The Mind of the Kraken

of teeth. Right. Yeah, yeah, they're a long extinct now, but but they're they're interest because they show up in the fossil record a lot, and and they're like bus size, big, big creatures. And uh, it was after the podcast was over I started looking at these guys again and I happened upon a really fascinating news story that came out

about a year ago. And a number of you've probably already heard this, but uh, you had a man by the name of Mark mcminimon, who is a paleontologist at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mansachusetts, and he was speaking at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Minneapolis, and he was talking specifically about a site in Las Vegas in the Nevada's Berlin Ittheosaur State Park, which two hundred million years ago was in a desert

but was a sea floor. So you have all these really cool fossils, and particularly you have I Thesaurus fossils, and you have this one area though that is really perplexed um scientists for a while, where you have remains of nine different forty five ft Athosaurus um. Back in the fifties, there was this theory that the that due to their position, we think they might have died in shallow water and this was actually a tile flat um or due to accident old um you know, toxic plankton

looming in the area. But recently there's been a rock evidence to suggest this these bodies were actually much deeper underwater than previously thought. So it read mcmentimun to come up with a very fascinating theory, I mean not just fastening, just a mind blowing theory and kind of a controversial theory that we're still still waiting to for for the rest of the scientific community to officially chime in on. Well, these fossils had patterns that resemble suckers on a tentacle,

right right, and that was the big mystery. And so mcmentimun came up with this idea that this crack and like creature nearly one ft long or thirty meters long, drowned or broke the neck of the thesaurus and then just like took them down to his layer. Yes, and then and then there are two additional layers of interest here. Okay, octopi, as we'll discussing this podcast another cephal occupied especially are rather smart creatures. They actually are capable of playing with things.

They get bored and they take things apart, and they scrunch things up and they uh they can't keep their hands still, I mean they're tentacles still rather so, uh So, the argument here is that this ancient cephalopod giant that dined on the sars in the deep, that that to hear she also would play with his or her food.

And then there's this added layer that mcmanimum adds to this where he suggests that these creatures might have actually that the crack and may have actually formed these dead ichthusars into the shape of a tentacle that they may have been playing with their bodies actually created art the first art like an artistic interpretation of itself, which is uh, which which is again controversial theory here. But it's just it's really mind blowing, and it just felt like we

had to mention. Well, I love the idea of it because I immediately think the most scientific thing I can think of, which is of course Clash of the Titans. And I think about, you know, the cracking and being released from its under original or or the original of course, which granted that that creature well awesome wasn't like an actual squid it was, and yeah, yeah, hey, I was sort of disappointing when it actually did emerge. Yeah, but it does. It brings to mind creatures like that, the

cracking of myth. It brings to mind Cthulhu. Uh. And it's intelligent, god like squid in the darkness. And just the idea that in an age, and in a in an age with so beyond human experience and in a place so beyond human experience, that you could have this intellect capable of of taking these grizzly remains and wrenching them into its own shape. You know, it's just a well, and I think the reason why you can't help it get caught up in this explanation as radical and it's right.

Yet what you're doing is you're you're marrying the brains that we know about cephalopods with braun to come up with this idea of them sculpting underwater. Um. But let's talk about the fact that that there's some criticism obviously that you know about this UM Yeah, yessing. Well, for Sartis mcmanimum, he's he's still standing by what he said and he's working on like official um official studies regarding

this theory. So so in his defense, he hasn't really had the chance to to really come out full force with his findings in his theory. He's just he's just roughly alluded to it at this conference and said I'll get back to you when I have these finished, and everyone waits with debated breath. But the critics have already pointed out that, well, that's a pretty imaginative explanation for what we're seeing here, and there are other explanations that

don't involve intelligent cephalopod artist in the triastic age. Yeah, there was there was one person who said that the hypothesis was a lot, you know, looking at these etchings that The hypothesis is a lot like looking at clouds and being able to see what you desire, that this artifact isn't there, This specimen isn't really that well preserved

in the first place. So there's that. UM. Then there is, of course the idea that there's no direct evidence of really large cephalopods at that size um And Glenn Stores, curator of vertebrate paleontology at Cincinnati Museum Center, told Live

