Sampaio et al., Multidimensional social influence drives leadership and composition-dependent success in octopus–fish hunting groups
I was curious about the the 3D reconstruction of the scenes.
> We manually tracked individuals in the videos using the software Computer Vision Annotation Tool. We annotated three frames per second, which yielded a time resolution of 0.33 s for animal movement.
> We then used another software developed to incorporate the previously tracked animals in each camera in the ‘colmap’ habitat models and camera paths, ‘multiviewtracks’ or ‘mvt’ [29]
> [29] Francisco, F. A., Nührenberg, P. & Jordan, A. High-resolution, non-invasive animal tracking and reconstruction of local environment in aquatic ecosystems
Seems it was specifically developed to track fish. Cool project.
I love imagining how the fish are almost an extension of the way the octopuses think. Octopuses seem to have quite a bit of independent cognition in each of their arms, which are wrangled by the central brain. Now they're wrangling independent fish brains instead of octopus arm brains. Incredible
You might enjoy 'Children of Ruin' by Adrian Tchaikovsky, which explores this idea in depth with a civilization of genetically modified, super-intelligent octopuses. (Though I'd start with the first book in the series, 'Children of Time')
>Octopuses seem to have quite a bit of independent cognition in each of their arms, which are wrangled by the central brain.
Yes, that's inherent in the design. All grey matter (optimized for local intercommunication), no white matter (optimized for sending signals between regions).
Each arm has its own ganglion ("CPU") and the central unit struggles to keep up with these and keep them coordinated.
The octopuses I spoke to strenuously deny the fish abuse accusations.
"It's true that our innovative management technique - Continuous Tactile Feedback - can look a little rough to the untrained eye, but our Food Collection Engineers are actually very well treated."
Yes but I've read the reports in the Annals of Oceanography and the sub-director General of Fishing Affairs said it is happening and the only reason they haven't been able to pursue it is that the dolphins keep vetoing any real measures at every yearly convention. It's a bit of a fishy subject.
I can't wait for OctoPunch, the turn-based combat video game! You play as the octopus, of course, and build your party from a selection of fishy characters, each with their own personality and special hunting skills.
aside: me after reading the headline: Shouldn't that be Octopii?
But no!
"The plural form octopii is doubly incorrect. Firstly, octopus derives from Greek, not Latin; its etymologically-consistent plural form is octopodes. Secondly, even if octopus were a second-declension Latin noun, the plural form would be octopi; in the correct plurals radii and gladii, with which octopii is analogous, the first ‘i’s are part of the words’ stems (radi- and gladi-), and not their case endings — for octopii to be the plural, *octopius would need to be the singular."
While I'm all for a history lesson (and the double-I octopii is indeed simply incorrect) I take issue with anyone insisting that "octopi" is wrong:
1. Language is neither static nor a series of rules to be blindly followed. The way a word was pluralized 1400 years ago has limited relevance today.
2. As noted just about everywhere, "octopodes" looks insane in any modern English sentence because we don't pluralize any other word that way. It also moves the emphasis to the second syllable. Thus it manages to make everybody's life harder for no benefit, a favorite pastime of the sort of people who would suggest this pluralization.
3. "Octopuses" feels stilted, and while it is correct, I thoroughly empathize with anyone uninterested in using a four-syllable word with three consecutive unstressed syllables in a sentence. Therefore it makes sense to create a shorter pluralization, and we can do this by analogy to other English words!
3a. We are not speaking Latin. If "-us" to "-i" is a valid pluralization of other English words, then it makes sense for it to be a valid pluralization of this word. While this pattern can be used irresponsibly ("bus" -> "bi"), using it for the three-syllable "octopus" is non-destructive. It preserves the structure (and the meter!) and thus makes a lot of sense.
4. To come back to "double-I octopii is simply incorrect": It's wrong because it's trying to be pedantic but uses the rules wrong (as noted in the wikipedia reference above). If, in 700 years, I were still alive, English were still spoken, and some band of idiots had managed to make "octopii" the most common pluralization, then I would begrudgingly accept it per point 1 above, but until then, no.
But more generally, enough generations have passed that "octopus" is no longer a foreign word, it's now just part of the English lexicon, and so you're free to pluralize it in the standard English manner. "Octopuses" is correct by that reasoning.
Note that this is the same process that we eventually apply to every other loanword; next time you talk to a German, watch them cringe at "delicatessens" as the plural to "delicatessen".
I wonder why it is that "octopuses" just kind of sounds wrong?
Is it the repeated "s" at the end? But we have no problem saying "buses" or "rebuses".
Is it something to do with the plural of "fish" just being "fish"? But we have no problem making whales and dolphins plural with an -s.
Is it that "-puses" sounds slightly vulgar, like we're talking about multiple female genitalia?
I genuinely don't know. All I know is that "octopuses" just sounds wrong for some reason I can't put my finger on. And that "octopii" somehow "feels" much better, even if everything about it is logically wrong.
I'll still say "octopuses", but I know I always want to say "octopii" instead. (And spell it that way too, because "octopi" feels like it would rhyme with "canopy".)
