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00:00These strange and flamboyant creatures are cephalopods, a diverse group of animals that
00:24include squid, octopus, and cuttlefish.
00:30Close relatives of primitive invertebrates such as snails, cephalopods are far more than
00:35just simple slugs.
00:40They have highly developed brains, superb vision, and tentacles with powerful suctioning discs.
00:49But their most remarkable trait is their ability to communicate.
01:00With complex visual signals and posturing, some cephalopods appear to speak to each other.
01:13Each summer, a dedicated group of scientists converge on Bonaire, a tiny island in the
01:19southern Caribbean Sea.
01:23Theirs is a revolutionary quest to discover if common reef squid are capable of language.
01:34In the final frantic weeks of their short lives, reef squid appear to read and write distinct
01:40messages on their shimmering skin.
01:47These foot-long mollusks, like humans, are thought to employ a creative, symbolic, and visual language.
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02:51It is difficult to imagine creatures more alien and unlike humans.
03:06Cephalopods have blue blood, three hearts, and use jet propulsion to navigate through
03:12the sea.
03:18Theirs is the most advanced nervous system of any invertebrate.
03:25They are wily magicians of the deep, the octopuses, cuttlefish, and squid.
03:40Tentacles are basically arms without bones.
03:47These dextrous limbs are utilized for mobility, exploration, or capturing prey.
03:54The rest of a cephalopod's body is made up of a muscular sac called a mantle, which contains
04:01their three hearts, brain, and other internal organs.
04:08Cephalopod in Latin literally means head-footed.
04:15Octopus, squid, and cuttlefish belong to the phylum mollusca.
04:22A group of soft-bodied animals that includes clams and snails.
04:29Unlike many of their simpler relatives, cephalopods have lost their external shells through the
04:36millennia of evolution.
04:38400 million years ago, their armored ancestors ruled the seas.
04:45These were the Ammonites, and the oceans once teemed with them.
04:52But evolution seems to have passed them by.
04:53Only the primitive nautilus of the sea.
04:54Cephalopods have lost their external shells through the millennia of evolution.
04:59400 million years ago, their armored ancestors ruled the seas.
05:09These were the Ammonites, and the oceans once teemed with them.
05:17But evolution seems to have passed them by.
05:21Only the primitive nautilus, a living fossil, has retained a protective outer shell.
05:33We don't know how Ammonites became extinct, or why most cephalopods evolved without protective shells.
05:42What we do know is that these animals can exhibit an astonishing repertoire of behaviors.
05:51They appear to be smart.
05:57The evolutionary answer to why octopuses and squid are more intelligent than other invertebrates is probably
06:03because while they are derived from molluscs, they have evolved away from using the molluscan shell.
06:10A good, big, solid shell is a great place to hide in.
06:15And if you're hiding all the time, you don't have to think.
06:17As soon as you get out from the shell, you are what some people have described as bait.
06:22Anything can get you, anything is interested in getting you, and you don't have any built-in protection.
06:28Probably not the only way, but an excellent way to get around the problem of not having any protection anymore is to have smarts.
06:37The background of these guys is pretty simple.
06:41Squid are cephalopods.
06:43That means they're molluscs, but they're really unusual molluscs.
06:47Dr. Jennifer Mather is a professor of psychology at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta.
06:53But it's a very short lifespan, so they go from this big hatched to this big doing mating games in less than a year and a half.
07:05The crystalline waters of the Dutch Antilles are a long way from the prairies of Western Canada.
07:14Caribbean reef squid are perplexing subjects considering Mather's primary field of study is human psychology.
07:23Her master's thesis dealt with a small species of octopus, while her doctorate examined the eye movements of schizophrenics, an unlikely pairing of research topics.
07:38Each summer, along with an enthusiastic team of scientists, Dr. Mather travels to Bonaire and its splendid coral reefs.
07:46Her ambition is revolutionary, to learn if Sepiotuthis sepioidea, a common species of reef squid, is capable of the most highly evolved of behaviors, language.