Science that circumstantial evidence is not enough. Totally agree with that. Yeah, And what migmonimum is really gonna want to have here is he needs to produce a beak or fossil evidence of the beak because there because theoretically there could have been crackings everywhere back then they could have just been ruling the roofs, but there would have been so few of them, and they're mostly soft material. And as we've

discussed before, fossilization is not a guaranteed process. It's more of the exception to the rule that we actually see fossil evidence of a creature that once lived. Now, I will play Devil's advocate here and I will mention the book called krack And by Wendy Williams that that you lent me and she does talk about this idea of um, cephalopods is is very mysterious creatures that wore for a

long time in the category of cryptozoology. She says that even up until like I think the eighteen seventies, they had a specimen. Uh, but it was until the eighteen nineties when when the specimen was you know, wildly widely then vetted, that people began to say, this is a real thing. So of course you have to produce the evidence in order to get there. Um. But I did want to play Devil's advocate a bit to say that there's there's still you know, this idea that a giant

cephalopod could have existed a long one. It's kind of a wild theory, but wild theories, like dreams, sometimes come true. Oh it was beautiful. Um. So okay, we're gonna talk obviously a lot about cephalopods today because they are fascinating

in because their brains are just a wonder um. In fact um, you know, the brain of the cephalopod has really advanced our understanding of ourselves right, our our own neuroscientists can definitely give a nod to cephalopods um and even like a gerontology that the study of aging, so the brain of the cephalopod. It's it's interesting because cephalopods are really not that far removed from saying you're you're common gardens slug. But we don't really look to the

garden slug for any kind of staggering intellect. It's a pretty simple creature and pretty disgusting um that really shouldn't exist at all. Whereas the cephalopods their jobs, what is their job? They're like turning up the dirt they're they're making, they're helping it to be more nutrient rich. Okay, well, disclaimer,

I kind of have a thing against garden slugs. Snails are fine, and then cephalopods are amazing, even though they're they're they're all basically buddies and probably email each other on the weekends. And uh, in the in the cephalopods of like, hey, sorry, dude, I don't know why I lamb is such a jerk about climbing on things to climbing up the domain. But um, like once one gotten the sink and I almost threw up it was disgusting,

but not a cephalopod. Yeah, so yeah, please don't nail me slugs people, But but the brain of a cephalopod is pretty amazing because while compared to the human brain, it's not really that impressive and it's not that big, but for an invertebrate and then certainly for for a mosque,

these are amazing brains that they're packing. Also, you have to keep in mind cephalopods were generally talking about creatures that live only one to two years, and but they're still there's still have an incredible brain activity going on well, and that one to two years is key in studying

aging because you can see it in real time right there. Um. This is from Science Magazines article tackling brain evolution fall eight arms short of Martians showing up and offering themselves up to science, cephalopods are the only example outside of vertebrates, of how to build a complex, clever brain, says neuroscientists Cliff rag Cell of the University of Chicago and Illinois. For that reason, rag Seal says, these creatures have much to teach us about brain evolution. So just how impressive

is the cephalopod brain? Um? Okay, so yeah, some some general modern cephalopod stats here. Um, they do have the most complex brains of any invertebrates. An octopus brain has fifty to seventy five lobes and at least as many neurons about one million as a mouse brain, and that is not taking into the account the smaller brains in each arm, the still smaller brains called ganglia technically associated

with each sucker. Cephalopods like octopus um or octopi think we the the what do we decide on octopi as the plural? Sure, cephalopods like octopi, Uh, they're unique, and that all these ganglias have condensed, that they form a centralized brain. And the other thing that's unique is there are two areas of the brain that have developed that are specialized for memory storage. And we we see this

