Re: Cities, landscapes and interesting places
Posted: Sun Mar 26, 2023 5:56 pm
But you know, I think it's actually more mindblowing for this to go in here:
Biologists Have Discovered an Underwater Octopus City And They're Calling It Octlantis
At the end of last year, scientists discovered a small octopus city – dubbed Octlantis – a find that suggests members of the gloomy octopus species (Octopus tetricus) are perhaps not the isolated and solitary creatures we thought they were.
Octlantis features dens made out of piles of sand and shells, and is home to up to 15 of the cephalopods, according to marine biologists. They recorded 10 hours of video footage of the site, which lies 10 to 15 metres (33 to 49 feet) under the water and measures 18 by 4 metres (59 by 13 feet).
The international team of researchers saw the gloomy octopuses meeting up, living together, communicating with each other, chasing unwelcome octopuses away, and even evicting each other from dens – so it seems Octlantis can be quite a rough place to live.
"These behaviours are the product of natural selection, and may be remarkably similar to vertebrate complex social behaviour," lead researcher David Scheel, from Alaska Pacific University, told Ephrat Livni at Quartz.
"This suggests that when the right conditions occur, evolution may produce very similar outcomes in diverse groups of organisms."
At this point, I'm 101% convinced octopodes are a coexisting sapient species on Earth (alongside bottlenose dolphins) and that, if they lived even twice as long (let alone 10x as long), we've have full-fledged octopus civilizations underwater.
