Octopuses don’t have money, so the people with money aren’t interested in putting more resources into understanding octopuses.

We do! https://www.earthspecies.org/about-us#careers

A solid series, with descriptions of thought process feeling truly alien. I'm currently enjoying "The Mountain in the Sea" by Ray Nayler for more octopus based speculative fiction

Don't worry, Alt Samman & co. will soon create GAI - Genetically Advanced Intelligence, Octopus Edition, which will know how to manhandle us, 8 arms at a time.

Also featuring geneticaly modified super-intelligent octopuses, is "Manifold: Time" by Stephen Baxter.

living brains are not "CPUs"

And that's why it's important to vote! #BlueWhale2024

> fishy subject.

Get outta here with that specist language. It's 2024 ffs. Not all fish.

Or perhaps:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/224480/Octodad_Dadliest_C...

Theory of mind is not necessary for the fish. I think conditioning should be enough, and conditioning works on pigeons.

Could it not be like dogs herding sheep?

The best plural is simply keeping the word the same as the singular. I.e. "octopus". There are many animals using this form, e.g. fish, deer, elk, salmon, buffalo.

E.g. Look at all those octopus.

All the divers I know say it this way, easy to say, understand, doesn't make you sound like an asshole.

> 3a. We are not speaking Latin.

This is why I would prefer say axises, basises, indexes, and matrixes. I mean as plurals of their respective singulars, not as plurals of octopus.

> Language is neither static nor a series of rules to be blindly followed.

It's also not open to arbitrary subjective opinion. There are rules, this is not 'Nam. :) Languages evolve, but you can't just claim something is correct because you think so or you'd love it to be so. It's incorrect in English language, today. Maybe in the future, when more people start using the plural "octopi", it will be correct.

Fun fact: Oxford dictionary changed the definition of "literally" to also mean "figuratively". https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/misuse-of-literally

This is a strange argument to make against "octopuses". Break from our history; use the English standard; we are not speaking Latin ... therefore it should be octopi!? What? How about this: it's OK to use the traditional form if it's still commonly understood, but otherwise let's try to use a "standard English" form. Those are your choices: traditional for the word, or standard. Since "octopodes" is awkward and not really ever used, we say "octopuses". Why would you convert to a false-traditional version?

> As noted just about everywhere, "octopodes" looks insane in any modern English sentence because we don't pluralize any other word that way.

I'm guessing "platypodes" doesn't count.

All my friends say “octopodes”.

Some people on the internet keep saying that that's wrong; I find that very strange.

>because we don't pluralize any other word that way.

Certainly we do “platypodes”, “matrices”, “irides”, “clitorides” and “vortices”, are all quite common words.

> 2... It also moves the emphasis to the second syllable.

Octopods - 8 times better than regular pods.

There's "antipodes" though.

Yes, but 'octopodes' is really neat, and definitely a [nerdy] conversation starter.

But octopi is also trying to be pedantically latin, octopodes though it could be pedantic is at least correct, and entirely descriptive. In practice I wouldn't expect someone to say octopi to my face, but writing weird words online is another matter.

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3. “Octopuses” sounds like what a child or English as Second Language speaker would say. Not sure what is stilted about being a novice to the language.

Technically speaking, Octopuses don't have tentacles at all. Those are arms. The morphology of "Octopus" is actually a really great example case for demonstrating paraconsistent logic.

This whole thing is built on lies!

Delicatessen itself is a French loanword (délicatesse) in German that's wrongly pluralized, it should be délicatesses not delicatessen.

So it's like doubly wrong.

Because it turns it into a four-syllable word with three consecutive unstressed syllables. It has bad meter and ruins the meter of almost any sentence constructed around it.

The pronunciation of the word is already on the boundaries between "awk-toe-poos", "awk-tuh-puhs", and "awk-tah-piss" depending on your region just in America.

So adding an additional "-es" that can be "-ehhs" or "-iz" gives at least six possible pronunciations.

> I'll still say "octopuses", but I know I always want to say "octopii" instead. (And spell it that way too, because "octopi" feels like it would rhyme with "canopy".)

There's a restaurant near here called Octapas.

> I wonder why it is that "octopuses" just kind of sounds wrong?

There are some Latin words ending -us in English, that keep their Latin plurals. For octopuses, both plurals are common and acceptable.

> I wonder why it is that "octopuses" just kind of sounds wrong?

Because of the english words with taboo meanings that coincidentally share the phonetic structure p-s-

The plural of fish is fish, but the plural of type of fish is fishes

But not as cool as "Whales on Stilts"

Could it be "Children of Time" by Adrian Tchaikovsky?

(ht Claude)

Children of Ruin.

Children of Time!

Virus actually is a latin word, but the plural is vira.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/virus#Latin

The plural of the Latin virus is vira (second declension etc etc). However viri means "men"

It is in fact "viri".

>Most spiders have eight eyes. Some have no eyes and others have as many as 12 eyes.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/spider-se...

Well, I'm not sure there'd be much benefit to spending energy on a 3rd eye. You can already achieve stereoscopic vision with just two eyes, why waste the energy on a third? It probably doesn't increase fitness enough to be worth the energy spend.

Maybe if he punched the fish...

For the octopus it is. Of course, they have many more arms to punch with so this might not translate well to management of humans.

my boss seems to think so.

...and buried in this discussion of octopus management technique, we find the TRUE reason behind the wave of return to office requirements

I'm intrigued by your statement "horseback riding is more or less a hobby now". Are you implying that a ban on horse meat in the USA was originally intended to ensure an adequate supply of riding horses during the time when they were still widely used? All of the breeds that Wikipedia lists as bred for consumption are related to draught horses rather than riding horses, although for that matter the list doesn't include any American breeds at all.

