Hehe, check this out, guys... Mantis shrimp the most intelligent inverts?!

Looks like everyone there agreed that octos are smarter :) Thats good. Im not familiar at all with mantis shrimps. I have seen them on TV once, but i dont know much more than that.
 
Depends what you call intelligence. I have both stomatopods and cephalopods in tanks. They both have their unique ways of thinking. "Aliens from Inner Space/ The Fastest Claw in the West" Shows that debate well on film.:smokin:
 
Hehe, Rudiger, read again... seems to be quite a hot topic over there, and I'm currently the only one defending the pro-octopus point of view ;)

And cephalopoder, I do really agree. The point I was making on that board was more that I think cephs conform best to the kind of intelligence which involves future planning, flexibility of behavior to accomplish the same task, and abstract thinking.
 
I have seen this debate many times before and I am not getting involved lol. Just keep some octopuses then try keeping some peacock mantis... You can come up with your own conclusion after that.
Both are intelligent. But don't under estimate either untill you have kept a few of both.
chris
 
Wow, last time i checked there were only 5 posts, now there are a bijillion. I added my 2 cents worth.
 
LOL "thanks" Rudiger, but it's ok... got it under control ;) Sorry, did have to correct you on the color change thing, and the fact that some mantises can eat octos...

I agree with you wholeheartedly, cephalopoder... neither is to be underestimated. To me, it's a very interesting debate, though... I stick firmly to my position that while both display different kinds of intelligence, the kind of emphasis I place with greater weight is that of cognitive flexibility and adaptation in novel situations, which I still think cephs are superior at.
 
hehehe just read the posts....... LOL looks like you had your hands full for a bit....... I'm not touching that one either.......

Just in case one of those mantis guys decides to pick a fight LOL


well, dammit, actually i would go with cuttlefish hahaha just to mess the whole thing up even more......
C
 
I mentioned nautilus, cuttlefish AND squid just to make my point about them being of the same monophyletic taxon :)
Someone kept saying "how can octopus be intelligent if they are a short-lived species", my points were:

1) We don't know if their ancestors were short-lived when they evolved intelligence (see long lifespan of nautilus)

2) Lifespan has no relevance to the evolution of intelligence anyway if there is no evidence of observational learning (I would say there is none conclusively for any invert, even octos)
 
O.K., I told myself I was done with this thread. It is no longer fun when your arguments are misconstrued - or should that be "misconscrewed"? However, I couldn't let Pandora's comment about abstract thinking pass. I doubt that any octopus or stomatopod ever had an abstract thought in its head.

If you really want to explore invertebrate "intelligence", whatever it is, probably the leading candidate is not a cephalopod or a hoplocarid, but an arachnid. The jumping spider Portia is one of the most remarkable invertebrates I know. Try looking up some of the papers by Robert Jackson on this species using deception, taking detours, aggressive mimicry, etc. It is a truly fascinating beast.

Roy
 
LOL Gono, I see this thread is not ready to die... which is ok by me ;) Like I said, it's a fascinating topic to me that I'm all too happy to explore..

Funny you should mention arachnids, in the beginning of the other intelligence thread, I said that I thought that mantis shrimp might actually not even be the most intelligent arthropods... that maybe something along the lines of a tarantula or other arachnid was up there! LOL... after reading your other posts on mantis, I was starting to be convinced otherwise, but now I'm not sure what to think on that anymore hehe. I do think jumping spiders are very cool... though IMHO, emotive deception by intent is something I'd probably only attribute to primates and possibly some cetaceans (behavioral deception, spiders wouldn't be alone in having).

Oh and abstract thinking, in behavioral psychology, is a synonym for categorical thinking, or the ability to generalize (antonym = concrete thinking). In other words, abstract thinking is being able to learn something is true for one situation, then go on to a novel situation and apply knowledge from past experiences there. I don't think it's such a stretch of the imagination that octos might be capable of this, given some of the experiments that have been run on them (for example, maze-running experiments where they get a little faster at it each time in novel mazes). I think you and kalim are taking a lot of these terms for their colloquial usage. It wasn't like I was trying to say that the next Picasso was going to be an octopus, or that they spend their days dreaming in iambic pentameter, hehe! :D
 
I'm not a cephalapod lover or owner but I think octos are very cool and smart... I saw a documentary in Gen Zoology in school about the blue ringed octo, and in one of the hunting clips, the octo was hunting a mantis shrimp! ... the shrimp scurried away under a rock and seemed to have won, but the octo came around the rock and pumped its venom under it to paralyze the mantis. Now if that is not smart, what is? I look at smarts as a way to find a solution. if an octo can figure out a way to do something like open a jar for food and pump venom under a rock to kill prey, It has to think about what it can do before executing... and I'm pretty sure millions of years of evolution and born insticts DID NOT teach an octo how to open a jar! just my thoughts...
 
