Tuesday morning brought some sad news from Japan …
The ‘psychic’ octopus that correctly predicted the result of Japan’s first three World Cup matches has been killed and sold for food.
As it turned out, the octopus in question, a giant Pacific octopus which had been dubbed “Rabiot,” was killed before Japan’s loss to Poland in game three. So it might be a bit of Octopus’ Revenge … except that Rabiot had already predicted Japan’s loss, so his divination skills were no longer needed. That’s a very tough position for an honest octopus.
This isn’t the first time a gifted octopus had been calling things as he/she saw them and ended up in hot water (or cold sushi). In 2010, Paul, a common Atlantic octopus who lived at Oberhausen Sea Life Centre in Germany, garnered quite a bit of attention from world media when he appeared to predict the outcome of a number of World Cup games—as well as several death threats when he pointed a tentacle at Germany’s coming loss to Spain.
How did these octopuses come by their time-bending skills? According to a slew of media reports, and one highly suspect paper published in an online journal, these cany cephalopods get their forecasting skills from the home of many comic book psychics: outer space. According to the theory put forth in this paper, cephalopods arrived on Earth in the form of free-dried eggs, ready to spark the explosion of complex life on the planet, rather like a kid sprinkling a packet of Sea Monkeys into a jar.
Only … no. Octopuses are neither aliens nor gifted with the ability to divine the outcome of people booting a ball around a green. The ‘experiments’ by which the football-calling octopuses do their stuff is a minor variation on an old scheme in which chickens were used for the same purpose. Not only can chickens not predict the future, they’re not too canny about the past, and only modestly aware of the present. It’s just a parlor game.
But while definitely a product of earthly evolution and not capable of bending time’s arrow, octopuses are extremely clever, and also genuinely odd. They’re also, like many forms of life in the sea, dealing with change.
As The Atlantic, appropriately enough, reported last year, octopuses have their surface weirdness ...
Octopuses have three hearts, parrot-like beaks, venomous bites, and eight semi-autonomous arms that can taste the world. They squirt ink, contort through the tiniest of spaces, and melt into the world by changing both color and texture. They are incredibly intelligent, capable of wielding tools, solving problems, and sabotaging equipment.
And a whole other layer of strange underneath.
A team of scientists led by Joshua Rosenthal at the Marine Biological Laboratory and Eli Eisenberg at Tel Aviv University have shown that octopuses and their relatives—the cephalopods—practice a type of genetic alteration called RNA editing that’s very rare in the rest of the animal kingdom. They use it to fine-tune the information encoded by their genes without altering the genes themselves. And they do so extensively, to a far greater degree than any other animal group.
This manipulation of gene expression may be responsible for the extraordinary intelligence of these animals. Unfortunately, the copy-edited genes haven’t gifted them with more than a couple of years of life in most species. So there’s not a lot of time for octopuses to develop much of a deep philosophy of life, or a culture they can pass along to the next generation. They may be very bright, but they’re always starting over.
Still, several studies have suggested that in plastic-laden oceans where most of what we hear is fish populations in peril, the number of cephalopods is actually going up. And that does seem to be true in some cases. Octopus relatives in the form of squids, in particular, may be exploiting niches left open by human over-fishing of predatory fish.
On the other hand, populations of cephalopods of all kinds are notoriously hard to count. There's that short lifespan, which can lead to some very abrupt boom-bust cycles of the population, and when the number of these creatures was never so great to begin with, coming up with numbers that suggest an increase may just be statistical noise. Even if there have been some increases, several types of octopus remain endangered (and it’s not just the much-discussed Northwest Tree Octopus).
Honestly, they’re just not that tasty. Or good at making football picks. And even if they were, we seem to be breeding that out of them—since those that make the correct picks against the home team get eaten. They’ve clever, odd, and interesting. Best to leave them where they can be all three.