California’s Two-Spot Octopus is the Alien Mind Off Shore

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I have a deep passion for octopuses. I have made several short documentaries about them and even traveled twice to Indonesia with one of the world’s leading octopus scientists to film them in their natural habitat. My home office is packed with octopus imagery and iconography, and years ago I made a personal vow never to eat octopus. Squid and other mollusks still get a pass in my book. If you want to debate the ethics of this, fine.

The octopus is a singularly unique creature in the animal kingdom. They are essentially related to clams and abalone and snails, yet they possess an intelligence (let alone a body form) that is so strange and alien, it is unsurprising that sci-fi movies like Arrival feature creatures that are both very intelligent and octopus-like. If you have ever spent an hour alone on the seafloor with an octopus (as I have….just looking eye to eye), you know that they are something different. While most other fish swim away, an octopus will often linger and even engage in what might be considered play.

In fact, we’ve learned that octopuses rely heavily on learning rather than instinct. Unlike many animals that follow hardwired behavioral scripts, octopuses explore, test, and improvise. For that reason and others, it’s hard not to think of them more like other familiar mammals, like a dog or a dolphin.

And then you consider evolution and it gets really weird.

The common octopus (Octopus vulgaris) in Indonesia. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

That’s the thing. When we talk about smart animals, we tend to think of vertebrates: dolphins, whales, dogs, horses, elephants. They all share a long evolutionary lineage with us, shaped by natural selection into social, communicative, problem-solving creatures whose minds we recognize because they work in ways familiar to our own. But octopuses are not like that. They diverged from our lineage hundreds of millions of years ago. The last common ancestor humans share with an octopus was a simple wormlike creature. From that fork in the tree of life, vertebrates developed one path toward cognition while invertebrates followed others, some of them evolving remarkable abilities (spiders anyone?!), but rarely what we traditionally call intelligence.

Somehow, the octopus broke that pattern. It built a mind through a completely different architecture, with neurons spread throughout its arms, distributed processing, and behaviors that suggest curiosity, play, memory, strategy. They’ve developed these complex behaviors because they are essentially large blobs of protein moving about the seafloor. When exposed, they are very vulnerable, and so millions of years of evolutionary pressure have compelled them to become, well, smart. What makes this even stranger is how short their lives are…usually just a year or two. All of that intelligence compressed into what, in the grand scheme of things, is just a brief flash of existence.

Seeing eye to eye with an octopus in Indonesia (Photo: Erik Olsen)

Alongside them, their closest cousins, the cuttlefish, have evolved similarly striking cognitive abilities, but they don’t quite equate with the octopus. Still, together they show that intelligence is not a single climb up one evolutionary ladder but something nature can shape in entirely different ways. Convergent evolution.

So, if you were searching for meaning and purpose and trying to understand the process of intelligence itself, you could hardly find a better creature to study than the octopus. Short of discovering another intelligent life form somewhere in the universe, the octopus is one of our best bets to grasp what intelligence is and how it evolves.

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Scientists are doing precisely that right now. And there is one species they turn to the most: our own California two-spot octopus (Octopus bimaculoides), one of the most remarkable animals on the planet. (They get their name, obviously, from the attractive blue spots on their sides.) The California two-spot octopus spends its days tucked into small crevices and hunting right off our shores. You can see them up and down the coast. I have only encountered a few in the wild, but each time it’s special, like a Christmas gift.

California two-spot octopus in a lab (Photo: Erik Olsen)

What’s especially cool is that the California two-spot octopus has gone from a coastal curiosity — an animal long seen, admired, and loved by divers — to a full-fledged scientific model, teaching us new things about neuroscience, genomics, and behavior. In 2015, researchers published the first complete genome sequence of the California two-spot octopus, and it marked a watershed moment in the study of cognition. For the first time, scientists could look directly at the genetic architecture behind an intelligence built on an evolutionary branch completely separate from our own. The two-spot became the go-to organism for this work because it is abundant in local waters, manageable in laboratory settings, and displays a level of problem solving that can be tested and observed in controlled conditions. I guess they make great pets, too, because several folks on Instagram have them and make pretty entertaining videos with them.

The genome of the two-spot octopus turned out to carry a treasure trove of evolutionary surprises. One of the most striking discoveries was the massive expansion of protocadherin genes, which guide how neurons connect and communicate. Vertebrates like humans have them, too, but octopuses have many more. This genetic abundance appears tailored to their unusual nervous system. Roughly two-thirds of an octopus’s neurons are not in its central brain but distributed throughout its arms. Each arm can process sensory information and make decisions locally, while still coordinating with the rest of the animal.