08:00American Martin Moynihan was the first biologist to present the controversial theory that reef squid might use visual language.
08:15But he passed away before proving his theory.
08:20Mather's mission, to prove Moynihan right.
08:22There's two reasons I chose the Caribbean reef squid for this long-term project.
08:29The first one is a really simple one.
08:32Martin Moynihan, in the early 1980s, said that he believed that the squid might make a visual language on their skin.
08:39Now this is a really big idea.
08:42Humans have language, and clearly monkeys have the ability to make a reasonable, primitive type of human language.
08:50If this were a third language in the animal kingdom, this would be big news.
08:57This is a really big question to tackle.
09:01Let me see if I can go and crack this particular nut.
09:11People often ask me, why are you in a psychology department studying octopuses and squid?
09:16Why do you go running off to the reef and watch animals?
09:19Does that really have anything to do with humans?
09:22And the answer is yes, it does have something to do with humans.
09:25The area that I'm really interested in is what has been described as comparative cognition.
09:31And that's trying to understand how thinking works by looking at thinking in animals other than humans.
09:36Now, a lot of people do it by saying, okay, well, we'll look at how monkeys think.
09:42What I'm looking at is really something quite different.
09:44What I'm seeing is, okay, let's take the most intelligent invertebrate,
09:49because the octopuses and squid are way ahead of the other invertebrates.
09:52They have to have developed intelligence quite differently.
09:55In the azure waters of the southern Caribbean sea,
10:13lies a tiny island renowned as an environmental success story, Bonaire.
10:18This idyllic outpost's marine sanctuary is recognized as a world leader in coral reef conservation.
10:37The entire undersea ecosystem surrounding the island is protected as a national park of the Netherlands Antilles.
10:44Jennifer Mather visited several other Caribbean destinations before choosing Bonaire as a base of operations for her research.
11:14The squid are conveniently accessible from shore and are spared the destructive effects of commercial fishing and pollution.
11:23When you decide you want to work with an animal in the field, you have to solve a lot of practical problems before
11:32you can go work with them.
11:47Researchers go to all sorts of strange places to do work,
11:50places to do work and some of them go half an hour's hike through the bush and
11:55some of them go up to the mountains and some of them go out in the open ocean in
11:58big research vessels and we wanted something that would be relatively
12:03simple we wanted to be able to go from the shore we wanted to go to a place
12:06where we could find the animals we wanted to go to a place to where animals
12:09would be safe we have to get up early and work hard at a time when people
12:17like James are semi-conscious because that's when the animals are active and
12:20that's what we need to study I'm a morning person myself so it's no problem
12:25but some of these others are kind of hard to get up out of bed
12:31I'm basically nocturnal like octopuses are if left to my own so but in the
12:37morning they are all coming back together and sorting things out again so we're
12:41here we need to be here that's when all the activity is a lot of it anyway
12:45May that her is joined in the expedition by an eclectic group of researchers Roland
12:52Anderson is the Puget Sound curator of the Seattle Aquarium
13:00Ulrike Griebel is a cognitive and evolutionary researcher from the
13:04University of Vienna she is accompanied by graduate student Ruth Ann Byrne
13:09the final member of the team is James Wood of the National Resource Center for
13:18Cephalopods in Galveston Texas
13:20I'm very fascinated with cephalopods
13:27well first of all they're invertebrates so they're related to things that don't have brains and
13:33some of them don't even have heads yet they're a group that behaviorally is more
13:39similar to something like a fish than to a snail they can change color shape and
13:45texture better than anything else on the planet and you might think of a
13:48chameleon but chameleons use hormones and that has to go through the blood
13:50system and then it takes a few seconds these animals this is all narrowly
13:55controlled so they think it and they're that so they can change what they look
13:59like many times in one second
14:08I got involved in the reef squid study here through dr. Jennifer Mather who is the
14:14team leader of this project she and I met at a conference back in 1986 we've been
14:20friends and colleagues ever since a few years ago she asked me if I'd like to
14:25come down here and help her study the reef squid I jumped at the chance
14:30I'm seeing new stuff every year I'm coming here now for the fourth year and I always see new
