What Ecstasy Does to Octopuses

What Ecstasy Does to Octopuses

"Despite their wacky brains, these intelligent animals seem to respond to the drug in a very similar way to humans."

Ed Yong

With ecstasy in their system, the five octopuses spent far more time in the company of the same trapped male they once shunned. Even without a stopwatch, the change was obvious. Before the drug, they explored the chamber with the other octopus very tentatively. “They mashed themselves against one wall, very slowly extended one arm, touched the [other animal], and went back to the other side,” Dölen says. “But when they had MDMA, they had this very relaxed posture. They floated around, they wrapped their arms around the chamber, and they interacted with the other octopus in a much more fluid and generous way. They even exposed their [underside], where their mouth is, which is not something octopuses usually do.”

But most octopuses, with some exceptions, are solitary hermits, and Jennifer Mather from the University of Lethbridge isn’t convinced that ecstasy is making them sociable. Instead, the drug might just mess with their ability to detect the chemical cues of potential mates. “There’s no proof that it is anything more than attraction,” she says.

Harriet de Wit from the University of Chicago, who has studied ecstasy’s effects on animals, has other concerns. “It’s an innovative and exciting study,” she says, but it’s unfortunate that the duo always tested the octopuses first after a dunk in normal salt water and then after an ecstasy bath. In pharmacology studies, scientists normally mix up the order in which animals receive the drug and the saline control. Without that counterbalancing, it’s hard to say why the octopuses were behaving differently the second time around: Was it because of the ecstasy, or simply because they had become familiar with the arena, the plastic toy, or the other octopus?

I didn't yet read the article, but do find octopuses intriguing.

On a slightly unrelated note, a few days ago I came across a claim (unsubstantiated) made somewhere on a forum, that only vertebrates (animals having a backbone) were capable of possessing consciousness. It seemed a dubious claim to me - in this context it would deny the possibility of octopus consciousness.

[Laird]

It seemed a dubious claim to me - in this context it would deny the possibility of octopus consciousness.

It's more than dubious - it's outright wrong. Even mainstream scientists accept that octopuses are conscious - witness the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness from 2012 (emphasis mine):

[N]eural circuits supporting behavioral/electrophysiological states of attentiveness, sleep and decision making appear to have arisen in evolution as early as the invertebrate radiation, being evident in insects and cephalopod mollusks (e.g., octopus).

[T]he weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.