even in nautilus. But that's jumping ahead a bit. Um. So their brains are larger and more condensed, and they also have an area dedicated to learning. Um. But here's the coolest thing. There are more neurons and the tentacles than in the central brains with the ability to make really lightning fast decisions, right they have to. I mean, that's really where you get get down to the some of the reasoning here um specifically with the octopus. Uh going on and moving into the octopus section of the

podcast here, I guess um. The theory is that since the octopus has to live in oftentimes like a tropical coral leaf environment, they're in a very complex environment. These are this is the these are the streets of like nineteen seventies in New York. These are this is the jungle, this is the you know, this is the warriors. And they have to have a lot of street smarts to survive. So this is kind of like animal streets smarts. They have to they have to be dexterious, they have to

be mass there's a disguise. They have to be stealthy, they have to be killers. They have to be seductive, well a little seductive. Well there's some seductive Um when you get into the various coloration and hunting schemes, I guess you can. You can make that argument. But but they have to they have to to really be on their game. And so the arms race is to be this is not to simply hide, not to simply hunt, but to to manage all of these skills. And to

do that you need a pretty impressive brain. And UH and pretty impressive nervous tissue to boot. Yeah, let's talk about their tool use. We have mentioned this before, but they are master tool users. Yes, um there there, there's some fascinating footage you can find online up to of octopi using coconuts for shelter. Basically a coconut half turn

it up. You got yourself a house, which is not that big of a level as that revelation for for us, but for a creature like this, it's pretty that's pretty phenomenal because tool use is uh is generally a mark of a pretty advanced organism. But here's just the essentially a sea slug that is uh, that is not really a sea slug, but just to the slander it a bit. This is a creature that that is is akin to a sea slug, and it is it is figured out

how to use tools. Other examples, you have the blanket octopus, which is immune to the man of war jellyfish sting. So what he does he or she does is uh, the octopus will glide down to the jellyfish, to this man of war and a rip off a few tentacles, and then it has this poisonous whip that it can use to protect itself. In some of the tentacles too, they float away and there's some bioluminescence involved as well. Right, it's distract to make it say to the prey, well,

you know, am I going this way? Where am I going that way? Yeah? I mean it's uh, I mean it's it's rather simple tool use. They are not uh and and we have a whole episode on tool use that if you really want to get into like the different levels of tool use and what they mean in terms of a creature's intellect. So they're not doing anything like like creating true our effects. They're not building bow

and arrows yet, but they are. But they are saying, hey, that appendage on that creature there's is pretty uh, pretty hostile. Uh and uh and it makes some pretty colors. I'm gonna rip that off and I'm gonna use it for my own purposes. Or that shell of that coconut is actually pretty useful as a shelter for me. I'm gonna take it and use it for that. Here here's one thing that I think they completely lap us in in

terms of our own pincer grasp. As I had mentioned before, they've got the ganglia on their tentacles and uh so gangling are controlling every sucker, right, and they have exquisite control over their body in that way, and they can fold the two sides of it suckered together to form a pincer grasp, and so it can do that with every single one. So it has like a hundred pincer grasp to our to our one little clumbing. It's pretty

pretty impressive. And like I said earlier, occupy are capable of playing like their their minds are advanced enough that they're constantly learning. They're they're they're they're geared to again, live on this reach, live in the jungle nineteen seventies New York. So if you take them out of that nineteen seventies New York and you put them in suburbia, they're gonna go a little stair crazy and started just messing with stuff just to be messing with it. And

that's exactly what happens in aquarium environment. The stories are

just numerous. Anytime you if you talk to someone who's working in an aquarium, or you know, look up any accounts online and people say, oh, yeah, we found out that this this octopus was sneaking out of the the aquarium at night and eating sharks, or we we have to constantly keep the octopus from taking the entire aquarium apart, taking apart, uh you know, suction equipment, taking apart, cameras, taking apart, submarine taking apart a robot submarine in one

of the tanks, part by part, which I thought was awesome. There was other another account, um that one of the keepers had given um some of the octopus, uh, some shrimp and there was a slightly spoiled one, and so the octopus actually stuffed it down the drain, whelming maintaining eye contact with her as if to say, really, you're gonna try to pass that by me. Yeah, And we've actually studied this too, it's not all just like uh