I’m sure I read a sci-fi novel some years back where one of the main characters selectively breeds octopuses for intelligence before dropping them on a terraformed planet and there was a small bit about how he didn’t like octopuses either and so called them octopii.
I think what you cited missed the spelling aberration, since the -pus is a mistake, as it should have been -pous,-podes (singular,plural, nominative). the word is just a chimera.
also, the reality is
#define octopi octopodes
#define octopuses octopodes
and so on is what's more or less going on...whereas in English octopodes is a mouthful.
So the plural of virus, if it wouldn't have been viruses, would be viri, not virii? I think for octopus I'd have intuitively thought octopi, but for virus I'd have thought virii.
One of the coolest things I've encountered at an aquarium was a sleeping octopus wildly shifting its colors. It seems truly alien to behold -- like it shouldn't be possible.
My googling after the fact says that who knows why they actually do it or what's going on, but, I really like the thought of them having little octopus dreams.
The fish are able to gather food from the sand which the octopus moves. It happend to me too in the ocean where fish around my feet followed along the spots in the sand I touched. Therefore I was hunting together with fish!?
Octopuses are much more intelligent than many give them credit for, but sadly I also love takoyaki (but then again, eating horse and whale is also culturally acceptable in Japan, one of the few countries that allow it; I've tried both as well, they're pretty good).
Literally a sucker punch. It doesn't seem like true cooperation as they don't share in the catch. I also didn't see any measurements of how much they caught versus hunting alone.
Disneyfication of octopuses. In that video you'll see, exactly anything that you want to see.
Would justify perfectly an: "in the video the octopus is seen trying to avoid being stolen its food by all the other fishes", that is the same behavior that you'll see if you break a crab or an urchin underwater. Many coastal fishes from rocky bottoms will come to steal any food scrap available. They don't cooperate with other fishes on any way.
Or maybe they are playing "rock, paper, tentacle", but to me the message more probable here is "this is my food, go away". If you look the video carefully the fishes seem trying to swim near the mouth of the octopus, where the probability of stealing a scrape is higher.
How much of a leap is it to say that octopuses have effectively domesticated fish, the way early humans might have turned docile wolves into hunting companions?
It depends on your definition of domestication. One could easily argue that ants have domesticated aphids so I don’t think the concept depends on the intelligence of the domesticator so much as the symbiotic relationship between species.
However the usual definition of domestication is specific to humans. The aforementioned aphid farming and the octopodes in TFA are technically in mutualistic relationships.
I think domestication implies multigenerational changes in genetics and morphology to make the domesticated species more useful for the domesticating species.
It doesn't seem that there's any evidence of that yet. Maybe if they keep at it for a while, and either the fish they hunt with branch off into a separate population or they do it so much that it affects the entire population?
[+] [-] tommiegannert|1 year ago|reply
Sampaio et al., Multidimensional social influence drives leadership and composition-dependent success in octopus–fish hunting groups
I was curious about the the 3D reconstruction of the scenes.
> We manually tracked individuals in the videos using the software Computer Vision Annotation Tool. We annotated three frames per second, which yielded a time resolution of 0.33 s for animal movement.
> We then used another software developed to incorporate the previously tracked animals in each camera in the ‘colmap’ habitat models and camera paths, ‘multiviewtracks’ or ‘mvt’ [29]
> [29] Francisco, F. A., Nührenberg, P. & Jordan, A. High-resolution, non-invasive animal tracking and reconstruction of local environment in aquatic ecosystems
Seems it was specifically developed to track fish. Cool project.
Links to https://github.com/matterport/Mask_RCNN and https://github.com/pnuehrenberg/multiviewtracks.
[+] [-] UncleOxidant|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] primer42|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] setgree|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mellavora|1 year ago|reply
Yes, that's inherent in the design. All grey matter (optimized for local intercommunication), no white matter (optimized for sending signals between regions).
Each arm has its own ganglion ("CPU") and the central unit struggles to keep up with these and keep them coordinated.
[+] [-] e40|1 year ago|reply
What a wonderful combination of words.
[+] [-] staplung|1 year ago|reply
"It's true that our innovative management technique - Continuous Tactile Feedback - can look a little rough to the untrained eye, but our Food Collection Engineers are actually very well treated."
[+] [-] vasco|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jpm_sd|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] excalibur|1 year ago|reply
https://splatoon.nintendo.com/
[+] [-] sparrish|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] eddyzh|1 year ago|reply
Supplementary Video 6
Typical movement dynamics and web-over temporal characteristics when octopuses are hunting alone. https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs415...
Example of a previous fish attack of a structure that triggers a reaction from the octopus and consequent web-over over a food-baited structure
https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs415...
Examples of octopuses punching fish, thus displacing them https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs415...
Example of a multispecific group hunting and typical movements, featuring all species categories analysed in this study except yellow goatfish https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs415...