According to Roger Hanlon, who I have worked with, octopuses are colorblind, and yet they have this remarkable ability to change color to fit their surroundings. It may be the most remarkable camouflage ability in the animal world, and yet we still understand surprisingly little about how it works. In addition to neurons, their skin and arms appear to contain opsins, light-detecting cells, raising the possibility that octopuses do not just see with their eyes, but with their bodies as well.

I mean, does it get more alien than that? That’s the stuff of serious sci-fi.

The author filming a cuttlefish in Indonesia. (Photo: Hergen Spalink)

The genome also revealed a wide set of genes involved in learning, neural flexibility, and sensory perception. Many of the same kinds of genes that support cognition in vertebrates appear in octopuses too, but they have been expanded and reworked, suggesting that evolution arrived at intelligence using a very different blueprint.

Perhaps the most surprising discovery is the octopus’s heavy reliance on RNA editing. RNA editing is the process by which cells deliberately alter RNA after it has been copied from DNA. If DNA is the master blueprint, RNA is the working set of instructions, and in octopuses that working copy can be extensively rewritten, especially in the nervous system. While other animals can do this on a small scale, this unusual molecular flexibility in the octopus may help their nervous systems adapt and respond with a level of speed and sophistication that maybe helps explain their problem-solving abilities and behavioral creativity, even if scientists are still working out exactly how it all works.

We’re really at the beginning of an effort to better understand this animal’s remarkable abilities and how it compares with our own unique intelligence. What we have learned so far is that octopus intelligence is real, measurable, and deeply unusual. In experiments, octopuses can solve puzzles, open jars, navigate mazes, remember solutions over time, and learn by watching others. Stories of octopuses escaping their tanks, squirting water at people they recognize, or slipping away from handlers they seem to dislike are surprisingly common. When I was a summer docent at the National Museum in Washington D.C. many years ago, there was an octopus that would greet me by draping an arm over the edge of the glass whenever I came in. Walking up to the tank felt less like approaching an exhibit and more like being welcomed by a friend.

Yes, I know, there is real danger in anthropomorphizing animals.

Many of my friends who are aware of my love for these animals beseeched me to watch My Octopus Teacher, the Oscar-winning documentary film. I’ve seen it twice, and I have to say that while I love many of the shots and scenes in the film, I feel like the movie goes way overboard making these animals seem like they have human emotions. I’m not sure they do. Something else is going on, I’m just not sure what it is.

If you’d like a good book on the subject, I’d recommend Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith. It’s got more actual science in it than Sy Montgomery’s The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness, which, like My Octopus Teacher, kind of annoyed me.

All of this is to say that we are blessed here in California to have such an amazing species in our local waters. The California two-spot octopus is more than an interesting coastal species; it is a window into how minds can form in ways we never imagined. Its genome offers clues to the very nature of intelligence, demonstrating that cognition can arise from wholly different evolutionary routes. In that sense, studying this unassuming little animal on our shoreline may be the closest we come to understanding an alien mind without ever leaving Earth.

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Caltech Fly Labs and a Century of Genetic Discovery

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Few organisms in the history of science have been as important to our understanding of life as the humble fruit fly. The genus Drosophila melanogaster holds a particularly esteemed spot among the dozens of model organisms that provide insight into life’s inner workings. For more than 100 years, this tiny, but formidable creature has allowed scientists to unwind the infinitesimal mechanisms that make every living creature on the planet what it is.

And much of the work to understand the fruit fly has taken place and is taking place now, right here in California at the Cal Tech fly labs.

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Over the decades, Drosophila have been key in studying brain, behavior, development, flight mechanics, genetics, and more in many labs across the globe. These tiny, round-bodied, (usually) red-eyed flies might appear irrelevant, but their simplicity makes them ideal models. They’re easy to breed—mix males and females in a test tube, and in 10 days, you have new flies. Their 14,000-gene DNA sequence is relatively short, but extremely well-studied and there are some 8,000 genes which have human analogs. (The fly’s entire genome was fully sequenced in 2000.) Crucially, a century of fruit fly research, much of it led by Caltech, has produced genetic tools for precise genome manipulation and shed light on the act of flight itself.

But how did Drosophila become the darling of genetics?

