Brains and Memory

Octopuses are considered extremely intelligent creatures. Considering the fact that an octopus has approximately 500 million neurons (to understand how great this number of nerve cells is, imagine that your dog has more or less the same range of nerve cells), it should come as no surprise that octopuses exhibit some amazing skills.

How well does an octopus remember? Not much is known about their memory. Some say they have a terrific memory while others state that their long term memory (more than 30 seconds) is terrible. We decided to design an experiment to test the octopus ability to remember.

Setting Up the Experiment

In this memory experiment, four transparent tubes are stabilized horizontally by a plastic divider set in the middle of the experiment tank. The divider prevents the octopus from seeing what’s on the other sider. The octopus can only see the four holes, each of which is an opening to a tube.

We will place a small fish in one of the tubes. The holes are large enough to allow the octopus to fit an arm through in order to retrieve the food, yet small enough to prevent him from seeing it. The octopus has to insert an arm in the tube to explore its contents.

The Results

We ran this experiment for 15 days, always placing the fish in the same tube to see if he would remember where he usually finds his snack.

The octopus is a very curious animal and can’t resist poking around when he finds a hole. In many of the scenes you will notice he places multiple arms simultaneously in the holes. However, try to see if he is favoring a certain one.

This experiment is is by no means going to give us conclusive results but it was interesting to run and does appear to give us some insight on how good his memory is. We’ll continue to run this experiment along with many, many more memory experiments.