It’s taboo like eating dog. I don’t even know that’s it illegal

We do see a lot of horses standing around on the acres lately but this is pets. They get medicin as all other pets and are not safe to eat for humans. The horse meat we eat is especially bred to be eaten.

Not sure about today but when I was a kid horse meat was in every grocery store in France.

Also pretty common in Sicily.

I believe it's typically eaten raw in Japan too.

There have been corruption scandals where a portion of beef being sold in the EU was partially horse meat (nearly always minced or packaged foods) would be difficult to do with a steak or at least much more difficult. So people may be inadvertently eating small amounts of horse without knowing.

I've had horse in France and Belgium, it's not bad, though not as good as reindeer which I had in Finland (of course).

Except Tesco lasagna.

The article doesn't say that the octopus shares the catch though. Maybe the fish don't benefit.

> Probably shouldn't base your entire opinion of the study on a 17 second video or a fluff article.

I comment based on what I have, and using my personal experience on the field. Experience based on decades of hard study. I had studied Cephalopods for more than 17 seconds, you can bet for it.

If this is common behavior, don't you think that with all the scientists doing research on Cephalopods since Aristotle, and with the millions of hours of people keeping Cephalopods on captivity, somebody would had described it long time ago?. I wonder why suddenly science only finds facts that support the ideologies from the politics that (duh) block, or allow, the money trickle for research.

Never had seen so much wonderful hype science as since the last years. So much 'interesting' interpretations on the reality that defy the logical explanation, since the LLM landed. Suddenly cows fly and pigs live underground. How we never realized this wonders before the IA?

If you want me to spend hours chasing articles, pruning the lying and counterfeit, and making you a report, no problem. Just pay me for my time. Alternatively, if you want to believe that octopuses are small alien children walking undersea gardens with umbrellas, good for you. It's a free country.

I don't think there is scholarly consensus on whether ant behavior can/should be considered domestication, but, per [0]:

> The best-studied insect-associated domestication is that of the attine ants...and the majority cultivate parasol mushrooms in the Leucocoprineae [58]. The ants plant sessile fungal cultivars, manage growth conditions by regulating temperature and moisture and fertilizing the fungal gardens, protect their crop from other herbivores, parasites, and disease, and harvest the cultivated fungi for food [4,58]. This coevolved domestication system has turned ants into obligate fungivores, as experimental removal of the fungal crop results in reduced reproduction and increased mortality among ants [58]. For the fungi, the ants increase their fitness relative to the free-living state by increasing their proportion across generations, providing for geographic dispersal and protecting the fungi against parasites and pathogens [58]. In the higher attine ants, the fungal cultivars are obligate mutualists and cannot grow in a free-living state [58]. It should be noted that fungi may not be the only ant domesticates; some ants tend to hemipteran insects like aphids and treehoppers in a system reminiscent of human animal husbandry [4,10].

I would call this domestication, full stop.

[0] https://www.cell.com/trends/ecology-evolution/fulltext/S0169...

I decided on pigs as the smart threshold because they were as smart as my dogs, and I would never eat my dog. Mutton, lamb, or chicken is no problem whatsoever. You grab them by the neck, stare deep into their eyes, and you will see the back of their skull.

I’ve been able to give up eating cephalopods, but pigs are too delicious to give up.

Not doing that is why future generations will loathe me and my generation.

> I doubt there are many people in the world whose diets rely on eating octopuses

Probably right (about the relying part), but eating octopuses is fairly common around the Mediterranean, at least the West side of it. Most restaurants have at least one item on the menu involving octopuses in some form or shape./

Octopuses are usually specifically fished [Cephalopods. Ecology and Fisheries, Peter Boyle, Paul Rodhouse. Chapter 16].

Typically octopuses produce offspring only near the end of their life, so eating them at any point is destructive for their reproduction and species health.

Anyone who likes the sound of that should check out Adrian Tchaikovksy's Children of Time trilogy, particularly the second one.

Eating a carcass isn't a problem, throwing it into boiling water while it's still alive or clubbing it to death is the objectionable thing.

Let me ask a similar question as another user asked: what attribute do animals lack that, if a human also lacked, would justify eating a human?

This is an honest question, I'm not making a joke.

Why shouldn't we eat _you_ then?

They already said they used to love eating octopus. You reply they should try eating octopus because it's tasty. They already tried it before and decided to give it up for reasons beyond how it tastes.

You should try eating young children, life is too short to not eat good food. That's what that sounds like to someone that opts not to eat something on the basis of its intelligence

Empathy/morality isn't necessarily a requirement for intelligence, nor are the definitions of either easy to nail down.

It is hard to extend morality between species. The idea of parents sacrificing themselves for their children seems to resonate as highly moral, and is also a common pattern in biology.

But how it plays out, from humans where the male can provide more by continuing to live and "hunt/protect/teach"-- but at the risk that the "hunt/protect" might end his life, to spiders where (some species) the male gives his body to provide nutrition for the child,

well, who am I to say which is more moral?

Okay, but maybe they deserve it? Hard for me to tell since I’m not an octopus

The Oatmeal talks about the male Angler fish: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/angler

To be fair, it's not at the empathy or morality levels of humans that a lot of people consider "smart", either.

As for the female octopus trying to eat the male octopus, did I ever tell ya the one about my ex wife? Huh? Huh? crickets

I was reading a fairly forgettable SF series, where one of the alien species is this giant centipede, that switches between “cooperative,” mode, and “competitive” mode.

When “cooperative,” they are your best buddy.

When “competitive,” you are fresh meat.

And you can’t tell when they switch.

Oh man, wait till you hear what humans do to each other.

are you sure? maybe they feel really bad about it after

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