By: April Sheng
His arms curled around his body, he scuttled along the glass toward his containment’s sandy bottom. Writhing, twisting, spinning; he filled the tank with a thick black substance. His last-ditch attempt to escape whatever was bothering him was to grasp a pipe with enough force to crush it.
Eric Angel Ramos, a marine scientist noted that fact, stating, “[it] look[s] like he was trying to kill it,” This incident occurred at the Rockefeller University in New York, where Costello the octopus was taking his daily nap when he was launched into a state of distress.
His skin’s colors were shifting rapidly as he dozed off, which is normal for a cephalopod. But that stage quickly evolved into a squirming, twisting mess. Costello started spinning in circles like a mini whirlpool. Eventually diving down and squirting ink everywhere inside the tank. Dr. Ramos commented that after the ink had cleared, the octopus held onto a pipe with aggressive and ferocious strength.
Dr. Ramos remarked that the way Costello acted “was not a normal octopus behavior,” A biophysicist at Rockefeller, Marcelo O. Magnasco, also commented on this abnormal behavior: “We were completely dumbfounded,” Costello was later said to be eating and playing with his toys, completely back to normal.
Further investigation by scientists is bound to be reviewed formally.. But for now, Dr. Ramos and Dr. Magnasco shared possible explanations on this strange occurrence on the bioRxiv website.
Although being a mysterious and mind-boggling episode, incidents such as this one is not unheard of. A lab that was also studying another octopus, Abbott, after the incident with Costello. The team reported that three similar and shorter happenings occurred with Abbott. Dr. Ramos and Dr. Magnasco studied these behaviors, concluding that Costello curled his armed towards his body and filled up the tank with ink as a sign of defense. Whereas the throttling of the pipe was a final attempt to stunt the cause of his distress
Whether this explanation by the two doctors is the plain truth, or there could be something deeper than just a small freight by a dream; undoubtedly, this must have been a big nightmare for an octopus.
Sources:
Wilke, Carolyn. “Is This Octopus Having a Nightmare?” The New York Times, The New York Times, 9 May 2023, https://eb18600f7bb2916037f5ee8e636ce199.cdn.bubble.io/f1686437734093x278067273748550100/Video%20Footage_%20Is%20This%20Octopus%20Having%20a%20Nightmare_%20-%20The%20New%20York%20Times.pdf. Accessed 11 June 2023.