© Jeff Rotman/Nature Picture Library/Rex Features
I spurn your primitive human technology.
Octopuses make for discerning TV viewers: it seems they prefer high-definition to traditional cathode ray images (CRT). What's more, the first study using video to trick octopuses, finds that they may be the Jekyll and Hydes of the oceans: aggressive one day, shrinking violets the next.
"People have been trying for over a decade to get proper behavioural responses from octopuses and other cephalopods using videos," says Roger Hanlon, an octopus researcher at the Marine Resources Center, Woods Hole, Massachusetts, who was not involved in the study. "But this is the first time anyone has managed it."
Gloomy octopuses (
Octopus tetricus) reacted to films shown on liquid crystal high definition television (HDTV) as if they were seeing the real thing, according to a new study by Renata Pronk at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and colleagues. "They lunge forwards to attack crabs and back off from other octopuses, much as they do in the wild," says Hanlon.
Surprisingly, an octopus that was bold, aggressive and exploratory on one day was just as likely to be shy, submissive and stationary the next. "This suggests that the gloomy octopus does not have personality," writes Pronk in the new study.
