Octopuses may have nightmares about predators attacking them

Octopuses could have nightmares. That’s one attainable rationalization for some extraordinary behaviour caught by cameras monitoring an octopus in a laboratory aquarium, says Marcelo Magnasco on the Rockefeller College in New York.

In 2021, his group purchased an octopus (Octopus insularis) caught off Florida for his or her research of cephalopod cognition. The octopus, named Costello after one of many “heptapod” aliens within the movie Arrival, quickly tailored to captivity and started sleeping out within the open, quite than in a den as octopuses do within the wild.

One morning, group member Eric Ramos, additionally on the Rockefeller College, entered …