Something smart enough to recgonize the people, what they mean, learn their schedule, and understand how to decieve them, is something that should not be kept in captivity for our amusement.
this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2025
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Every animal can react to their environment, including avoiding predators. Not all of them do it perfectly, but it is a basic survival skill for mobile life forms.
In the wild an octopus often hides in a tight space to protect itself and wanders out to feed, then returns to their safe location afterwards. They avoid predators while doing so. Lots of animals will be less active when predators are out and about, or will be active during times where it is more difficult for the predators to hunt.
Yes, an octopus is a very clever animal but really we should stop killing them because we are absolutely crushing their populations.
The stories I here about Octopi make them sound more like an intelligent creature we don't understand rather than "lots of creatures escape their cages to go hunting and then return before anyone notices. This is natural behavior for an animal."
Yes, the mind of an octopus is unknowable, and it could be just acting on instinct. It could also have some measure of sentience, and there is no way to really know. As such maybe we should err on the side of caution and not keep them in little pens for us to gawk at.
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Multiple similar stories:
https://youtube.com/shorts/iork5qOyCNs
https://mishpacha.com/octopus-escapades/
My favorite is one who would squirt water at lights to turn them off.
I would believe it, those fuckers are smart and if they were social creatures I think they would be in competition with humans for the dominant species . This is an opinion of a person not super well versed on octopi so take this with a good size grain of salt.
Their lifespan is an issue. They live around 2 to 3 years before dying.
Also, the act of reproducing kills the mother. Basically starved to death protecting the eggs. No generational knowledge transfer.
Also doesn’t help that they live underwater. Makes it kinda hard to harness the power of fire or electricity. Especially the former was very important for human domination
there are social octopuses, like the larger pacific striped octopus. imo octopuses had 150 million years to rule the planet and they just weren't good enough. skill issue. us humans only had 2-4 million years. i'd say we're doing quite well comparatively.
Maybe their version of "rule the planet" involved mostly just hanging out in their den and thinking interesting thoughts.
Yep they just hang out and do wtf they want to do. They're not going to work and having politics about whose turn it is to make coffee, or why Will should never have got promoted over Kay. Really they're the smarter species
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They ruled the planet for 150 million years and didn’t ruin the environment once ? What are they even doing?
We’re clearly superior, who else could speed run the mass extinction end game?
They ruled the planet for 150 million years and didn’t ruin the environment once ?
That's what Cthulhu wants you to think.
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Octopi if the base word was Latin. It’s Greek, so octopodes for plural. Technically.
Because English is a bastard if a language octopuses and octopi are fine too.
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Fire is a major limitation.
If i was a multi Billionaire i would dedicate my vast wealth to building an Institute that breeds only the most intelligent octopi with each other.
They don't live so long, so generations go by fast. I bet we could speedrun evolution if we just put our money where our tentacles are.
I know that you mean well, but that is an extremely 'Evil Billionaire' thing to do
Perhaps, but one must consider BogeyTheSwear’s Cephalopod:
- It is inevitable that super-intelligent octopuses will evolve eventually.
- When they do evolve, they will inevitable consider humans to be delicious snacks.
- As intelligent beings, they will of course look kindly upon their creators - mythical or billionairical.
- Therefore, the only safe and rational course of action is to invest all of one’s energies into bringing forth these humanity-munchers with all due haste, so as to preserve oneself as a creator in their perfect eyes. Either working against their awakening or having nothing to do with it at all is ultimately condemning your bloodline for all eternity to be a nice little midnight snack.
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If you want to read a book about super intelligent cephalopods Children of Ruin the second book of the Children of Time book is interesting.
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Ah, so an octopus is overqualified for the position of US President. Good to know.
My turd from this morning is overqualified. You set the lowest bar known to men.
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Last time I went to the aquarium there was a specialist on reef ecology talking about all the different species of animals on display and a woman in the group behind me loudly exclaimed "Wait, fish are animals?" so I'm going out on a limb and stating that I believe there's a considerable amount of overlap between the smartest of their species and the dumbest of ours when it comes to intelligence.
Dumb humans survive and are taken care of, dumb octopi dont survive. Most animals dont have the luxury of keeping every mutation and variation viable for survival.
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Octopus didn't memorize shit. They saw fish and went to get them. Security guard don't give a fuck about the fish tanks, they were at the gate all night.
Can confirm, have been a guard.
'Rounds' were check boxes on a piece of paper. TF do I care whether doors are secure, it's not my department store.
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If it was possible to start fire under water octopi would have tribal civilizations already.
Did you know that the correct pluralization is octopuses or octopoda, not octopi? This is because the -pus ending in octopus to es from the Greek word for foot, not prom latin.
Did you know that octopi has long been included in many dictionaries also?
Language is only half etymology and half vibes
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The correct GREEK plural, which would be used because the root of octopus is Greek, could be octopodes. However, in ENGLISH, people have started intuiting that words ending in “~us” pluralize to ~i, akin to cacti. So this isn’t about being a Latin rule, it’s actually an emergent English rule.
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I'm disappointed that this didn't appear in my feed adjacent to the "teaching an octopus to play piano" video for a nice screenshot.
Makes me think of Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky. 😀
There are many documented Octopus escape/returns. But some of these details could be new/exaggerated.
octopi = 25.1327412287183
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The simpler explanation seems to be that the guard was eating the fish, and blamed the octopus when people noticed something was amiss.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/c98qnyLLTPg
Apologies for the ear bleeding voice over. But it is a cool video showing an octopus opening a jar.
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Octopus for President!! (more brains)
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