Don't believe everything you see in natural history films. That sequence was actually cut together from several shots. There are actually two different species of mantis shrimp shown and neither species occurs near Sydney where the octopus was from. I know and have worked with the person who filmed the sequence. He was trying to show behavior that has been reported previously - venom release by blue-rings to subdue prey (or potential predators at a distance, but I and others I know who work on blue-rings have been unable to elicit this behavior. It may occur, but I have not seen it. More like what happened is that the octopus what struck several times by mantis shrimp, was damaged by the blows and leaked some TTX, and in the confines of the tank in which the sequence was being photographed, the stomatopod was killed.

Roy
 
hmmm...thank you.....i actually did notice that was two different mantis shrimps, with the first being much bigger and the second being quite a bit smaller.

I did not know that the key sequence was done in a tank, nor that the "poisoning" of the mantis might actually be because the blue ring had been damaged and "leaked" the poison.

didn't you note down before that some mantis that prey on blue rings may be resistant to the blue ring toxin?


Gonodactylus said:
Don't believe everything you see in natural history films. That sequence was actually cut together from several shots. There are actually two different species of mantis shrimp shown and neither species occurs near Sydney where the octopus was from. I know and have worked with the person who filmed the sequence. He was trying to show behavior that has been reported previously - venom release by blue-rings to subdue prey (or potential predators at a distance, but I and others I know who work on blue-rings have been unable to elicit this behavior. It may occur, but I have not seen it. More like what happened is that the octopus what struck several times by mantis shrimp, was damaged by the blows and leaked some TTX, and in the confines of the tank in which the sequence was being photographed, the stomatopod was killed.

Roy
Click to expand...
 
I said that we are working on a stomatopod that preys on blue-rings, but their is no evidence that it is immune to TTX. Rather, it appears to pulverize the octopus, pounding it until the TTX is dispersed. It then eats the octopus, all the time acting like the octopus is covered with hot sauce. We plan to look for sodium channels in the stomatopod that might not be effected by TTX, but I honestly don't expect to find them.

Roy
 
hmmm...thanks.... i gotta correct that somewheres in the site (or maybe stick it as a new log or faq).

unless the stomatopod preys exclusively on octos, then i guess there would not be enough selection pressure to justify such mutant channels. finding one would be really interesting though. with the increase in pollution in the seas, mayhaps the capability to develop resistance to toxins would be useful to stomatopods.
 
I am curious, Gono, since you work with TTX, how similiar is the blue-ring's teratotoxin to that of other sea life, such as that of Fugu? That would be fascinating if you were to find some kind of resistent sodium channel with the mantis that you work with (though I guess it's not pointing in that direction), it'd be a huge boost for toxicology.

Have you looked at comparitive studies with other animals resistent to TTX? I think there's a garter snake that preys on the rough-sided newt with the same poison, but I don't know how different this TTX is from that released by the blue ring, or what the mechanism of resistence is there. I think there is a researcher named Brodie who is working with toxic resistence with other predators, and who did some work with the garter snake, I just don't remember the name of the species.
 
you might find this useful, pandora.
http://www.chm.bris.ac.uk/motm/ttx/ttx.htm

a single point mutation that can be selected for seems enough to create resistant critters.

<blockquote>
"The Japanese tiger pufferfish, Fugu rubripes, has been the subject of intensive genetic sequencing studies. A single point mutation in the amino acid sequence of the sodium-ion channel in this species renders it immune from being bound and blockaded by TTX . Changing the amino acid sequence of any protein alters its structure, and therefore its function. Such spontaneous mutations occur all the time in animal populations. Most such changes are neutral or disadvantageous to an organism's survival, but occasionally one confers a selective advantage. In the case of F. rubripes, one tiny change enabled the fish to incorporate TTX-producing bacteria into its tissues and use the toxin to its own advantage."
</blockquote>
 
OK from what I saw, the octo was chasing the mantis and subdued the prey. And as Joe Dirt would say " You're focusing on the wrong part of the story..." I was bringing up the intelligence of the octo... and in the clip I watched, the octo ate the shrimp...so if it was fabricated or set up ...the octo still killed the mantis... it doesn't matter if they would or would not meet in the wild, what matters is I saw the octo all in one clip kill and devour the shrimp. how do you know the clip I watched was the same as what you are speaking of? give me the name of the person that supposedly created this clip and I will rent the movie I watched in class from the library to see if we are speaking of the same clip (I'm pretty sure I was watching Nat. Geographic and I'm pretty sure they wouldn't lie about this sort of thing). If you have any doubts about who is the tough guy of the tank put an octo and a mantis together in the same tank about the same size and see which prevails...my money is on the octo... with eight arms lined with suction cups, ink, a razor sharp beak mixed with color changing abilities and shear speed, the octo would win hands...or I mean tentacles down.
 
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