Who are you calling a SUCKER?

Remember Paul the Octopus, the eight-tentacled seer who used to predict the football scores? During the 2010 World Cup, the cephalopod pundit living in a German sea-life centre was so accurate in his forecasting that he became an international headline. He got nine out of ten matches in that tournament spot on – when it came to footballing prophesy, this was no sucker.

There were, inevitably, gainsayers who insisted that, when he fished a mussel out of a box containing the flag of one of the participants in a forthcoming tie, it was just coincidence that he picked the winner. Clearly none of them had read this, the Australian philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith’s delightful assessment of the octopus, in which it soon becomes clear that Paul was no one-off. Godfrey-Smith recalls one captive octopus that lived in a laboratory tank. The thing about octopuses (apart from the fact that, to every pedant’s dismay, octopuses, not octopi, is the preferred plural) is that they are particular about their diet. They like crab, eased fresh from the shell. In one experiment, a researcher had been feeding captives chunks of frozen squid. One day, as she made her way down the row of tanks, the scientist’s eye was caught by one of the occupants.

‘It had not eaten its squid but was holding it up conspicuously,’ Godfrey-Smith writes. ‘As she stood there, the octopus made its way slowly across the tank to the outflow pipe, watching her all the way. Then, still watching her, it dumped the bit of squid down the drain.’

Never mind football punditry, that octopus should have been made a judge on MasterChef.

Godfrey-Smith’s book is full of anecdotes about the creature’s sly brain power, about the way its bonefree body can be refashioned to fit any available space, about its skin which – believe it or not – can see. An octopus’s skin is rippling with little receptors that react to light and allow it to navigate its way round the ocean depths, changing colour, chameleon-like, as it goes.

After a lifetime’s fascination with cephalopods, the conclusion he comes to is that while our ancestors climbed out of the water and slowly turned into what we are today, the octopus’s precursors remained where they were, developing a parallel nervous system, different from ours but almost as complex.

The octopus, he writes, ‘is the nearest thing to alien life form we can encounter on the planet’. And there on the cover of the book is a picture of one looking for all the world as if it is auditioning for the next series of Doctor Who.

Unfortunately for these cunning, fascinating creatures, they never get much older than two. Godfrey-Smith has yet to fully determine why such a complex nervous system runs out of gas so hurriedly. But his description of one of them reaching the end of its lifespan, limbs and skin falling off as he watches, is as poignant as anything you will read this year.

And that’s why we have not seen Paul back on the Match Of The Day sofa. He died soon after the end of the tournament that made his name, the ultimate one-season wonder.

The octopus ‘is the nearest thing to an alien life form we can encounter on the planet’