In the early 20th century, the field of genetics was still in its infancy. Thomas Hunt Morgan, a biologist at Columbia University with a background in embryology and a penchant for skepticism began with an effort to find a simple, cheap, easy-to-breed model organism. At Columbia, he established a laboratory in room 613 of Schermerhorn Hall. This cramped space became famous for groundbreaking research in genetics, with Morgan making innovative use of the common fruit fly.

Thomas Hunt Morgan in the Fly Room at Columbia, 1922 (Cal Tech Archives)

Morgan, who joined Columbia University after teaching at Bryn Mawr College, chose the fruit fly for its ease of breeding and rapid reproduction cycle. Morgan observed a male fly with white eyes instead of the usual red. Curious about this trait’s inheritance, he conducted breeding experiments and discovered that eye color is linked to the X chromosome. He realized a male fly, with one X and one Y chromosome, inherits the white-eye trait from its mother, who provides the X chromosome. This led him to conclude that other traits might also be linked to chromosomes. His extensive experiments in this lab confirmed the chromosomal theory of inheritance, demonstrating that genes are located on chromosomes and that some genes are linked and inherited together.

After his groundbreaking research in genetics at Columbia University, Morgan moved to Pasadena and joined the faculty at CalTech in 1928, where he became the first chairman of its Biology Division and continued his influential work in the field of genetics establishing a strong genetics research program. Morgan’s work, supported by notable students like Alfred Sturtevant and Hermann Muller, laid the foundation for modern genetics and earned him the Nobel Prize in 1933.

CalTech then became a world center for genetics research using the fruit fly. Other notable names involved in fruit fly research at CalTech include Ed Lewis, a student of Morgan, who focused his research on the bithorax complex, a cluster of genes responsible for the development of body segments in Drosophila. His meticulous work over several decades revealed the existence of homeotic and Hox genes, which control the basic body plan of an organism (for which he won the 1995 Nobel Prize).

Novel prize winner Edward Lewis (Nobel Prize.org)

Seymour Benzer, another luminary at CalTech, shifted the focus from genes to behavior. Benzer’s innovative experiments in the 1960s and 1970s sought to understand how genes influence behavior. His work demonstrated that mutations in specific genes could affect circadian rhythms, courtship behaviors, and learning in fruit flies. Benzer’s approach was revolutionary, merging genetics with neurobiology and opening new avenues for exploring the genetic basis of behavior. His contributions are chronicled in Jonathan Weiner’s “Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior,” a riveting account of Benzer’s quest to uncover the genetic roots of behavior. Lewis Wolpert in his review for the New York Times wrote, “Benzer has many gifts beyond cleverness. He has that special imagination and view of the world that makes a great scientist.”

Since Benzer’s retirement in 1991, new vanguard in genetics research has taken over at CalTech, which continues to be at the forefront of scientific discovery, driven by a new generation of researchers who are unraveling the complexities of the brain and behavior with unprecedented precision.

Elizabeth Hong is a rising star in biology, with her Hong lab investigating how the brain orders and encodes complex odors. Her research focuses on the olfactory system of Drosophila, which, despite its simplicity, shares many features with the olfactory systems of more complex organisms. Hong’s work involves mapping the synapses and neural circuits that process olfactory information, seeking to understand how different odors are represented in the brain and how these representations influence behavior. Her findings could have profound implications for understanding sensory processing and neural coding in general.

David Anderson, another prominent figure at Caltech, studies the neural mechanisms underlying emotions and behaviors. While much of Anderson’s work now focuses on mice as a model organism, the lab’s research explores how different neural circuits contribute to various emotional states, such as fear, aggression, and pleasure, essentially how emotions are encoded in the circuitry and chemistry of the brain, and how they control animal behavior. Using advanced techniques like optogenetics and calcium imaging, Anderson’s lab can manipulate specific neurons and observe the resulting changes in behavior. This work aims to bridge the gap between neural activity and complex emotional behaviors, providing insights into mental health disorders and potential therapeutic targets.

In 2018, the Anderson laboratory identified a cluster of just three neurons in the fly brain that controls a “threat display” — a specific set of behaviors male fruit flies exhibit when facing a male challenger. During a threat display, a fly will extend its wings, make quick, short lunges forward, and continually reorient itself to face the intruder.

California Institute of Technology (Photo: Erik Olsen)

Michael Dickinson is renowned for his studies on the biomechanics and neural control of flight in Drosophila. In the Dickenson Lab, researchers combine behavioral experiments with computational models and robotic simulations, seeking to understand how flies execute complex flight maneuvers with such precision. His work has broader applications in robotics and may inspire new designs for autonomous flying robots.