sort of back room accounts. Uh. Read an interview with Jennifer math Or, who's a comparative psychologist University of Lethbridge in a bart of Canada, and um, she was part of an experiment where they gave a pair of octopy in an empty tank, a floating pill bottle. That's it, just a floating pill bottle and two board occupy and uh, they watched them in a seat like in twenty different

times like in a sequence. Uh, they watched them do the She said, exactly the kind of thing that we would do if we were to, say, bounce a ball off a wall, like Steve McQueen in The Great Escape. Just out of boredom. They started just bouncing this stuff pill bottle around and flipping it around the tank, which you know, of course, when you're in captivity, that's that's going to happen. They're going to go a bit store crazy. So it's important to have things to enrich and and

certainly they've shown themselves capable of solving mazes. Uh. They like puzzles that Generally, if you see an octopus on display and an aquarium, it will not be an empty container. They'll have various things to interact with. They will be given food inside of a toy of some kind where they have to actually work at it because they're active

creatures and they need an active environment. Or sometimes they are asked to predict the World Cup winner, like our friend Paul the octopus who have born January eight died October two, ten um. Anyone who follows um soccer or

cephalopod h news probably caught this one. But Paul lived at the Sea Life Center in Oberhausen, Germany, and they had this, uh, this gimmick set up where um he was he was able to correctly predict the winner of each of Germany's national football teams seven matches in the two thousand ten f i f A World Cup as well was the outcome of the final? Um didn't he have like the for the outcome of the final wasn't

like accuracy? Yea and yeah. And then the other level that you just said before that was like a six or six yeah, And it was based on like where you would pick food from one or one of two places. It wasn't It's not like the octop I had a Twitter account or a blog he was he was just making basically a random choice. And then that's the big

criticism here. He wasn't actually making predictions and and there was all there also been accusations that there was some bias involved on the part of the people caring for the octopus. But the food container had the team's logo on it, right, Yeah, but but it was still an exciting day in uh in cephalopod media, Hey, I mean I gave some attention to cephalopods. So there you go. That was a win. All right, Well, we mentioned the

nautilus earlier. Yes, so let's let's discuss the nautils, and Nautilus is a much older organism and it's less advanced, it's less bright compared to other cephal pods. It's tiny. Yeah, they're the soul surviving family of an not alloids in general, which includes like the nautilus and the paper nautilus, which we mentioned in the previous episode. Soul surviving members of the externally shelled cephalopod family that live that thrived in

tropical oceans four dred and fifty fifty million years ago. Yeah. They diverge from the from their cousins squid, octopus and cutlefish four hundred million years ago, which makes them more i should say, on the tiny scale in comparison. Yeah. And they're fascinating organisms, just beautiful to to look at, and the shells are amazing. But they have tiny, tiny brains and they lack that dedicated learning region that we

see in other cephalopods. Yet what's amazing is that we've in experiments, we've shown that they do have a form of short term memory that we're still trying to really understand how it works. Because they shouldn't really be capable of any kind of higher brain function. UM. There again, they're kind of the dull knife and the cephalopod drawer um.

But in experiments they found that if they use flashes of light UM paired with with the food, they'll actually be able to train the cephalopod to extend its tentacles. Whenever there's that light, it begins to associate the light with food, and it will retain this memory for about twenty four hours and then it's gone. So these guys are kind of like a guy Pierce in Memento. They only have the short term memory and then it fades. Well,

what I liked is that I get that right Memento. Ah, well Memento, everything is in sort of reverse right like yeah, um. But I really like the way new scientists described it. It's called simple minded natolyst reveals Flash of Memory. That's the article title. They say that first of all, the food that was offered with the flash of light was an irresistible mixture of pulverized telapia heads and water, So the first of all it was ei um. And then they said that that when um, when they were reacting

