Ocean wonders

Can octopuses use tools? 10 incredible facts about these creatures

Image: Maximillian Conacher

Have you ever wondered how octopuses live? How do they hunt, feed, and escape predators? They may not be the cutest animals on Earth, but it turns out they are able to do incredible things! Recent discoveries have revealed that octopuses are much more intelligent than we ever thought. These creatures can evaluate options, strategize, and even recognize other animals, including humans! If you want to learn more, join us as we reveal these 10 surprising secrets about the life of octopuses!

Image: Ashleigh Joy Photography

Today, we can find several species of octopus in our oceans, but this doesn't mean that they are something recent. In fact, it's quite the opposite.

Octopuses have been around for a long, long time. The oldest known relative of cephalopods dates back about 330 million years. That's a really long time ago! This ancient fossil, discovered in what is now Fergus County, Montana, belonged to a creature with ten arms.

So much time navigating the seas has served them well, allowing octopuses to develop skills we humans can only dream of.

Image: Roger Darnell

Chameleons might be famous for their camouflage skills, but they're not the only ones with this superpower. Blending into the surroundings and becoming practically invisible is an art practiced by octopuses, too.

Even though they have many arms to hide -8, to be exact- this is not a problem for octopuses when it comes to camouflage. Octopus skin is quite different from ours: they have special cells called chromatophores that let them change not only the color of their skin but also the texture! And that's not all; this process only takes a couple of seconds, adapting their colors and textures to blend with sand, corals, rocks, and any other surface.

Image: Heidi Bruce

Octopuses not only blend in with the colors and shapes of their surroundings but can also mimic other creatures. That's right, they are masters of disguise.

Like a comic book villain who changes appearance to trick others, the mimic octopus can alter its color and shape to resemble other animals in its environment, often choosing to impersonate the shapes of the creatures most feared and avoided by predators.

This octopus can imitate, for example, a venomous sea snake by sporting stripes of different colors and wiggling its arms in a snake-like dance, copying both its appearance and behavior!

Image: Αντωνης Κοροτσάκης

To imitate and adapt, octopuses need to be aware of their surroundings and recognize different places and animals. And they do it.

Octopuses can recognize other sea creatures, and some research even suggests they might recognize humans. There have been documented cases where researchers return to visit the same octopus in the sea, and the octopus often develops a gradual trust in them. Amazing!

There's a reason for all this: besides their excellent vision and sensory perception, octopuses also have an exceptional memory that helps them retain and use new information.

Image: Aaron Burden

Certain abilities are clear signs of high intelligence in animals, and using tools is one of those.

Octopuses use objects from their surroundings, adapting them to suit their needs. Take the veined octopus, for example. This species collects shells to use as a shelter when escaping predators or as a shield when dealing with difficult prey. Amazing, right?

But that's not all! These octopuses have also been observed gathering shells and carrying them for future use. This behavior suggests not just intelligence and good memory, but also the ability to plan ahead!

Image: Sunira Moses

All that knowledge and skills are packed into a huge brain.

As we've seen, octopuses offer much more than just 8 arms and an extensive color palette. These animals also have impressive intelligence and a highly complex nervous system, which is reflected in the large size of their brains. In fact, their brain-to-body ratio is one of the highest among invertebrates. In other words, their brain is really big, considering their body proportions.

Given all that this creature is capable of, the size of its brain is no surprise.

Image: Kostas Morfiris

Octopuses are great at problem-solving. They not only learn from their experiences but also remember the knowledge, locations, and animals they encounter, using this information for future situations.

All this makes them great learners and excellent performers. In different experiments, both in captivity and in the wild, octopuses have demonstrated their ability to open jars, navigate through mazes with ease, and elaborate complex strategies for hunting, among other surprising behaviors. Many octopuses, for example, hide near the paths of passing crabs and wait for the perfect moment to launch a surprise attack. A real ambush!

Image: rivage

A single heart isn't enough to keep a large brain, a mutable body, and 8 long tentacles irrigated.

That is why octopuses have the privilege of possessing no less than 3 hearts, all with a well-defined function. 2 of these hearts are responsible for pumping blood to the gills for oxygenation. Then, the third heart, the systemic heart, circulates the oxygenated blood throughout the rest of the body.

Want to know more? The third heart stops beating when the octopus swims!

Image: Yaselyn Perez

There's a lot we can say about octopuses, but calling them selfish isn't one of them. Why? Well, let's see.

When octopus mothers lay their eggs, they reserve all their focus, dedication, and energy to caring for them. The mother cleans, protects, and arranges the eggs, never taking her eyes off them. In doing so, it abandons all other activities, even stopping eating entirely.

Unfortunately, by not eating, the octopus becomes weak and debilitated. As a consequence, once the eggs hatch, the mother often doesn't survive.

Image: engin akyurt

Octopuses might not be royalty, but they do have blue blood! That's right; these creatures never stop surprising us. First, they have 3 hearts, and now they show us blood that's literally blue!

