are. They have

the kinds of intelligence they do. They're kind of amazing at it. They can open a clam better than I can, for sure. Um, but if you want to have a conversation with with words, then you probably want to look for a person, not an octopus. Do you think One of the more shocking things that I saw in the documentary was this video of Heidi possibly dreaming, could you talk a little bit about because it didn't even occur to me that maybe octopuses could dream, especially in the

way that Heidi does. Um, well, you know, octopuses sleep. So this turns out to very likely be one of those extremely deep connections amongst all animals, in the sense that in any animal fila where people have looked carefully, there seems to be evidence that the animals need to sleep. And in the case of mollusks octopuses, they also seem to have something similar to what we call rapid eye movement and sleep, which is one of two types of

sleep that that humans have. And so there they are engaged in sleep and engaged in rapid eye movement sleep. But we don't really fully understand what sleep does for humans, let alone for other animals. And do we really know what dreaming is either, I'm not sure. And so if we can't even answer those questions for people, it's it's

that much harder to answer them for for octopuses. But we do use, we do use our behavior even amongst people as an indication of our internal state, Like what's going on with me while people look at me, whether I'm pacing, whether I'm nervous, whether I'm yelling, you know, and they use my behavior to get a sense and

read my mental state, and we accept that. We consider that to be fine, and sometimes we extend it to our dogs, you know, we say, oh, look his legs are running, you know, and he's twitching, and he's probably dreaming of chasing a rabbit. So if we do that same sort of thing for the octopus, they have these amazing abilities to change the color and texture of their skin, and this is a behavior that we can see, and

they do it when they're asleep sometimes. And so there's this bit in the film where you can see this octopus going through a sequence of of of of color changes and texture changes. And so in the film, I I sort of narrate that is that typical of a behavior that the octopus might might exhibit, And it seems to vaguely match up with what you would expect to see if the occupus were pouncing on a crab. But in this case, the octupus is clearly asleep, so maybe

she's dreaming. That comparison to watching your dog kind of twitching in their sleep and the little legs kind of moving a little bit in their mouth twitching. I think it's very apt because obviously we don't we can't be inside the heads of other animals. We can't even, like

you said, dreaming is pretty mysterious even for humans. We we don't actually know exactly how and why dreams happen, uh, And so we can just kind of guess that maybe since animals have the this basic similarity that's basic parallel to our brains, and they also sleep, and they seem to exhibit little motor functions that that are suppressed because of the way sleep functions. But it does seem to

mirror some of their awake behavior. I think to me, it's a pretty strong indicator that they're at least kind of going through the motions maybe of their day, maybe read thinking about what happened that day, or generalizing and

thinking about these behaviors in general. And then it shows up on their body when we're in sleep and the brain stops signals to the rest of to our spinal cord, which case the octopus doesn't have a spinal cord, so I'm supposing it stops signals to the nerve structure somehow.

It must yeah, right, I'm not a sleep biologist. But you know, one of the things that's interesting about this is if if sleep is evolutionarily very deep, and it has a function that pretty much all animals with nervous systems need, and and if dreaming is important, you know, then that raises the question not just about humans and

dogs and occupuses, but like do jellyfish dream? Right? Um? So, you know, I think this is just it's one area where we don't necessarily have a complete story yet about what the biological functions of these things are or whether they're just phenomenon that occur in systems that, you know, nervous systems that have these properties that need to sleep. Dreaming might simply occur as a byproduct of things that are important. It might not be an important product itself.

