Birmingham’s National SEA LIFE Centre has gone on ‘octopus watch’ in a bid to solve one of the many mysteries about these notoriously intelligent sea creatures.
Staff and visitors will both take part in a month-long study to determine whether or not octopuses favour a specific arm or arms for the tasks of feeding and investigating.
The results could shed light on the evolution of ‘handedness’ in animals.
“There have been several investigations into arm usage by octopuses,” said displays supervisor Carey Duckhouse, “but they have involved small numbers of octopuses and the results have been conflicting.”
The Birmingham research is being duplicated simultaneously at 23 other SEA LIFE attractions across Europe and aims to provide conclusive answers.
“Many animals have been shown to favour a certain arm,” said Carey, “but studies have tended to focus on vertebrates rather than creatures without skeletons like octopuses.
“This study is interesting because octopuses have been evolving separately to vertebrates for 500 million years.
“Uniquely, they have more than half their nerves in their arms, and have even been shown to partially think with their arms.
“A severed octopus arm will still pick up food and push it towards where the mouth used to be.”
The majority of studies concluded that octopuses simply used the nearest arm with which to grab food or investigate an object.
Then in 2004 a team at the University of Vienna reported very different findings.
In studies of eight octopuses the University team recorded the same arm, or same combination of arms being employed 339 times out of a total of 448.
The Austrian scientists speculated that octopuses have a preferred ‘eye’ and that arm choice was determined by this.
The Vienna experiment involved offering the octopuses a T-shaped cavity to explore, but the SEA LIFE survey will go further.
“We will be feeding our octopus from different directions and recording which arm it uses to grab its food on each occasion,” said Carey.
“Our visitors will be helping us by using specially devised survey forms to record which arm or arms the octopus uses to investigate a variety of toys and other objects we will introduce to its tank.”
The results will be analysed by SEA LIFE biologists and the results announced in the autumn.
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