--- jthorn65 at sbcglobal.net wrote:
> > Is it ok to poke oysters to make them produce
> pearls? :p
> >
> >
> > Kelley
>
> No. The pearl is a product of causing them
> discomfort, therefore you are making them suffer.
Oysters did have brains, so presumably suffering is not an issue.
Octopi, on the other hand, are believed by some scientists to have intelligence around on the level of a housecat. What is so cool about this is that the common ancestor of vertebrates and invertebrates did have a brain, with the result that the octopus brain is organized completely differently from the mammalian brain.
This is so cool:
What is this octopus thinking?
WHEN an octopus in a research laboratory in Naples learnt to choose a red ball instead of a white one by watching another octopus, students of animal learning were taken aback. Such "observational learning" is supposed to be seen only in higher vertebrates animals such as rats with sophisticated brains - Octopuses, on the other hand, are molluscs, a seemingly primitive animal group. True, octopus have huge brains. But they look nothing like the brains of the vertebrates that are so adept at learning. For that matter, why would octopuses need to learn by example? They are short-lived, solitary creatures that usually meet only once, to copulate.
Jean Boal, who studies animal behaviour at the University of Texas in Galveston, epitomises the scepticism that greeted the announcement in 1992 of the educable octopus. "If they really did show observational learning, it would be astonishing," she said recently. "We have many mammals that aren't doing that." But not everyone is as doubtful. After all, the brains of animals like the octopus evolved entirely separately from the brains of the vertebrates, and they have an entirely different design - perhaps they also house a unique form of intelligence. "We have two very different brains that can do some similar things- including perhaps observational learning," says Shelley Adamo at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Others say that even if octopuses are incapable of something as sophisticated as observational learning, they excel at other types of behaviours that mainstream neurobiology has long since denied in so lowly an animal. "It's very clear from a cursory observation of cephalopods that they are extremely - intelligent animals," says Nathan Tublitz at the University of Oregon in Eugene. The debate about observational learning in octopuses is at the centre of one of the oddest challenges in neurobiology: the quest to understand the brain of the cephalopod, animals that include octopuses, squid, cuttlefish and the single- shelled nautilus. The weird construction of the cephalopod brain was pieced together in the 1960s by J. Z. Young's classic studies of the common octopus, Octopus vulgaris. But getting to grips with how it works, and how well it works, has become fraught with disagreement.
Octopuses and squid are seductive creatures, so some critics suspect that their intelligence has been grossly exaggerated by anthropomorphising observers-"they watch my every move, therefore they must be curious". On the other hand, because cephalopod behaviour and brain structure are so foreign, others argue that their greatest cognitive feats are probably still being overlooked.
Deep-sea brains "They're very alien-an alien intelligence," says Adamo. "The way they 'think' is very different. When you consider a cat, dog or rat, we pretend we can sort of understand some of their responses. With cuttlefish, it's much more difficult."
http://www.fortunecity.com/emachines/e11/86/cephpod.html
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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