CLIFF RAGSDALE: I tried to make sure it was alive
and that entailed just looking at it.
I could follow its eyes, I assume they were eyes
they looked like eyes....
CARRIE ALBERTIN: It's a really remarkable, very strange looking animal
three hearts, blue blood, gills
and the entire body is covered in these remarkable color-changing cells
so the animal can camouflage itself in the blink of an eye
JANET VOIGHT: based on its gut anatomy, it's a predator. It eats only meat, it's a short simple gut.
When I look at the brain, the brain is not that big, so I'm thinking
you know, this is something that kills and eats other animals,
maybe it uses something other than its brain to really figure out what's what.
CLIFF RAGSDALE: It didn't look like it had a skeleton so we were able to ask
Does it have anything that looks like DNA that we would know?
And it did.
And as we analyzed the genome of the animal, it was about the size
of a human genome,
and the response was: Oh...You've solved it!
That must be the basis of how smart they seem, how good they are at
solving problems.
We would hesitate to say that, but we are certainly
very excited by this discovery.
The reason I became fascinated with cephalopods is
because they have the largest brains of invertebrates.
Their design, if you look at it from 20 paces, looks like an invertebrate brain
but if you look at it in a microscopic cross-section
it looks completely unlike any other invertebrate brain
it also looks much more complex
and it has not been studied at all with modern molecular and cellular techniques.
CARRIE ALBERTIN: The human genome has 3.2 billion letters in it.
The octopus genome has about 2.7 billion, so it's almost as big as a human genome
but much much bigger than the genomes of other invertebrates.
Now that we know that it's big we were able to go through
and look at how many different genes it has.
So when we did this we actually found they have a
large number of genes that were thought to be
uniquely expanded in animals like us.
This was really a surprise, because this group of genes
had not been found in animals outside the vertebrates.
CLIFF RAGSDALE: So this was then our starting point, to ask how a large brain
could be organized, and also how it could develop
apart from the vertebrate design.
Z. YAN WANG: The nature paper was a multi-lab collaboration between our lab here,
Dan Rokhsar's group at UC Berkeley, and The Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology.
Dan Rokhsar's group sequenced the genome of our species
and our group, we sequenced the transcriptomes.
That is, we looked at the specific RNAs in different tissues.
By combining our data, we were able to come up with a more powerful
way of understanding what makes the octopus genetically unique.
CARRIE ALBERTIN: One of the most gratifying things about publishing the genome paper
was that there was such an enormous response to it.
People got really excited about these animals that,
you know, they are quite cool
but I don't think people think about very often.
Z. YAN WANG: Cliff said this once, and it has haunted us ever since!
CLIFF RAGSDALE: We will not, hopefully, in our lifetimes have intelligent aliens land
but if they did, they almost surely would not
offer themselves up for experimental neuroscience
so we will not have the ability to ask:
How could an intelligent brain be organized apart from vertebrates
by doing anything else except looking around at the great diversity of the animal world
and what will you then zero-in on are cephalopods.
CARRIE ALBERTIN: I've always been interested in how you make a weird animal
and octopuses are, essentially, the weirdest animals
I could get my hands on!
JANET VOIGHT: To me, if an animal modifies its behavior based on past
experience, it shows evidence of learning
Is it intelligence?
Well, it's not thinking about the conceptual implications
of its change in behavior,
it's saying: What's the best means to an end, based on what I know.
Z. YAN WANG: If you're a soft-bodied animal with no bones, you want to spend a lot of time hiding
because other animals will eat you.
Even if you are as strong and ferocious as an octopus.
But Scootie was incredibly gregarious.
He would come out when he noticed us come in.
He definitely had a sense of humor, I would say,
or mischievousness.
CARRIE ALBERTIN: Scootie was a lot of fun to have in the lab.
He very often spent a lot of time on the glass of the aquarium
just kind of checking things out
and occasionally squirting water out of the aquarium
to get attention.
Z. YAN WANG: So we had these little glass jars and we put fiddler crabs in them
and then we would drop them into his tank
and it was a kind of enrichment
or way of challenging him to get his food.
Ultimately he realized that the cap could move
and he was able to pop it off and get the crab inside of it.
Intelligence is such a tricky term
because it's incredibly context specific
and I find that really hard to apply to our animals
even though we can see them do things we can do.
For example, opening a jar.
JANET VOIGHT: Oh, if octopuses lived 100 years
and had overlapping generations
so mom octopuses taught their babies all she knows
and the babies remembered, and as they grew they learned more and more,
human society would be in big trouble!
CLIFF RAGSDALE: It might be better to say that if they lived longer
they would rule the world
but that's a very land-centric view.
Cephalopods do, in many ways, rule the world
in the marine environment
which is most of the world.
CARRIE ALBERTIN: Octopuses seem almost otherworldly.
Their behavior, their bodies, they're just completely different.
I think the thing we learned from the genome
is how very similar they are to other animals.
We see they have the same compliment of genes
that other invertebrates have
they just use them very differently.