14:41patterns new combinations of patterns new behaviors I think that they need
14:50this complex signal language because they are social as soon as animals are
14:56social and living groups and need to communicate this is also the driving force
15:01for intelligence also in mammals the most intelligent mammals are found among
15:06the social mammals and the same is happening here in the cephalopods
15:11the group's fieldwork is quietly fascinating but requires patience their research demands hours of snorkeling in unobtrusive observation
15:34individual animals are identified by distinctive scars and skin patterns and each behavior is recorded for later analysis
15:45Caribbean reef squid are not the species favored by chefs and seafood fans they are slightly larger and darker in appearance than the restaurant variety
16:05journalists have branded Mather the Jane Goodall of calamari we noticed personalities in these animals and we found that there were dramatic differences between individuals such that you could describe them in terms of human personalities or perhaps human temperament
16:25it's almost impossible not to think of them in terms of the human roles that's why we use this flirting at the bar that's why we talk about going all the way making it
16:39from time to time to time we talk about it as a soap opera because we have all the characters we have all the situations that you could possibly have in a soap opera
16:52the squid practice a daily routine as timeless as the coral reefs themselves
17:05at night they disperse to hunt alone
17:16each day at dawn small groups of animals gather at precisely the same spot
17:27early morning is the time for mating games and this is when things get interesting
17:37they gather together for a few hours of greetings jousting courting and of course sex
17:46foreplay may last for hours but the mating act itself is suffice to say quick
17:59probably the most important behavior that these squid do when they're gathered in these daytime groups is a reproductive behavior
18:21as they come together females are the first ones to let everybody know they're interested
18:30what we notice is the females rise above the group they go pale on all of their mantle except just a strip around the front margin which is kind of a warm brown
18:45when we saw that one we decided to call it saddle because it looked as if the brown was a saddle around the animal almost like it was waiting for a rider
19:15when someone is doing something interesting in return it's probably a male doing stripe
19:22that seems to be the first exchange of visual signals indicating interest in mating in the future
19:38when he's really interested in doing a mating he'll do a display called a flicker
19:45we call it the flicker because it's on off pale dark pale dark pale dark so fast that in fact we haven't been able to dissect and find out how often or to find out whether it's all the body at once
20:03but when he does that it seems to be a fairly honest signal of intent to mate if she lets him
20:10if a male squid in a school flickers they have the equivalent of what I say all hell breaks loose
20:18it's a clear signal that everything's going to happen
20:23squid are going to zoom all over the school other squid are going to come in and try to interfere with it and if a squid are lucky they're starting the next generation
20:32the other thing that happens when a male flickers is that it alerts other males to the fact there's an interesting situation coming in here
20:49so they'll do a challenge they'll do a challenge with the zebra display and coming up beside perhaps in special postures
20:57often in order to do anything about having the opportunity to mate he has to fight off the interfering other males
21:12after four years of study the scientists have concluded that reef squid exhibit approximately 20 distinctive displays
21:29many of which revolve around reproduction
21:32each of these displays may involve hundreds of individual components and there are perhaps thousands of subtle variations
21:51specialised cells in cephalopod skin called chromatophores contain pigment filled sacs
21:58additional layers of cells iridophores and leucophores differentially reflect and alter the appearance of incoming light
22:06the three groups of cells work together to form the startling color and pattern changes exhibited by these animals
22:27next week i think we're going to have to do an all-day watch on one group and sort of start at dawn and have relays of people coming in
22:45watch for an hour get out watch for an hour get out
22:48do you think that she didn't want him to mate her i mean that's why she was doing the zebra
22:55yeah she did the zebra right at him and she kept the distance too i mean she wasn't with him
23:01once back at their research headquarters the team analyzes each morning's observations
23:07individual files cover a wide range of behaviors including flickers saddles and zebra displays
