Coconut-Carrying Octopus: Secrets of Octopus Intelligence

[JonathanStrange]

One of our brethren finds a home or a toy or a fort - or has quietly gone mad scuttling along the floors of silent seas.

[Isgrimnur]

How about that?

[Kraken]

Heresy! Against the octopus, the overrated cephalopod It's not a crafty, soulful genius. It's dinner.

Rampant octophilia affects our diets, too, with some now calling for octopus to be added to the list of foods that people shouldn’t eat. “Octopus are too smart to be food,” Gwyneth Paltrow wrote on Instagram last March. “I had to stop eating them because I was so freaked out by it. They can escape from sea world and shit by unscrewing drains and going out to sea.”

For 10 years, I subscribed to this very point of view, forgoing any dish with octopus on account of the animal’s half a billion neurons, its sophisticated behavioral repertoire, and its apparent capacity for learning. How could one go on eating something so remarkable?

But, reader, I’m no longer having it. Or rather, I should say that in the past few years I’ve been having it every way I can: raw on sushi rice, braised with black olives, grilled with garlic and a pinch of Spanish paprika, etc. You see, as the cult of octopus intelligence has taken on adherents, I’ve begun to have my doubts. A slimy, brainy, eight-armed sea snail has been rebranded, uncritically and all at once, as the soulful “genius of the ocean.” But are Inky, Otto, and their ilk really what they seem—or could it be that we’re the suckers in this story?

Yeah, that's just what they want you to believe.