Thinking that a groundhog could possibly possess the skills and knowledge to predict the weather when our homo sapien weather gurus struggle to get it right, got me thinking about intelligent species in the animal kingdom.
That made me think about the “lowly octopus, squid, and cuttlefish.” These three species are classified as cephalopods and are as alien to vertebrates as almost any other creature on the planet. their brains are equated to be as smart as dogs, if not smarter, and defy all our conceived notions of what makes animal species smart.
Even odder is seeing the high levels of intelligence these animals exhibit while only living very short lives compared to intelligent vertebrates. Cephalopods have lifespans that vary from 6 months to 5 years. In vertebrates, we associate long lifespan with intelligence and point to elephants, whales, parrots, crows and humans, who all exhibit high intelligence. But in the octopus, squid and cuttlefish, you have an animal that shows cognitive skills equal to if not greater than most of the vertebrates on the above list while living very shortened lives.
Cephalopods are fascinating to watch. They employ deception in seeking food. They can hide food from other cephalopods using misdirection. They change appearances in an instant. Some use bioluminescence to freeze prey. Their tentacles are equivalent to an elephant’s trunk, or a human hand but even better, containing 10,000 neurons and sensors that touch, taste and smell. And their main brain demonstrates sentience on another level entirely.
When you first encounter an octopus, it is hard to not notice their eyes. They are as sophisticated as those found in vertebrates and in their 600 million years of evolution have developed camera eyes similar to ours but with additional ways of processing visual information, we cannot even fathom. They always are watching and they respond to humans in the wild or in a fish tank in ways that suggest they are our equals.
An invertebrate that exhibits the kind of mental complexity and behaviours states Peter Godfrey-Smith in an article that appeared in Scientific American in 2017, states, “they are probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien.”
Godfrey-Smith notes their evolutionary roots go back 600 million years to the beginning of the Cambrian explosion when complex life first started appearing in the oceans and well before the first invertebrates and vertebrates appeared on land. And in terms of their intelligence, it may have developed smarts well before any of our chordate ancestors, an intelligence that is very different from vertebrates, and that reflects their anatomical structure.
So just how smart are cephalopods? We have yet to meet an octopus Einstein but we certainly have witnessed amazing behaviours.
In captivity, octopi have been observed doing food raids outside their home tanks, slipping out or through pipes and emerging in another aquarium to grab a snack. At the University of Otago in New Zealand, octopi have learned to turn off lights in a room by squirting jets of water at the wall panels to cause them to short out. The university described it as such a nuisance that the researchers released the animals back into the wild.
Octopus and squid can recognize different people outside their tanks even to the point of distinguishing them when wearing identical uniforms. They are situationally aware unlike fish in an aquarium. A captive octopus knows exactly where it is and will mess with its human keepers if so inclined by trashing the tank’s life support equipment causing floods. It could be they are plotting an avenue of escape.
And then there is the observed behaviour of octopus turning non-food objects into toys, a curiosity seen in higher intelligence vertebrates.
Other than the tentacles and the lack of bones, how different are cephalopods. Our nervous systems and spinal cord derive from our fish, reptile, bird and mammal ancestors. The octopus, squid and cuttlefish evolved from flatworms with neurons distributed in bunches throughout the body and interconnected running through the body. Over the 600 million years the bunches turned into the neurons that populate the tentacles, twice as many as can be found in the central brain. Some researchers believe the neurons in the tentacles have their own memory while the central brain controls overall motion. It is akin to a combination of top-down and localized control.
A final note. My wife and I are heading to Costa Rica for the next two weeks. I’m bringing my chromebook along for the ride and may from time to time write something new. And while we are in Costa Rica I will recharge my batteries so that when I’m back I can continue to share my curiosity about science and technology with all of my many readers.
So it would make sense that those who think about designing robots would look at bio-mimicry to come up with technology capable of doing much more than what two artificial human hands can do, the model for much of our industrial robotics today. Think of the advantages going beyond the number two. A mobile robot with eight or twelve arms (octopus or squid) would be capable of multi-tasking, with each arm independently doing different jobs, or all coordinated to work on a single activity.
Recently I came across a number of bio-mimetic robotic projects focused on designing technology that apes what an octopus and elephant trunk can do.
Building An Octobot
An octopus is a cephalopod. Its body is similar in anatomy to a slug or snail. It contains no bones yet it has muscles that give it unique abilities to alter shape, touch, grasp and squeeze. So what kinds of technological tools do we need to build an artificial octopus?
A group of European and Israeli universities, as well as a foundation have gotten together to form the OCTOPUS Project to figure this out. To design their octopus they are looking at the following:
In the first stage of the project the OCTOPUS team built a soft arm prototype using an artificial muscular-hydrostat that replicated the capability of an octopus to lengthen, shorten, bend or stiffen its arms. The next step, seen in the picture below has involved creating a control system to coordinate all eight arms to work on a single task.
Building the Elephant Trunkbot
A number of years ago I took my daughter to see the elephant house at the Metro Toronto Zoo. We were offered a behind the scenes tour and got to meet several elephants up close. I patted one of the older females and fed her. She grasped the feed with her trunk and then maneuvered it to her mouth. Her touch was so light that I wasn’t even aware she had taken the food until she was reaching for more. After a few minutes we turned to leave and suddenly I felt a pebble hit my back. I turned around to see the elephant looking at me. I turned again to walk away and felt another pebble strike me. The elephant was throwing each pebble using her trunk. She wanted me to feed her again. Besides the incredible connection within the experience, it was amazing to witness the dexterity with which she used her trunk, first to take food, and then to pick up a pebble in her compound and then aim it and release it so that it hit me squarely between the shoulder blades.
An elephant’s trunk is an amazing evolutionary appendage. It is a nose, an arm, a hand, a hose, a straw and a vocal organ. It has taken millions of years of evolution to achieve all of these capabilities. Along its entire length it contains two tube-like nostrils surrounded by muscles, nerves and connective tissue. It can weigh 140 kilograms (almost 300 pounds) in an adult elephant. Four external muscles control it from the outside. Another set of muscles providing internal control form a network of approximately 150,000 fascicles, resembling spokes on a bicycle wheel. These fascicles give the trunk the flexibility that allowed my elephant to pick up the tiniest pebble and flick it at me. At the end of the trunk are appendages that resemble fingers. The African elephant has two. The Asian or Indian elephant has one. These appendage tips are packed with nerve endings giving elephants touch sensory capability as sensitive as ours. This goes along with a nose that has the best sense of smell in the animal kingdom.
To build a robot with some of the capability of an elephant’s trunk, a team at MIT tried to replicate the complex muscles by using four control cables placed at 90 degree intervals around the outside perimeter of a multi-segmented tube. Within each segment wall the engineers introduced particles in a liquid slurry. By changing the liquid volume, they were able to deform or morph any segment to create movement. Called jamming, this technology is also present in the Octobot. The end result, Trunkbot, was a multi-segmented robotic arm resembling an elephant’s trunk. Movement, gripping and releasing happened as individual or groups of segments got jammed. At this year’s IEEE Conference on Robotics, the MIT researchers presented a paper entitled, Design and Analysis of a Robust, Low-Cost, Highly Articulated Manipulator Enabled by Jamming of Granular Media.
Many more animal models are the subject of research by robotic design teams. After all what natural evolution has produced represents success worth copying. Expect to see more animal-like robots in the next few years from the octopi and elephant trunks described here to fish and flying insects.
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