to it, that their tentacles were crazy. Now keep in mind too that in comparison to the octopus is eight arms um that Annalist has for for the females fifty arms and males have nineties. So it is quite a display when they are waving them around. Um. And that they were panting too, which was interesting, the panting nautilus by Rabbit Lamb. All right, well, we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back, we're going to

deal with some squid intelligence. Specifically, we're going to talk about the Humboldt squid also known as the blows rocks. All right, we're back. The Humboldt squid also known as a jumbo squid, also known again as say it for us there much better than me? Yes, uh. In fact, they were named that by Nexkin fisherman who who noted their very aggressive behavior. Yeah occasionally. I mean their tales of sailors dying at the hands of these guys, right,

I mean though they slit their throats. I don't think they have shanks. They don't have shanks, but anyway they have there have been some definite violent encounters with with Humboldt squid, and they have this reputation as being a very aggressive creature. Now there's been some fascinating experiments where they like put they take decoy Humboldt squid down into the deep and they actually they're able to explore. Then they're not just mindlessly aggressive creatures and they're still very

intelligent animals. But um, under the right circumstances, they can be extremely aggressive. But what's more interesting here for us as we're discussing cephalopod intelligence, is that the idea that they are able to coordinate with each other when yeah, yeah, they hunt in schools containing as many as twelve hundred other squid. They swim at speeds from three to fifteen miles an hour, and they can eject themselves from the water and glide through the air to escape nitors. Yeah yeah,

they have huge brains for their body size. And uh and it's been suggested that they might actually be as smart as dogs. Oh that's what William Gilly, who who is featured in the book Cracking by Wendy Williams, actually talks about that, and he studies them of course, um it has a research center. But uh, yeah, as smart as dogs, he claims. And uh he even says that or not. He doesn't, but Wendy Williams does says that divers Scott Castle once sall when fiddling with a latch

of an underwater cage he had just closed. So so they have that same curious nature, that same problem solving ability. Yeah, this is from the National Zoo form equals functioned. Uh. These squid actually have two large optic lobes and the squid brain, and that testifies the importance of vision for locating praise for the prey for these guys and gals and um, you know, they also rely on taste and texture to locate food, and they have highly developed lobes

for storing chemical intact information. So that's interesting to hear about the diver who was witnessing the squid trying to open the lock, and the idea that you know it is it has this ability to plan, and it has this ability to store the tactile information and try to figure out this lock. There are accounts of them actually stealing car keys and driving as far as Mexico City. Yeah, I read that. Definitely. Supposedly there's a there's a whole pack of them that have like an apartment there. I

don't know what they do for a living. But oh fish, of course, yeah, of course, um, and real quick, we we mentioned the colossal squid in our our other episode that we recorded this week on gigantism. But I found it really interesting that the the the brain of the colossal squid is actually donut shaped and the esophagus passes straight through the center of it. So it's just a different way of thinking about the brain of an organism

and how it fits into the overall morphology. Well, and I think a lot of times too that we come at it from our human centric um fashion and we don't necessarily think about cephalopods um in this way. But um, it is interesting to see that their mouths are encircled with arms, whereas we sort of think about our own flailing tentacles on either side of us. And that does certainly um the color, the way or actually order the

way that their brains are arranged. So there is this difference of arrangement in the in the brains of cephalopods obviously versus humans. And we already talked about ganglion on tentacles, but then you start to look at the eyes of cephalopods, and this is where there is a major difference. There's a lot of similarity, right. Cephalopods have camera eye camera like eyes like ours, with a lens that projects images

onto the retina. The difference between humans and cephalopods, or vertebrates and cephalopods in this case is that our many armed friends don't have blind spots like we do, because when we look at an image, there's a blind spot in the middle, and that is owing to the fiber optic nerve which is going in front of the retina as opposed to behind the retina like a cephalopod. And this is actually an upgrade. This is you know, this