“He’s a highly original scientist,” Alexander Borst, a department director at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Germany, told the New York Times.

Dickinson’s investigations also delve into how sensory information is integrated and processed to guide flight behavior, offering insights into the general principles of motor control and sensory integration.

As science advances, Caltech’s Fly Lab’s remind us of the power of curiosity, perseverance, and the endless quest to uncover the mysteries of life. The tiny fruit fly, with its simple elegance, remains a powerful model organism, driving discoveries that illuminate the complexities of biology and behavior. Just recently, scientists (though not at CalTech) unveiled the first fully image of the fruit fly brain. Smaller than a poppy seed, the brain is an astonishingly complex tangle of 140,000 neurons, joined together by more than 490 feet of wiring.

In essence, the fruit fly remains a key to unlocking the wonders and intricacies of life, and in the Fly Labs at Caltech, that spirit of discovery thrives, ensuring that the legacy of Morgan, Lewis, Benzer, and their successors will continue to inspire generations of scientists to come.

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California companies lead the effort to save the world with microbes, California connection: meet 2018 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry Frances Arnold, Carnegie Observatories and the GMT, Questioning “Disaster tourism” in California, Feeling the Force in Anaheim and more

Week of May 31, 2019

Biology

California companies are leading the effort to save the world with microbes

Overfishing is arguably one of the most significant threats to the human food supply on the planet. Approximately three billion people in the world rely on both wild and farmed seafood as their primary source of protein, and ten percent of the world’s population depends on fisheries to make a living.

One the of dirty little secrets of the global commercial fish industry is that it takes fish to make fish. While many people see farmed fish as an ideal solution to meeting our protein needs in the future, the reality is that feeding farmed fish right now requires massive inputs of so-called forage fish, namely small fish like anchovies, herring, menhaden, capelin, anchovy, pilchard, sardines, and mackerel that occur in large numbers in the ocean, particularly the cold Southern and Northern latitudes. A multi-billion dollar industry is dedicated to using large ships that ply the ocean with nets to bring up millions of tons of forage fish every year.

So is there a way to feed farmed fish that reduces the need to trawl the seas for forage fish? It turns out that one California company is working on a solution, and it involves one of the most abundant organisms on earth: bacteria.

NovoNutrients is a Mountain View, California, startup, whose offices lie close to both Facebook and Google. The company is harnessing the new technology of synthetic biology or synbio to get bacteria to do our bidding, creating proteins using the same tiny organisms that curdle milk into yogurt and cause innumerable diseases.

California Science Weekly

Chemistry / Nobel Prizes

California connection: meet Frances Arnold, the 2018 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry

The 2018 Nobel Prizes, announced in October, included a very special California name: Frances Arnold. Dr. Arnold is a professor of chemical engineering at the California Institute of Technology, an institution that has seen its share of Nobel winners: 39. She calls La Canada Flintridge home, adding brain power to a city already loaded with brilliant minds (JPL is headquartered there).

A wonderful profile of Dr. Arnold can be found in this week’s New York Times, written by the always witty and fun Natalie Angier. The piece does an admirable job of explaining directed evolution, the process she developed that is now widely used to generate novel enzymes and other biomolecules by harnessing cellular machinery. Her process is being used to develop biofuels, medicines, agricultural prodiucts and even in laundry detergent to remove stains.

It is only the 52nd time in history that the Nobel prize was awarded to a female scientist. That’s out of a total of 892 awards (17%) given since the prize was created by Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, who established the prize in 1895. It should be noted that the brilliant French chemist Marie Curie won it twice.

The Nobel site also has a wonderful series on women in science that’s worth reading in its entirety. It’s very well illustrated and put together. The piece on Dr. Arnold is particularly good.

The New York Times Nobel Prize

Astronomy / Space

Carnegie Observatories and the Giant Magellan Telescope

While many science institutions in California are extremely well-known (we cover many of them here), one Pasadena organization gets little media attention, but is arguably one of the most important places in the world in astronomy.

The Carnegie Observatories, located in Pasadena, is playing a leading role in humanity’s grasp of the origins of the cosmos. Scientists at the Carnegie are working at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile’s Atacama desert, home to the twin Magellan telescopes, and site of the future Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT).

