Why is the octopus smart as heck?

Le poulpe : l’un des animaux les plus intelligents au monde.

Si les singes, les dauphins ou encore les éléphants font partie des animaux les plus intelligents au monde, ils ne sont pas les seuls à pouvoir prétendre à ce titre. Les poulpes sont également dotés d’une incroyable intelligence et capables d’exploits – Paul le poulpe et Inky, l’évadé de l'Aquarium national de NouvelleZélande, l’ont prouvé ! Pourtant, cette intelligence déconcerte grandement les spécialistes de la cognition animale. Explications.

To demonstrate how smart an octopus can be, Piero Amodio points to a YouTube video. It shows an octopus pulling two halves of a coconut shell together to hide inside. Later the animal stacks the shells together like nesting bowls — and carts them away. “It suggests the octopus is carrying these tools around because it has some understanding they may be useful in the future,” said Amodio, a graduate student studying animal intelligence at the University of Cambridge in Britain.

2. But his amazement is mixed with puzzlement. For decades, researchers have studied how certain animals evolved to be intelligent, among them apes, elephants, dolphins and even some birds, such as crows and parrots. But all the scientific theories fail when it comes to cephalopods, a group that includes octopuses, squid and cuttlefish. Despite feats of creativity, they lack some hallmarks of intelligence seen in other species.

WHAT IS ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE?

3. “It’s an apparent paradox that’s been largely overlooked in the past,” Amodio said. He and five other experts on animal intelligence explore this paradox in a paper published this month in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution. For scientists who study animal behavior, intelligence is not about acing a calculus test or taking a car apart and putting it back together. Intelligence comprises sophisticated cognitive skills that help an animal thrive. That may include the ability to come up with solutions to the problem of finding food, for example, or a knack for planning for some challenge in the future. Intelligent animals don’t rely on fixed responses to survive — they can invent new behaviors on the fly.

4. To measure animal intelligence, scientists observe creatures in the wild — watching a dolphin stick a sponge on its beak to avoid getting cuts from sharp rocks and coral, for example. Or they bring animals into the lab and offer them puzzles to solve, such as rewarding crows when they learn to rip paper into strips of just the right size. Only a few species stand out in these stud-