is an advantage. This is something that we don't have um And I also wanted to mention that another difference is that cephalopods have horizontal pupils. So because the eyes can rotate thanks to a balancing organ that they have called a statusist, they can always keep their pupils horizontal and it doesn't matter what position their body is, it's always horizontal. So they just have fantastic visual coverage of the world around it. Yeah, their brain can interpret visual

information no matter what their position is. They don't have to account for the position of the eye like we do. If you think about it. If we turn around quickly, uh, you know we have we are very disoriented and we have to sit there and figure out our location in space before we can begin to take in data in a way that's meaningful to us. But not these guys. They can, I mean, this is an amazing piece of

machinery for them. They can also see polarized light and this allows them to communicate by creating changing patterns on their skin and uh, and this I thought was fascinating. Um. The reason for this that they can see the polarized light is because the sephalo cephalopod eyes started out as light sensitive skin cells that folded in words, to form the structure that they have now, rather than as an

extension of the brain as as we have. So that's again another difference between the way ways that their brains and eyes work. So while we've both species, or not just species, but both vertebrates and squid, they have reached sort of similar conclusions with with their eyes, but from different starting points. Yeah. Just to know that the eyes that the root material there came from from skin, from skin cells is very interesting, fascinating. So let's move on

to the last real cephalopod. We're gonna discuss here um and we're really talking about the faberge egg of the cephalopod world, the cuttlefish. Now, back in the stuff in the Science Flave days right at the end, we did in an episode on cuttlefish, and there's a lot of

great information that's cuttlefish specific in there. But we're gonna talk about it a little bit here, especially as it as it deals with intelligence, because the cuttlefish has one of the largest brain to body size ratios of all invertebrates and UH, and you see a lot of the the the the really impressive attributes UH involving intelligence and nervous systems in cephalopods are really highlighted in the cuttle fish is design because you have uh rapid shifts in color. Uh.

They they're fairly social creatures. I mean, they're not social and in the in a way that's really comparable to say, you know, dogs or or primates, but there are there are some very interesting social interactions here. There's a certain amount of communication that takes place through the use of their colorful skin, which contains these chromatophors that can lighten and darken, and they can shift just really rapidly from different colors and intensities, so it red, black, and yellow

are some of the chromatophores that emerge. But in addition to that, there's this luminosity, so it gives a greater range. And in fact with with other sea creatures like fish, they have four rods in their eyes and they're able to perceive more color than say our three rodded eyes. So when when we see these incredible displays of color from cephalopods, keep in mind that we're not even really seeing the full spectrum, right, And these creatures that cuttle

fish are just remarkable to to see at an aquarium. Now, generally you have to wait for a large pack of people with cell phone cameras to get out of the way because you go to an aquarium you want to take a really bad, direct flash cellphone photo of everything there. Apparently that's the apparently the big thing these days. But if you can actually get the tank to yourself for a little bit, they're just really fascinating to watch the

color shifts that they kind of hover. For starters, they're not, they're a lot they're a lot more interesting to look at an aquarium because octopi uh you know, you may catch them when they're active, but they're they're gonna be sticking to the corners and and and all that. Where the cuttlefish is going to hover out there in in in the middle, and he's gonna kind of here, she's gonna kind of hover around, has this little hover skirt

that goes around the edges. Um. And then they're gonna slowly change colors, and then there may be a drastic change in color. Yeah, and all of that is predicated on the fact that they are controlled by nerves, so it gives them that instantaneous color change. And when we talk about those chromatoporce we are talking about tens of thousands of organs here that are controlling that. And so think of it similar to the way that pixels form on images of a computer screen. That's what you're seeing

on their skin basically. Um, you talked about their communication and their their level of social ness, and I wanted to bring up Gene Bowl of Penn miller's Ville University. She's a scientist and she says that they the males have all kinds of really impressive displays and that in fact, the cuttlefish can signultaneously just one side of his butdet body to show a dominant display towards other males, while um the other side of his body shows a calm

display towards a potential mate. So really aggressive pattern on the left where where a foe is. And on the right, I don't know exactly what it would be. Let's say a little heart design. It's not really hard, but it's kind of like he's flexing the muscle and looking all bad on one side, but then he's he's kind of smiling and winking out of the other eye. And this

