Octopuses are mysterious creatures with amazing abilities, they are considered one of the most intelligent animals in the animal kingdom. Among their abilities are those of making their skin change colors and not only that, they also imitate textures. In a documentary that addresses the life of octopuses, one of them is shown dreaming and changing colors at the same time.
New research reveals more curiosities about the animal of a thousand rarities, the . A recent study shows how the brains of these mollusks go through different phases while they sleep, just like humans. During their dreaming period, octopuses also dream and change color.
Credit: Nature on PBS
A PBS documentary shows an octopus in the act of dreaming and makes evident the constant change of colors in its skin, as if its body were a completely visible projector of its brain activity. This has sparked more intrigue among students of animal behavior, i.e. what could octopuses dream about?
Dr. David Scheel, who participated in the documentary, assumes that the octopus dream is directly related to their daily lives, just as it is in the human dream world. This is why he has gone one step further and has developed an entire narrative about the dream experienced by the female octopus that appears on camera in the documentary.
According to Scheel, the mollusk is most likely in an everyday scenario such as hunting. The octopus then changes color according to the actions that happen in its dream.
“So here she is asleep, she sees a and her color starts to change a little bit. Then she goes all dark. Octopuses will do that when they leave the bottom. This is camouflage, like she just subdued a crab and now she’s going to sit there and eat it and she doesn’t want anyone to notice her. This really is fascinating, but yes, if she is dreaming, that is the dream.”
Mollusks continue to surprise researchers and are such amazing creatures that it has even been suggested that they could have arrived from another world. For this, their DNA has been investigated and the results are even more surprising, since they have a strange system of gene arrangement.
Without a doubt, these are creatures that challenge our understanding of nature and how we look at animals, which in times past were believed to have no intelligence, although that is now in the past. On more than one occasion it has been shown that when it comes to intelligence, animals have their own standards.