The Giant Magellan Telescope is arguably one of the most important astronomic scientific instruments ever constructed. When completed in 2025, it stands to revolutionize our view and understanding of the universe. The GMT is a segmented mirror telescope using seven incredibly precise reflecting surfaces that have been shaped and polished to within a wavelength of light, approximately one-millionth of an inch. It will have a resolving power of almost 25 meters, dwarfing that of most other terrestrial-based telescopes. In fact, it will have ten times the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope, NASA’s current workhorse for mirror-based astronomical observation. That means it will resolve points of light 10 times sharper than Hubble.

Construction of the Magellan is underway and you can follow its progress here.

Carnegie Observatories

Environment

Questioning “Disaster tourism” in California

The 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California fire wiped out a small community of mostly retired homeowners who sought out the quiet, forested glens in Northern California as a place to spend the waning years of their lives. The fire is considered the deadliest in California history and resulted in the death of 88 people and the destruction of 13,696 homes.

The San Francisco Chronicle delves into the idea of “disaster tourism”, following several people who made a special effort to visit the destroyed town to see the damage for themselves, take pictures and video. They were not alone. Apparently, three cleanup workers were fired after posting insensitive images of the devastation on social media. And one artist spray-painted chilling images around Paradise.

For the people who once called Paradise home, let alone for the relatives of the ones who lost their lives in the tragic fire, the idea of people poking around to gaze, paint and take selfies in the ruins might have distasteful quality.

San Francisco Chronicle

Space / Companies

Feel the Force in Anaheim

It was 53 years ago this month that Disneyland delighted (or annoyed, depending on your tolerance for earworms) visitors with the opening of the It’s a Small World ride. Perhaps it’s fitting, or a sign of how much more commercialized the world has become, that this week (Friday, May 31, in fact) saw the opening of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, a new 14-acre addition to the theme park that capitalizes on Disney’s $4 billion, 2012 purchase of the Star Wars franchise from Lucasfilm. The centerpiece of the new addition is a 100-foot long Millennium Falcon.

The New York Times gets a personalized tour of the new addition, and seemed to think it was both “jaw-dropping” and incomplete, since several of the marquee attractions still aren’t open. In the Los Angeles Times, the reporter both appreciated and questioned how interactive it is, as it forces people who don’t know each other to work together to achieve various goals.

We can’t help pity the parents who will not only pay nearly $120 per person to enter the park, but will then have to shell out an additional $200 for a hand-built lightsaber.

New York Times Los Angeles Times

Could a drought in California be linked to a drought in the Midwest? A recent Stanford-led study looks at so-called “Domino droughts”. (Stanford Water in the West)

Some lovely shots, recently discovered, of California’s desert landscapes from the 1920s, all shot by two women. (Atlas Obscura)

A bill making its way through the California legislature will allow “harvesting” of roadkill. With a permit. Didn’t know it was illegal, but apparently, it is. (CalMatters)

Elephant seals speak in dialects, but they may be losing them. Wow, this is so interesting. Who knew? There are numerous rookeries of elephant seals around California. (The Atlantic)

The Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach has a new wing called Pacific Visions that just opened. (Aquarium of the Pacific)

Hawthorne, California-based SpaceX’s internet-beaming Starlink satellites are totally bumming out astronomers. (Axios)

Saving pets is apparently a big – and expensive – thing near San Francisco. (Alta Online)

Spotting wildfires around California may get easier with an array of new cameras. (NY Times)

The Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles has a new exhibit: ‘Hollywood Dream Machines’ with over 40 vehicles from cinema history, including Blade Runner, A Clockwork Orange, Mad Max: Fury Road, Back to the Future, and RoboCop. (Smith Journal)

Speaking of the Carnegie Observatories (see above) NASA’s Transiting Exoplanets Survey Satellite discovered that a nearby system hosts the first Earth-sized planet. Carnegie scientists were involved in the discovery. (Carnegie Observatories)

A rare (and very smelly) corpse lily is set to bloom in Long Beach. (LA Times)

Excellent story on the decline of the vaquita porpoise, a marine mammal that is almost extinct in the Gulf of California. (Undark)

You may soon get a sandwich delivered to you by drone in San Diego. (Freight Waves)

That’s it! Have a great week, and please send your friends an invitation to sign up for the California Science Weekly newsletter.

Design by Luis Ramirez

Tag: Biology

California’s Two-Spot Octopus is the Alien Mind Off Shore

Caltech Fly Labs and a Century of Genetic Discovery