How is it different from our blood? Human blood contains hemoglobin, which has iron and gives it its characteristic red color. On the other hand, the blood that circulates in the incredible bodies of octopuses contains a protein called hemocyanin, which is what makes the difference. Hemocyanin contains copper, which gives the blood its blue color when it's oxygenated.

Who knew?

How did they know? 11 unbelievable cases of writers predicting the future

Image: Michael Dziedzic

Do modern inventions ever remind you of things you’ve read in old books? Do you ever find yourself pointing and saying, "Just like The Jetsons!" or "The Simpsons predicted this!"? Sometimes, real life ends up imitating art, even centuries later. Let’s explore 11 cases where writers anticipated the future, ranging from logical to downright eerie.

Image: K. Mitch Hodge

Did you know that a novel from 1898 predicted the Titanic disaster with an eerie degree of precision? Fourteen years before the real event, there was... the Titan.

Morgan Robertson published Futility, later retitled The Wreck of the Titan. It told the story of a massive British ocean liner called the Titan, described as unsinkable. The ship struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic, carried too few lifeboats, and sank in April, all details that mirror the Titanic tragedy.

Image: Arthur Lambillotte

Isaac Asimov imagined the iPad, more or less, back in 1964. In an essay for The New York Times, the sci-fi legend described what life might look like in 2014. Among his predictions was that people would use a "compact screen" to read books, watch videos, and communicate with others, all without ever leaving their homes.

Asimov essentially foresaw smart electronic tablets and even hinted at remote work and distance learning decades before they became reality.

Image: Steve DiMatteo

In a 1998 episode of The Simpsons ("When You Dish Upon a Star"), Homer crashes into a Hollywood meeting and we briefly see a sign that reads: "20th Century Fox — a division of Walt Disney Co."

At the time, this was a playful nod to Disney’s ever-growing empire. But in 2019, it became real: Disney acquired 21st Century Fox for $71.3 billion.

Image: SpaceX

In his 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon, Jules Verne got more than one detail right, including which U.S. state would one day launch spaceships.

Verne imagined a three-man crew in a projectile fired from Florida (near modern-day Cape Canaveral) that splashed down in the Pacific Ocean. Yes, just like Apollo 11, more than a hundred years later. That’s a remarkably accurate prediction for a piece of fiction written during the Civil War era!

Image: Gabriel Benois

Do you remember seeing people communicate through large flat screens in The Jetsons and laughing at it as an exaggerated gag about the future? Well, who’s laughing now?

In Hanna-Barbera’s 1962 show, the characters used "televiewers" to chat across long distances, surprisingly similar to how we use Zoom or FaceTime today. Other works, like E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops (1909), had predicted remote video communication even earlier, but The Jetsons cemented the concept visually in pop culture.

Image: bady abbas

IVF was predicted as far back as 1924, 54 years before the first "test-tube baby" was born.

British biologist J.B.S. Haldane imagined a world of artificial reproduction. In his essay Daedalus; or, Science and the Future, he coined the term "ectogenesis" to describe babies being grown outside the womb.

Image: Emiliano Vittoriosi

In Steel Beach (1992), sci-fi author John Varley envisioned a future where artificial intelligence provided therapy. In his story, the Central Computer actively counsels people, offers psychological evaluations, and responds to emotional needs.

At a time when AI was still seen as a cold, mechanical concept, Varley’s story offered a surprisingly human twist. Today, studies show that many people using AI chatbots turn to them for emotional support and counseling.

Image: Possessed Photography

The word "robot" entered the English language in 1920 through a Czech play titled R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) by Karel Čapek. These "robots" weren’t mechanical machines but biological workers created to serve humans. The name came from the Czech word robota, meaning "forced labor." A century later, the term has clearly stuck.

Image: Mateo Avila Chinchilla

In 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Arthur C. Clarke introduced HAL 9000, an AI so advanced it could carry out conversations, read lips, and make decisions. But Clarke’s futuristic vision also included video calls, flat-screen tablets, and casual digital multitasking, all decades before such technology existed.

HAL’s breakdown was fiction, but Clarke accurately foresaw how machines would gradually take over our attention.

Image: Olivier Amyot

In 1880, Mary E. Bradley published her book Mizora: A Prophecy. Maybe not all of the details in her all-female utopia were prophetic, but she did get one thing right: artificially grown meat. In her world, food wasn’t farmed but created through chemical processes in laboratories.

It sounded outlandish at the time, but today some food companies are doing exactly that. Bradley’s vision came long before environmentalism or animal rights were mainstream. Somehow, in a story about feminism and science, she also imagined what we might now call the vegan burger.

Image: Stephen Phillips - Hostreviews.co.uk

Credit cards might seem like a very modern invention, but they were anticipated in an 1888 novel. Looking Backward, by Edward Bellamy, imagined a future in the year 2000 where everyone received a card loaded with "credit" from the government. People used this card to access goods from massive communal warehouses—similar to what we today would call department stores.