is interesting. During mating, they display a zebra pattern, which I just automatically always associate with wrestlers bodybuilders because always wearing the pants with the zebra patterns are popular with some of the boys. But but this is intricate, right, I mean, this is ah, this is a whole language that we don't necessarily have access to, that we can witness and it can tell us something about ourselves to some degree, but we can't even fully imagine we don't

have the language ourselves to it. There's another interesting thing that goes on with cephalopod I mean not sephal pod,

cuttlefish mating that's really fascinating. And that's where you'll have these dominant cuttlefish, like these big, brutish looking cuttlefish that are that are not the cute little guys that you didn't see the aquarium, the big, rugged, old man catulu looking cuttlefish, and they're they're really bossy and they're getting the fights over the females because you know, they're like they really want to mate with the with the females.

But then you'll have the smaller males that will that will disguise themselves as females, like they'll like a lot of cephalopods. The cuttle fish has a has a lot of control over just how drug queens I'm thinking boosom bodies. Yeah, yeah, it's that kind of thing. Like they know that they don't stand a chance walking in there as a small male because they're just gonna get beat up and tore up,

and then the big male is gonna mate. So they disguised themselves as a female and then they move in close. And then the big beefy cuttlefish he looks at this and it's like, oh, yeah, it looks like I got two days for the night. Uh. You know, that's a total win. For me. Meanwhile, the disguised smaller male actually gets in there in mates with the female. Okay, so you really just did um talk about the premise for

the sitcom Boom Bodies was Queen. Well, actually, the premise was really that the rent was much more or a favorite at this all women's boarding. But they use that to their advantage to to advance their agendas with the ladies there. The other really awesome thing about cuttlefish, um that that that I may have mentioned on here before is their use of ptomorphs, which means false form. And what they'll do is a pseudomorph is a bubble of ink surrounded by mucus, and it occupies the same amount

of space as the cuttle fish. It's a decoy. So what will happen If they're in a situation where they're they're threatened, they will shift their color suddenly to where they're really dark like the surrounding. Then they'll shoot out the pseudomorph and then they'll they'll turbo out of there with their jets. Yeah. Their jet propulsion, by the way, is amazing. So they create a copy of themselves more or less. I mean, it's not it's not like an

artistic expression. But they'll they'll create, you know, appropriate mass replica of themselves that is just ain't conside of mucus, and then they'll jet away really fast at the same time, so it's like slide of hand where they leave the decoy where they just were and they're already jetting away.

And then when something tries to eat these pseudomorph of course, then they just get a whole bunch of ink, which also contains dopamine and el dopa, a precursor to the dopamine, which may temporarily paralyze the sense of smell uh the creature that so it's just a fantastic uh and deceptive means of self defense in terms of their intelligence again gene bowl Uh. The scientists devised a couple of experiments to study this, rather than just sort of the stimulus

response experiments that you see sometimes um again. In the book Crack and Winny, Williams describes this experiment as a tank in the shape of a clock with escape routes two of them, only one open at a time, and that's at the three o'clock position, and the six o'clock excuse me, the nine o'clock, three and nine three and nine. And so the cuttlefish enter through the six o'clock position and then immediately they see a queue at the twelve o'clock position. So the que is either algae or brick.

Algae would indicate like, hey, on the right, that's your escape hatch. Um the brick would indicate on the left, that's your that's going to be your escape hatch. So they actually get to learn these cues that hey, okay, when I see the algae, I know to take a ninety degree turn to the right. And it's fascinating. She said, this was um, this process of if then propositions that we learned, and that in humans that's represented as the first steps in development of logic and our ability to

use reason and decision making. It's fascinating, alright. So one final squid to mention, and this one is is even even more dubious than the idea of of ancient krakens creating art out of dead right dolphins, and that is the idea of the mega squid, which was featured on the TV show Future Future is Wild uh and which you can believe occasionally catch on various Discovery Channel, UM Discovery Channel or Animal Planet just check local listings that