I don't I don't really know. I don't know that anyone really knows. Yeah, like kind of a spandrel of just having a brain and thinking and then also having to sleep. Yeah. One other thing I was kind of interested in is the extent to which octopuses will socialize with each other. They seem rather solitary, but I know that they do occasionally bump bump tentacles with each other, and they're not necessarily unfriendly. But can you talk a little bit about what the social life of an octopus

is like in the wild? Yeah, well, I think you know, as a general rule, the characterization of of octopuses is probably as solitary seems to bear up reasonably well. They you know, for many octopuses when you find them there alone. On the other hand, we're still sorting out what the exceptions are to that and when they occur in how commonly, And the more we the more we look, the more exceptions we find, and so that that seems to be

fairly interesting. Octopuses do appear to interact with one another more than had previously been noticed. I work also sometimes at that site that is visited towards the very end of the film in Australia, and at those sites you might have sixteen or seventeen octopuses in a relatively small area, and they do seem to interact with one another routinely throughout the day. Um, but we still haven't sorted out what those interactions are about, or how typical they are,

how important they are to the animal's life. They may occur simply because it's a dangerous world out there, and this relatively small patch of habitat has a lot of good shelter, and so it forces the animals into contact with one another. But at the same time, when they're in contact whether another, they are using signaling we think, and a fairly complex set of behaviors and your actions. And so they seem to have access to ways to moderate the need to interact with one another, and they

have tools to do that. I don't mean manufactured tools, I mean behavioral patterns to do that. And so that suggests that even if even if interacting with other octopuses doesn't happen daily in the life of most octopuses, when it does happen, they know how to deal with it. So they're they're introverts, but they know how to function, especially something like that. Yeah, yeah, I may or may not know people like that. I may or may not be a person. So are they any other octopus facts

that you think people should know? You know, I tell my students there's an octopus in every lesson. And what I mean by that is, you know, when I'm teaching ethics or philosophy or aquarium biology, I kind of mean it's easy to talk about how we should treat other humans, or or what does a fish need to survive in an aquarium? Because those are very familiar cases that we we talk about all the time. And what makes this octopus film interesting and what makes occopus is interesting is

there a very different other case. They are what's been called a distant and challenging case, and because of that, they make the questions much clearer. You know, if we want to ask how does what what do humans owe in ethical treatment of animals? Right, if we ask that question about a chimpanzee, it seems pretty straightforward. If we ask that question about a dog, it seems pretty straightforward. But by the time we get to an octopus, it's a much harder question and we have to think about

it a lot more clearly. And so that's why I think it's important to have a film about octopuses, and why I think we if we're going to talk about octopuses, we should do it in a way that um is respectful of what they might offer us, including in the headlines. Yeah exactly. I mean, I think it's hard for people to put themselves on the shoes of like an animal that literally can't wear shoes. It's just so alien to us. But I think they just need four pairs of a yeah,

pull a squid word there. Um. Yeah. I think if we can learn to empathize with an octopus, maybe that would be good for our society as a whole. Like, if you can empathize with an octopus, you can empathize with other people and maybe be a better people. You know, more, empathy can't hurt, right, exactly. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, and again, you guys can check out the documentary. It's called Octopus Making Contact. You can catch that tonight on PBS. It's October two and it's

airing today to the season premiere of Nature. It's an excellent documentary, so check that out. Thank you for speaking with me. So I'm back with Chris crofton uh So. We just finished talking about keeping an octopus as like a family member in your home. I don't know. I always knew octopuses were intelligent, but the idea of them dreaming and playing basically playing like ball with themselves, like tossing a little buoyant ball around, and I didn't know

any of that stuff. Yeah, I had no idea that an octopus was intelligent. I'm still not sure that they are. I think maybe this this biologist guy might be insane. I've got to take his side. I think that there's a lot of evidence of how intelligent they are, especially because they can basically escape any any tank that they're in because they're so squishy, they can slip out of little holes. And then question where are they going to

go steal? They'll steal people's goldfish. So like if you have like an aquarium that has an octopus in it, they've been known to escape out of the aquarium, go over to the bowl of goldfish and eat the goldfish. Okay, well that was that? That Okay, that explains I guess if there's a goldfish nearby. But what else they if they get out of a out of a out of

their tank, where are they going to go? They don't they need to be wet, they do they I think even though they're intelligence, they that doesn't necessarily mean that they have um street smarts. So like they get out of their tank, they get the they get their illicit goods.