23:27the squid provide the researchers with an endless amount of information and behaviors that must be catalogued
23:32the various displays can be sort of quantified and sort of assigned numbers depending on the intensity
23:39whether it was on a quarter of the animal or half the animal or all the animal
23:45for example the zebra display the arms can be together which is kind of a low intensity thing where they can be
23:53completely spread out which is more of a high intensity the zebra display can be on only half the animal
23:59so that can be quantified we just have an incredible amount of information that we get from these animals
24:08reef squid are very good at communication whatever they're doing is obviously very complex and has a lot of different components
24:29so
24:44photographing the tiny reef squid and their mating behavior was a difficult task
24:48the skittish animals however eventually became comfortable even oblivious to the presence of the divers
25:08cinematographer neil mcdaniel captured images of behaviors of which little is known
25:13egg-laying is the final act of a frantic and all-too-short life
25:20egg-laying is the final act of a frantic and all-too-short life
25:28when a female is laying eggs it's really of course the culmination of reproduction and it's a very interesting situation in these animals
25:34biologists talk about biologists talk about this a lot who is it who controls who gets their genes in the gene pool
25:42and in the case of the Caribbean reef squid it looks as if the female has an awful lot of control
25:48because of course when a male does the flicker and he transfers the spermatophores to her
25:53it's her choice whether or not to take them and put them inside her mantle cavity
25:56and then since she's stored the sperm it's her choice about when to fertilize the eggs with which sperm
26:04both males and females will die after reproduction
26:10both males and females will die after reproduction
26:13both males and females will die after reproduction
26:15both males and females will die after reproduction
26:17and it's a very short life span
26:21we talk about them as having a motto of live fast die young
26:30an attending male guards the female throughout egg-laying
26:34he tries to mate with her right before and even during the process to give his seed an advantage over that of his rivals
26:53after carefully selecting a coral ledge with suitable protection from the elements and predators
26:59the female lays up to 50 strings or fingers of eggs
27:07she squeezes down underneath the rock and she deposits an egg string on the rock
27:13then she comes back out again it looks as if she takes a deep breath and goes
27:17that one was hard
27:19and then another five minutes later on average she'll do another egg string
27:22they start out life as eggs
27:33there's no parental care whatsoever
27:36and the male contributes nothing except sperm
27:45in only a few short weeks
27:47the eggs hatch and tiny squidlets venture into the water column
27:54from birth each is prepared to assume the role of marine hunter
28:00yet they too must run a gauntlet of predators to reach maturity
28:04in the cold waters of british columbia
28:14the world's largest octopus appears to have little need for the complex visual signaling used by reef squid
28:20the giant pacific octopus lives a mostly solitary life
28:26and its reproductive strategy is quite different
28:30like reef squid females accept sperm sacs from males to fertilize their eggs
28:34but instead of abandoning her brood she stays behind to tend the nest in a very motherly fashion
28:52before she uses the sperm to fertilize her eggs
28:55she seals off a den produces 57,000 eggs
29:01glues them in strings to the top of her den
29:04and then grooms them for six or six and a half months until they're ready to hatch
29:08during the entire period that the females there she does not leave nor does she feed
29:14and so her body weight will go from something around 15 or 18 kilos
29:17down to five or seven kilos when she dies so she'll lose more than 50% of her body weight
29:28out of the nest that the female lays if the population is going to stay stable
29:34all you need is two to survive they just basically replace the parents
29:38so out of 57,000 which is the average for a female nest you're only going to get two surviving
29:44more than that the population increases fewer than that the population decreases
29:49and right now it looks like British Columbia's population is very stable
30:05James Cosgrove of the Royal British Columbia Museum
30:07has spent many years studying the reproductive behavior of these intriguing animals
30:16one of the most surprising things I've learned from my research was that the animals are such short-lived animals
30:23it seems unfortunate that evolution would have developed such a magnificent animal
30:28allowed it to grow up to 20 or 30 kilos only to have it mate lay its eggs and die
30:33in a period of less than four years