[+] [-] neerajk|1 year ago|reply
But no! "The plural form octopii is doubly incorrect. Firstly, octopus derives from Greek, not Latin; its etymologically-consistent plural form is octopodes. Secondly, even if octopus were a second-declension Latin noun, the plural form would be octopi; in the correct plurals radii and gladii, with which octopii is analogous, the first ‘i’s are part of the words’ stems (radi- and gladi-), and not their case endings — for octopii to be the plural, *octopius would need to be the singular."
Thanks wikipedia.
TIL!
[+] [-] banannaise|1 year ago|reply
1. Language is neither static nor a series of rules to be blindly followed. The way a word was pluralized 1400 years ago has limited relevance today.
2. As noted just about everywhere, "octopodes" looks insane in any modern English sentence because we don't pluralize any other word that way. It also moves the emphasis to the second syllable. Thus it manages to make everybody's life harder for no benefit, a favorite pastime of the sort of people who would suggest this pluralization.
3. "Octopuses" feels stilted, and while it is correct, I thoroughly empathize with anyone uninterested in using a four-syllable word with three consecutive unstressed syllables in a sentence. Therefore it makes sense to create a shorter pluralization, and we can do this by analogy to other English words!
3a. We are not speaking Latin. If "-us" to "-i" is a valid pluralization of other English words, then it makes sense for it to be a valid pluralization of this word. While this pattern can be used irresponsibly ("bus" -> "bi"), using it for the three-syllable "octopus" is non-destructive. It preserves the structure (and the meter!) and thus makes a lot of sense.
4. To come back to "double-I octopii is simply incorrect": It's wrong because it's trying to be pedantic but uses the rules wrong (as noted in the wikipedia reference above). If, in 700 years, I were still alive, English were still spoken, and some band of idiots had managed to make "octopii" the most common pluralization, then I would begrudgingly accept it per point 1 above, but until then, no.
[+] [-] gpderetta|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] kibwen|1 year ago|reply
Note that this is the same process that we eventually apply to every other loanword; next time you talk to a German, watch them cringe at "delicatessens" as the plural to "delicatessen".
[+] [-] crazygringo|1 year ago|reply
Is it the repeated "s" at the end? But we have no problem saying "buses" or "rebuses".
Is it something to do with the plural of "fish" just being "fish"? But we have no problem making whales and dolphins plural with an -s.
Is it that "-puses" sounds slightly vulgar, like we're talking about multiple female genitalia?
I genuinely don't know. All I know is that "octopuses" just sounds wrong for some reason I can't put my finger on. And that "octopii" somehow "feels" much better, even if everything about it is logically wrong.
I'll still say "octopuses", but I know I always want to say "octopii" instead. (And spell it that way too, because "octopi" feels like it would rhyme with "canopy".)
[+] [-] cyberpunk|1 year ago|reply
I’m in his boat ;)
fun book, forgot the name.
[+] [-] jjtheblunt|1 year ago|reply
also, the reality is
#define octopi octopodes
#define octopuses octopodes
and so on is what's more or less going on...whereas in English octopodes is a mouthful.
[+] [-] not_kurt_godel|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Aardwolf|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mellavora|1 year ago|reply
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[+] [-] sigzero|1 year ago|reply
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[+] [-] tiffanyh|1 year ago|reply
They can:
- shape shift into so many different forms and shapes.
- "invisibility", by instantanously changing colors & it's own skin texture, to match surrounds.
- can regrow entire body parts if cut off (like arms)
- have 9 brains (localized)
- and are ridiculous intelligent
[+] [-] goostavos|1 year ago|reply
One of the coolest things I've encountered at an aquarium was a sleeping octopus wildly shifting its colors. It seems truly alien to behold -- like it shouldn't be possible.
My googling after the fact says that who knows why they actually do it or what's going on, but, I really like the thought of them having little octopus dreams.
[+] [-] rkagerer|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] sharpshadow|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mellavora|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Qem|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] FrustratedMonky|1 year ago|reply
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[+] [-] knighthack|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] noelwelsh|1 year ago|reply
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[+] [-] Tool_of_Society|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] pvaldes|1 year ago|reply
Would justify perfectly an: "in the video the octopus is seen trying to avoid being stolen its food by all the other fishes", that is the same behavior that you'll see if you break a crab or an urchin underwater. Many coastal fishes from rocky bottoms will come to steal any food scrap available. They don't cooperate with other fishes on any way.
Or maybe they are playing "rock, paper, tentacle", but to me the message more probable here is "this is my food, go away". If you look the video carefully the fishes seem trying to swim near the mouth of the octopus, where the probability of stealing a scrape is higher.
[+] [-] Tool_of_Society|1 year ago|reply
Probably shouldn't base your entire opinion of the study on a 17 second video or a fluff article.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-024-02525-2
[+] [-] mseepgood|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] setgree|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] throwup238|1 year ago|reply
However the usual definition of domestication is specific to humans. The aforementioned aphid farming and the octopodes in TFA are technically in mutualistic relationships.
[+] [-] Intralexical|1 year ago|reply
It doesn't seem that there's any evidence of that yet. Maybe if they keep at it for a while, and either the fish they hunt with branch off into a separate population or they do it so much that it affects the entire population?
[+] [-] Intralexical|1 year ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36103801
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopolis_and_Octlantis