Even Octopuses Can See a Difference

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA: From the annals of you can’t make this stuff up: Octopuses like HDTV.

For decades researchers studying cephalopods, the class of mollusks that includes squids and octopuses, have tried using television to illicit a response from the creatures. Until now, none of the test subjects have taken the bait.

But biologist Renata Pronk at Macquarie University in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, and her colleagues decided to give it one more try. Instead of using the sort of SD CRT displays traditionally used in such experiments, they tried an LCD HD display. Their test subject, a gloomy octopus (Octopus tetricus), responded to the HDTV images as if it were seeing genuine competitors, preditors or prey, moving away from or toward the screen.

Speculating in a report in New Scientist, Roger Hanlon, an octopus researcher at the Marine Resources Center in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, said that the reason likely lies in the complexity of octopus eyes. Pronk’s HD clips were filmed at 50 fps, while the CRT displays only show footage at 24 fps. “The images that they see on CRT screens are incomplete and probably incoherent,” Hanlon told New Scientist.

Pronk told the Sydney Morning Herald that it was likely the lower frame rate CRT images looked like a series of still images to the octopus while the HDTV images looked more like real, moving animals.

Octopuses are considered the most intelligent of all invertebrates, but much debate remains about the extent of their brain power and capacity for learning. It is possible, Halon said, that the discovery that octopuses will respond to HDTV images could help in testing the limits of cephalopod intelligence.