30:37on the Gulf Coast of Texas the research vessel Marie Hall departs from Galveston Bay
30:56researcher John Forsythe is fishing for food for his captive cephalopods
31:03a bottom trawl is used to capture live shrimp crabs and fish
31:10a bottom trawl is used to capture live shrimp crabs and fish
31:25small bay squid are also taken as a bycatch
31:42they are transferred to a holding tank for the trip back to shore
31:47squid octopuses and cuttlefish disliked process but they are not
31:51the only way they are not the only way they are not the only way they are not the only way they are
31:52squid octopuses and cuttlefish disliked process or dead food
31:57squid octopuses organized in a week
32:06squid octopuses and cuttlefish dislike processed or dead food they prefer to stock and capture
32:22their prey much as they do in the wild most cephalopods do very well in captivity and these european
32:47cuttlefish exhibit many visual signals similar to those of caribbean reef squid
32:58in captive environments they display all the behaviors of wild animals including mating and egg
33:09at the national resource center for cephalopods in galveston
33:13squids octopuses and cuttlefish are raised in a closed seawater system
33:20eggs darkly pigmented with melanin are collected and transferred to special tanks
33:28each marble-sized egg contains a single animal that hatches in only a few short weeks
33:33these tiny cuttlefish are perfect replicas of their parents
33:52the cephalopods are primarily utilized as marine lab rats and shipped to researchers across north america
33:59like their rodent counterparts these cuttlefish provide scientists with valuable insights into
34:08human physiology
34:14the reason cephalopods are so interesting is that much of the research we're helping to support is
34:19really ultimately aimed at understanding human diseases but scientists find that going to a
34:25human or even a vertebrate is very difficult because the systems are so small and so sophisticated
34:31it's a hard place to begin so you move down the animal kingdom until you can find a sufficiently
34:36sophisticated system that you can begin to understand and ask good questions and cephalopods we find are an
34:43interesting place to stop because they have very large elements of their physiology be it the nervous
34:49system or the circulatory system or their brain or their eyes the processes that are discovered there
34:55seem applicable to much more sophisticated systems like vertebrates even all the way up to humans
35:04this is the premier model in understanding how a living nerve cell can transmit an electric signal
35:10down its length and when you consider that we don't have copper wire inside of us it really is a miracle
35:15that electrical signals can move down living tissues back from his field work in bonaire dr james wood
35:30updates the website that he developed to share cephalopod research
35:39his office is crammed with toy octopuses and squids
35:43a testament to his fascination with these animals
35:55a skilled photographer he carefully examines his underwater images for new clues to the visual language of the reef squid
36:12it's clear that cephalopods have varying degrees of visual communication
36:28the intensely social reef squid are the most expressive while more solitary animals such as octopus seem to have
36:37less need for communication
36:44the complexity of the squid visual displays studied by jennifer mather are indeed remarkable
36:51but do they represent a language are these squid really able to talk
36:56john forsyth and james cosgrove offer differing perspectives on the intelligence and communication skills of cephalopods
37:12there's no question that they're dazzling animals with a broad range of behaviors
37:17to say an animal is intelligent the best
37:20uh... sort of definition or handle i've been able to put on it is to imagine that when an animal is born
37:25uh... you're born with a floppy disk that has so much code written on it and that code is your behavior
37:30or your response to the world around you
37:37i think the question of intelligence will be answered in cephalopods
37:40when we can show that the cephalopod can take that floppy disk of
37:45behavioral or life options
37:46and begin writing new code that wasn't there the day they hatched out in other words synthesizing new
37:54information into new responses that it didn't possess on the day it hatched and that
38:00to me is the beginning of saying yes these animals are intelligent
38:09there's no question that these animals are communicating with one another primarily through
38:14visual signaling in their skin but also their body posturing and their body movements
38:22reproduction of course is a very important area to be able to communicate in for any animal
38:30squids just don't randomly run into each other and mate and then move on
38:38all the hundreds of hours i've been able to spend watching them i've never seen a predator get
