If Octopuses Lived Longer, They'd Probably Take Over
Octopuses Are Scary Smart
And yes, the most common plural of Octopus in both American and British English is "octopuses" and not the silly octopi. But that's not what this is about. While you're busy debating the correct plural term, these eight-tentacled geniuses might be sneaking up behind you.
Here's the sad part. These clever creatures don't live for longer than five years. Smaller species don't even live that long. The males die shortly after mating, and the females pretty much exhaust themselves to death guarding their eggs until they hatch.
By five-years-old, we humans have barely learned to blow our noses. We've mostly just started our formal educations. We get to live long enough for our children to grow up and aggravate us.
Just How Smart Are Octopuses?
People underestimated these undersea animals for a long time. However, by now we've seen examples of them unscrewing jars to feast upon a tasty treat inside. They escape from their tanks, make their way to another tank to have a snack, and then return to their own tank. Sometimes they escape from their tanks and use drains to escape. In their natural habitat, some octopuses mimic the appearance and behavior of fish. Some make themselves look just like coral to hide.
We humans mostly seem to keep our brains in our head, though there are some arguments that the bacteria in our gut may be an actual part of our intelligence. Anyway, people misjudged smaller octopuses because they don't have big heads. However, scientists have recently discovered that they have neurons all through their bodies, so they have much bigger and weirder brains than we thought they did.
As far back as the 1950s, scientists found they could learn shapes. They could even learn shapes and angles and teach themselves the next steps they thought they should learn to get rewards.
It's not really fair to compare the IQ of an octopus to that of a human. We've evolved differently over the course of hundreds of millions of years. However, we'd have to be stupid to miss the fact that they're scary smart. If they lived longer, they'd probably take over. Watch out!
If you're interested in theories of octopus consciousness, this is an interesting article: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2008/06/how_smart_is_the_octopus.html
I'd want one for a pet, but I wouldn't want to mourn my friend after only a few years. The smaller kinds that most people keep as pets only live a few months. I'd say that scientists should work on that, but I don't want to become octopus stew.