There is one story of an octopus that like escaped from uh its container and it was like on a ship, it'd either escape from a net or a container and then it like crawled along the ship and it can survive surprisingly long time, and then it went into like

a teapot full of water. Oh I saw a video of a something an octopus doing something interesting, but I can't really Oh yeah, yeah, there's a viral video of an octopus who's on the deck of a fishing boat and then it squeezes through a tiny hole in the ship into the water. Yeah. Yeah, So they're pretty weirdly capable on land. Obviously they won't survive too long on land, but they can move pretty good. It is kind of I guess, yeah, all right, I guess this is the

thing I have a question about, Katie, and that is why. Now, if you're an intelligent octopus, I mean, this is so interesting because you're applying, like I'm applying human sort of emotions to intelligence, which doesn't necessarily that's who don't necessarily go together, so it's different. It's probably a different kind

of intelligence. But I'm imagining that if you are super intelligent and you're an octopus, you're probably a reincarnated human being punished, because who the hell wants to be an octopus? I mean, I don't know, in a way it might be kind of fun. They can, like they can take east with their arms. But I'm thinking this is the way I think that. I'm like, I'm thinking an octopus is thinking to itself, who the hell wants to be an octopus, which is obviously not a thought that that

would have. I don't know, I mean, we I did talk about earlier. How I think it's kind of cruel that octopuses are fairly intelligent, but they have such short lifespans. But maybe that just makes them live in the moment more. It's like dolphins being super intelligent. Like I'm like, I always think of it in terms of human intelligence, So I'm like, I bet dolphins are pretty mad they can't

go to a concert. Well, there's this famous Douglas Adams quote that I really love, which is like humans always think and I'm just paraphrasing here, but it's like humans always think that we're the most intelligent ones because we've built societies and roads and cars and bureaucracy, while dolphins are just mucking around playing in the water, and dolphins think they're the most intelligent for the exact same reason, right, So that's interesting. So I imagine, Yeah, an octopus is

being some miserable Einstein. You're like, oh, intelligent, that means Einstein. So it's like Einstein, except it's like he he has to be in a tank. I don't know, but well

not always. That's like Einstein in a tank. But like if an octopus, so like if you could like shift your body into every shape and squeeze through holes and like you can taste with your tentacles and um, change change color and texture and just kind of I don't know, it'd be kind but you like, but then to like somebody, like the octopus is excited when the guy's daughter comes home. That's that's that's weird to me. I mean it is.

It is weird because it really kind of puts our own minds in perspective where we kind of feel like humans were special at least mammals are special, right, like humans and primates, and because like you can you look at a dog and you can look into a dog's eyes and you're like, okay, so the dog likes to have its belly rubbed and and that kind of makes sense because they're they're mammals too. They have expressions that

we can read. Um, we've we've actually co evolved with dogs, so we can both kind of read each other's by d language fairly well. But with an octopus, they're so they've evolved in such a different environment. That connection of like I can read their body language, they can read my body language is very is much more difficult. So imagining them their emotional state is so much harder, where it's like, Okay, are they happy or they excited? And

what does that mean? It it? I mean, obviously there's no definitive answers because we can't be inside an octopus brain unless Elon Musk gets on that. I don't know, but uh, you know, it's I think personally, I think it that they are conscious and they're cognizant, but they probably just have a very different experience of the world that's basically impossible to put into words because an octopus

doesn't have words. They probably think in weird pictures and like, uh, you know, they they expressed themselves through their skin can change color and texture. So when they're like we talked about in the interview, like when they're dreaming, their skin sort of fluctuates in color and texture as they're thinking about hunting or playing or whatever they're doing, and it's just it's such a different It's like, I mean, it's

essentially like aliens. Like when we try to think about what alien life would be like, this is to me what it would be like. Did you see that movie about those huge balloons that hung in the sky and US Arrival? Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, and that was that was whoever that guy is Jeremy Renner and uh I think amy um, they like stare at octopus for the movie. Yeah. Someone someone was like, if we make yeah, so that's