38:42even close to a school of squid they're gone long before that so they're extremely effective in that
38:47type of communication
38:55to take this to the level of it is it a language is their syntax or is there sentence structure
39:00to the way they communicate that's very sophisticated and very difficult to get at
39:06i don't think there are many of us ready to just yet say that's the way they structure their
39:11communication but there's no doubt that they do make certain decisions very clearly known to one
39:17another
39:23the definition of cephalopod intelligence is a difficult one because we're putting
39:27human values on an animal that doesn't live in our environment
39:31when we look at squids and cuttlefishes we see a lot of visual communication there and it's very clear
39:41that messages are passed back and forth
39:46there is communication happening in that not only is the squid the sender of the message is also a
39:52receiver of the message and that's what communication is
40:06it is well known that cephalopods can change color and texture more quickly than any animal
40:11but the theories of the scientists in bonaire take this behavior many steps further
40:21jennifer mather believes the signals between reef squid to be the most complex visual display system among
40:27invertebrates
40:33if the signals prove to be encoded with intelligent design
40:37then jennifer may have discovered something truly remarkable
40:43in terms of do these squid communicate with each other when they're in the groups and they're sending
40:48out these displays this has to be answered by the simple step of saying what happens afterwards
40:54and i've done some analyses about what happens afterwards and yes after these displays other
40:59things happen reliably so that's the answer of do they communicate yes they're communicating to each other
41:04do i always know just exactly what the shades of meaning are lots to learn about that
41:13the second part of the question of how are squid communicating is clearly
41:17was moynhan right do they have a language and what i have to say at this point is they're so complicated
41:23i can't tell you yet
41:29i'm beginning to gather the basics of the simplest signals and remember
41:33sexual signals should be simple
41:37i know that in terms of communication anything that a squid wants to say it will do not simply but
41:44in a complex way so there's definitely the background there that they could make a language
41:53it's going to take a long time because it's such a complex thing because it's such a complex and
41:57intelligent animal there's lots and lots to learn over four years of just scratching the surface
42:04it may be a few more years before jennifer mather can ultimately prove that reef squid are capable of language
42:20there is however one thing that is absolutely certain about cephalopods
42:36they generate enormous fascination from a very passionate group of scientists
42:41you know i think most marine biologists are attracted to something and sometimes you don't
42:47know exactly why but you're drawn to something you begin looking at it and for 25 years i haven't been
42:53able to stop wondering about this animal group with fishes i'm not really sure a fish is looking at me
43:01you know it's hard to tell but a cuttlefish or an octopus when you're looking at that in an aquarium
43:06it is looking at you you're being observed as much as you are observing there's just new books new pages
43:17new stones to be turned over that even i can't even imagine right now but that's what drives a biologist
43:24is knowing that an animal group that you know very well still has those magical mysteries to to show to you
43:36i'm crazy about cephalopods because they're smart and there are different smarts than our smarts and
43:43i'm still trying to understand it lots of researchers find that they spend a lifetime with one species
43:52because they find that the closer they get to them the more they get to know them the more there is to
43:57know that's the kind of thing i have with these guys i'm also nuts about squid because they're
44:10gorgeous to watch i love watching the flashes i love watching the color changes they're beautiful animals
44:21we don't just do it because it's absorbing and it's fascinating we also do it because it's great fun
44:27so
44:39cephalopods are an amazing group of animals
44:45species we once considered frightening are proving to be intelligent and wonderfully adapted to their
44:51undersea habitat
44:56by evolving with superb communication skills cephalopods have become less like their simpler cousins and
45:02more like fish and perhaps even mammals
45:10what they have accomplished is a remarkable ability to survive even prosper in a harsh environment
45:17in nature of course that's the name of the game
45:34the blue realm is partially funded by patty the way the world learns to dive
45:39so
45:43the
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45:54white
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