C
AN
INVERTEBRATES
BE
CONSIDERED
INTELLIGENT
?
“Filming and . . . watching . . . octopuses interacting. . . .
[can] be funny, like when I would try to remove the
[LEGOs] from an octopus’s grasp and we would play
tug-of-war for up to fifteen minutes. And octopuses
will squirt water at you to make you go away—and
they are
very
good at aiming for your face. More than
once I went home wet.”
—Michael Kuba, Konrad Lorenz Institute
for Evolution and Cognition Research, Austria
“Over the course of the next several years [of
experimentation], a few thousand cuticle-bruising
fights later [between mantis shrimp], I eventually
could say with some certainty that mantis shrimp were
capable of identifying individuals they had previously
fought, and adjusting their fight strategy accordingly.”
—Roy Caldwell, University of California at Berkeley
