The zero parenting thing is what gets me. Pretty much every other animal we'd call intelligent leans hard on social learning -- crows, primates, parrots all spend ages learning from adults. Octopuses hatch alone, figure everything out solo in 1-2 years, and then die. That's the wild part. If they had even a 5 year lifespan with overlapping generations, honestly no idea where the ceiling would be. Maybe the octopi in captivity could be taught to parent and produce genius octopi?
Yes, a five year lifespan octopus would be something.
Unfortunately they can't parent, as both parents die directly after reproduction. But octopus can learn from observing, so some kind of mentoring or modeling between individuals could be encouraged or arranged.
And perhaps animatronic or video animations could contribute? If it turned out octopus could learn from video, the potential experiments would be unlimited. Most of an octopus eye's field of vision, maybe all, is monocular.
One of my dreams is to have an octopus reserve and a parrot reserve. And breed and create situational and living contexts for both species, where both individual and social intelligences are brought to the surface and encouraged to flourish.
I view those two animals as the most and 2nd-most (peak, for their separating phylums/classes) alien intelligences on Earth. The octopus intelligence is a true alien from a functional perspective, in that our common ancestor only had a rudimentary nervous system. A bilateral marine worm, 600 mya.
Our common ancestor with parrots would be something like the Hylonomus, 320 mya. something like a primitive gecko.
The differences in managing the two species would be extreme. Water, air. Hermit vs. tight knit social bents. Extremely short generations vs. very long ones.
But both are highly curious and actively engage and bond with people, other creatures and artifacts they find interesting.
Short octopus lives would ironically, be an exceptional boon for breeding longevity. Not only would changes be very apparent quickly, but the short lifecycle makes breeding vast numbers, to implement a broad gene/morph search, relatively inexpensive.
We have 94 parrot genomes [0], and at least one octopus genome. [1] Octopus genes are as trippy as everything else about them.
My guess is with both creatures, a significant intelligence uptick could happen very quickly simply by mining their current very high diversity of genes, across large populations and numbers of sub-species. They are both ideal creatures in that respect.
The west side of Hawaii's Big Island had both an octopus lab and a parrot reserve. The reserve is still there. I was able to visit the lab twice before it was shut down.
This is interesting because I wonder if it compounds. Smaller genome, smaller cells, more neurons in the same volume... and now those neurons are individually more efficient too. The density numbers already seemed hard to explain just from spatial optimisation -- this might be the missing piece? Wonder what research exists here
Ah yeah that's exactly what it was but thought I'd try to add a bit more emotion to this point haha. Even if the parrot said this every night as a good night - its still very sweet that Alex said that every night :)
Then to put it bluntly; you lied to your audience.
> "I don't care how you define intelligence -- that one's hard to brush off."
If your audience conceived it as possibly being a merely repeated phrase that the researcher probably said thousands of times, not something the parrot actually understood, then it is very easy to brush off as something we already knew parrots could do.
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