But clever as they are, they can also use those siphons to shoot water, or even ink, at things that annoy them - including scientists. They have tube-shaped structures on their bodies, known as siphons, which expel water to help them move around. Octopuses sometimes shoot ink at scientists who study them It’s how they’re different from us that makes them so remarkable. In the end, we shouldn’t have to relate to an animal in order to respect it. But experts warn that we need to be careful when interpreting the results from studies like these because octopuses are nothing like us. It’s hard not to marvel at the idea of an octopus dreaming - or of a female rebuffing a male suitor, for that matter. In recent years, we’ve been utterly captivated by octopus intelligence, and studies that draw parallels between their behavior and our own have helped propel the animals to fame. It’s not explicitly a social behavior, she said.
More likely, she suspects, the octopuses are just jetting water toward nuisances - a behavior we’ve known about for decades - and sometimes the water happens to have “crud” in it.
“If they were throwing, they would pick stuff up with their arms and throw it,” said Jennifer Mather, a renowned octopus expert at Canada’s University of Lethbridge who was not part of the study. Courtesy of Peter Godfrey-Smith, David Scheel, Stephanie Chancellor, Stefan Linquist, and Matthew Lawrenceīut some experts don’t see this behavior as throwing, per se, and question whether the animals actually aim to hit other creatures. An octopus propels silt toward another octopus at a site in southeastern Australia. Elephants, monkeys, and birds are among the few animals known to do it, but at times throwing has “been seen as distinctively human,” the authors write. These observations are a big deal because targeted throwing is rare in the animal kingdom, said Peter Godfrey-Smith, the study’s lead author and a professor of philosophy of science at the University of Sydney. In one case, the authors write, a female octopus repeatedly launches silt at a male that had been trying to mate with her. In a new preprint study based on the footage, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, scientists say these interactions reveal that octopuses “throw” things, sometimes at other octopuses or fish. The interaction was caught on camera, as were dozens of similar behaviors that show octopuses launching debris in a jet of water. Shrouded in cloudy water, the octopus that’s been hit inches back - like you might if someone hurled trash at you on a New York City sidewalk. Then, seemingly without warning, one of them jets a stream of silt in the other’s face. In quiet waters south of Sydney, Australia, two octopuses are resting near each other on a bed of scallop shells.
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