pops up from time to time. But it was this you know, sspeculative episode where they're talking about the future. What if humans weren't around, what might evolve and fill that void? What would become the dominant species? And so they had some some c g I stuff going on and some some fabulous ideas of what might happen. And one of the cooler things that they introduced was a mega squid, which was a twelve foot tall, eight ton terrestrial air breathing squid that roams the northern forests of

a humanless Earth. And it's a pretty cool design. Mean, it's on one level's kind of ridiculous because with the whole air pressure issue first of all, right, going from from from the the the pressure in the ocean to land. Yeah, it's it's crazy to think. But that their their argument was that it's not just a situation of a giant squid crawling out or a giant octopus crawling out of the water. It would have been like a slow evolutionary

procession years later. Yeah, And they and it had legs, which they they made the case that each of these legs, which looked kind of like an elephant leg Uh contain a network of circular and vertical muscles that form these limbs and make them strong enough to carry this eight ton weight. Uh. They have vocal sac that vibrates to produce sound. That was the other thing that they came up with for the mega squid. And uh they also have two large tentacles that they grab things out of

the woods to eat. So it's kind of neat. It's it's like I said, don't don't make any any hard vegas bets on on mega squids taking over the planet any time in the distant future even, But but it's a cool idea, and it's it's interesting to think of cephalopods not merely as this interesting creature confined to the ocean, but one of ours more remarkable creatures that maybe could become the primary player in a future Well in that context, it is really interesting to to imagine what the brain

would look like once it became terrestrial, because as Bull had said before, is that one of the things that's really exciting to her about sufflage seplode intelligence is that we know that their relatives are arms and snails. Yeah, not not so smart. They're um so whatever happened to the cephalo cephalopods was different, and she wants to get to the bottom of why they're using their intelligence, Why why their brains developed in the way they that they did,

and um, what does that tell us about ourselves? As we discussed in the Gigantism episode, as animals get bigger, they have fewer predators and and certainly the mega squid is not going to have the survival challenge that the smaller cephalopods have evolved to deal with. So you can imagine this thing might be pretty stupid. Yeah, I mean intellectually, it just might. And there might not be a lot going on because I don't have to do is wander around the forest and eat other c g I creatures.

So little Jar Jar here, you know, all right? As we close out here our episode on the Mind of the Crack, and I thought it would be fun to bring in Jonathan Strickling, co host of the Tech Stuff podcast, to read The Cracking by Alfred Lloyd. Yes and his poem is based on an old Norse legend of gigantic sea monsters who prey on ships and drag them underneath the ocean, below the thunders of the other deep, far far beneath in the abysmal sea, his ancient, dreamless, uninvaded

sleep the krack and sleepeth. Faintest sunlights flee about his shadowy sides above, and swell huge sponges of millennial growth in height and far away into the sickly light from many a wondrous, grotten, secret cell, unnumbered and enormous polypi winnow with giant arms the slumbering green. They're happy lane for ages and will lie battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep until the latter fire shall heat the deep. Then, once by man and angels to be seen in roaring,

he shall rise and on the surface die. So there you go. Fantastic reading from Jonathan Strickland if you if you haven't checked out tech Stuff, be sure to check that out. It's a great podcast. UH. Chris and Jonathan tackle all sorts of gadgety, techy nerdy topics in UH in awesome form, and they are wonderful punsters. So if you have something you would like to share with us about the mind of the kracking, about the possibility that this cracking theory is is true, or maybe you have

thoughts about the mega squid. Maybe you have worked with the cephalopods at one point or another and have some some yeah, or you know, if you have some occupied escate stories, let us know about those. If you have ever um snuck away from work and left a bunch of squid ink inside of a thin layer of mucus in your place as a decoy, we would love to

hear about that as well. You can find us on Facebook where we are stuff to blow your mind, and you can find on Twitter where our handles blow the mind, and you can drop us a line at blow the Mind at discovery dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com.