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This Sleeping Octopus Twitches in Technicolor-But Is She Dreaming - Popular Science PDF
This Sleeping Octopus Twitches in Technicolor-But Is She Dreaming - Popular Science PDF
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Tips to get your fancy Eleven animals you can LightSail 2′s success could
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ANIMALS
A video has been making rounds on the internet showing Heidi asleep in her tank. Her
mantle (the ball of muscle behind her eyes) expands and deflates, and you can practically
hear her tiny cartoon snores.
Each time the octopus twitches, her body pulses with a new array of colors and textures and
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patterns. Her skin shifts from a dappled yellow to a pale white, then a dark, rippling
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magenta, before settling on a yellow and black paisley. She’s clinging to the bare wall of her
tank, yet her colors change as if she’s swimming across the ocean floor, trying to blend in
with the sun-dappled sand or the murky ocean.
"If she is dreaming, it's this dramatic moment," narrates David Scheel, a marine biologist
from Alaska Pacific University. Part of a soon-to-be-aired PBS documentary, the video
captures Scheel's stunned, real-time reaction to Heidi's rainbow display. He guesses that
Heidi could be dreaming about chasing a crab, the same way we imagine dogs dream of
chasing cats.
“If she’s dreaming, that’s the dream,” Scheel concludes. The prospect is exciting, but also
very open-ended—there’s hardly any scholarly work available to support this claim. In
general, “dreaming” is a tricky concept to nail down, especially for something as alien as a
marine invertebrate. Heidi’s performance in the video, enchanting as it is, raises more
questions than answers. We did our best to address some of those questions here:
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Additionally, posits Gilly, if your outline or colors are continuously changing, then it might
keep you from sticking out as a static object on the seafloor.
For an organism to be considered "asleep," it should fulfill several key criteria: it must go very
still, become less responsive than it is while awake, and—should it miss a night of sleep—
strive to compensate by sleeping more later on.
Octopuses have been shown to display most of these behaviors. "They become quiescent
and less responsive to disturbance, but can be roused. After a period of sleep deprivation,
they sleep longer to catch up," Scheel tells PopSci. "And their brains are active during these
sleep behaviors." That suggests they might have the capacity to dream.
octopusis
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How can scientists determine if the
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dreaming?
Dreams usually occur during REM sleep (the phase of sleep characterized by Rapid Eye
Movement). Studies have found that octopuses do sleep, and that their cephalopod cousins,
cuttlefish, exhibit something like REM sleep.
At the moment, says Scheel, "the science of invertebrate sleep is still exploring these
behaviors, and whether we should conclude octopuses dream." Because dreaming is such a
human concept—it's a manifestation of the subconscious, and not exactly something we can
ask an animal about—we may never really know for sure.
Scheel doesn’t claim to be a sleep biologist, nor is he an expert in sleep behaviors, but
something about Heidi’s performance makes him believe that octopuses are just as capable
of dreaming as humans are. These highly intelligent animals are highly distinct from us, he
says, but it’s important to remember that our experiences might not be so different.
Gilly is pretty skeptical that the changing colors are indicative of dreaming. “Color change is
just a neuromuscular behavior, just like moving our arms or fingers or anything else,” says
Gilly. “It’s not necessarily a conscious thing.” If only our own leg twitches and snores were
this lovely to look at.
“Even for humans,” says Scheel, “the function of dreams is still under investigation.”
The sequence was taken from the upcoming PBS NATURE's Octopus: Making Contact. The
full documentary will air on October 2.
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