just I just thought of that. Yeah. No, exactly, no, exactly, no aliens, No, No, it does because I think that and like I think in the movie they were sort of trying to figure out how to communicate with them, and their method of language was so different from ours

it was hard to recognize. But uh yeah, I mean that's to me, like I mean, obviously an alien might not look like an octopus, but the idea that you know, maybe because octopuses were so we're so far back in terms of when we were related to them, like seven million years ago and very simple like warm like creature was our common ancestor that you know, I imagine like maybe if there's a planet that can support life and

can create at least a warm like creature. Maybe intelligent life is bound to develop given enough time, given the proper circumstances, the environment that's friendly towards evolving life. And and then that way, like maybe this kind of star trek world where you have these different races that develop and but they all kind of all think and dream and and can communicate. Maybe it'll all start in this

marine biologists apartment. Maybe that's what he's doing. Well, maybe Heidi is learning more from us than we're learning from her, and she's she's learning how to take over the world. Yeah, he's gonna, Yeah, he might be in big trouble. Well, it's like that movie Planet of the Apes. Maybe it's a what was that ape's name? That the chimpanzee that like went insane and yeah, that sounds right. Of them, I don't know which one is the one, right, oh, Caesar,

I think is that the main one? And it's like, you know, maybe these octopuses will Unfortunately they only live about a year long, so yeah, well some of them. The giant Pacific apartment, yeah, it can only live about a year. And then the giant Pacific octopus lives up to five years. So it's it's really sad because like, I would love to be friends with an octopus, but that would be so bittersweet. It would be super boring too. I don't know if have you ever held hands with

an octopus? Yes, it seems like really no, you're lying now. I think it would be fun. And then they scored it you with water. It's a good time, I guess, so until you come home and they got eight of your beers in their hands and then you're like, they can open jars. That's not too much of a stretch. Yeah, I mean, all right, I want I want to hang out with an octopus. Good. We've converted you just all part of our plan, I mean their plan. I mean

nobody's playing. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. Have you got anything to plug any where? People can find you on Twitter? Yeah you can. You can follow me on Twitter. Uh my handle is at the crofton show and I write poems on there just for fun, like pretty much really dumb poems about animals, and actually wrote I wrote one about an octopus. Yeah, just I think it was. Octopus is the name of the poem, and it's a Uh, you've got eight arms and inc

write a book. I think that was what the poem was. So you can follow me, Yeah, you can follow me on at the Crofton Show and and you can hear about all my stuff and then also Instagram Chris Underscore Crofton and um, I talked endlessly about cold brew on there because whatever, I used to be an alcoholic and now but now my now I'm my coffee holic. So um and I have a record, a music record that you can listen to on Spotify or anything title I

don't know, however, you listen to music. It's called Hello, It's me and it's a dead serious record that got reviewed by NPR and Pitchfork and uh and it's uh, it's like soft rock. That's all about it's all about for the purposes of this podcast, it's all about octopuses. Yes, please please make an album a soft rock about octopuses. Well, and they are soft bodied animals, so I mean it's technically about my ex girlfriend, but you could what's your

ex girlfriend an octopus? For the yes? All right? And you can find us on the internet Creature Feature dot com, on Instagram at Creature Feature Pod, on Twitter at Creature Feet Pod. F a T, not f et. It's a very different Potter account. Um. You can find me at Katie Golden and of course at pro bird Rites where I advanced the rights of birds. Thanks so much for listening. You can join us next Wednesday and keep sending in

those Chevrotaine pictures. Would you like some Chevartaine pictures, Chris? Send Chris some Dick Dick pick picks. Don't worry, those are also tiny deer called Dick Dix and some Chevertaine. Get him on the Chevertine trains. You'll find out what we mean. Okay, Well, thank you for having me on the show. It's been super fun. Thank you so much for joining us, and thanks to the Space Classics for their excellent song Exo Lumina. Creature features a production of

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