Goodbye to 2025: The Year of the Octopus

Image by Jack Forbes / New York Post (2024) [1]

 

 

I. 

 

Due a mild winter followed by an exceptionally warm spring, record numbers of octopuses have abandoned their Mediterranean homes and taken up residence along England's south coast. 

 

So many in fact, that approximately 233,000 were caught in UK waters this year - over ten times the average amount - and 2025 has been declared as the year of the octopus by the Wildlife Trusts in their annual review of what's going on in the marine world. 

 

This is not entirely unprecedented, however: a sudden increase in the population of the common octopus - known as a bloom by teuthologists and cephalophiles such as myself - was also observed in 1950 and, prior to that, in 1900. 

 

This is, on balance, welcome news (although not if you're a Cornish lobster or Devon crab) and I find it comforting to imagine a time - long after the extinction of man - when octopuses rule the world; a future possibility that, whilst speculative in nature, is one that many scientists are taking increasingly seriously ...

 

 

II.     

 

Tim Coulson, for example, a professor of zoology at the University of Oxford, argues that if humanity were to fall into the evolutionary void, then the octopus, thanks to its physical and mental attributes, is in pole position to become the dominant species on the planet. 

 

For these eight-legged animals are not only highly intelligent, but also possess, says Coulson, the dexterity, curiosity, and ability to communicate with each other that may one day allow them to make complex tools and, who knows, build a deep-sea civilisation [2].  

 

Coulson even advances the possibility that octopuses might - under the right circumstances and environmental conditions - eventually evolve into animals capable of spending at least some of their time on land in a post-human (and, in all likelihood, post-mammalian) world, although the lack of a skeleton and lungs with which to breathe would obviously be serious hurdles to overcome.    

 

As mentioned, this is all highly speculative and we've really no way of knowing what evolutionary surprises the future will produce millions of years from now. 

 

But it would be unwise to bet against the octopus playing some part in this future; for this is a creature with an evolutionary history behind it stretching back to a time pre-dating the dinosaurs, so they're obviously adaptable and prepared to play the long game. 

 

And I for one say better a world of octopuses than a world of intelligent machines ...   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Illustration for an article by Brooke Kato, 'This captivating sea creature could dominate Earth if humans become extinct', in the New York Post (15 Nov. 2024): click here. 

      For those interested in knowing more about Jack Forbes and his artwork, visit his website: jackforbesportfolio.com

 

[2] This isn't as far-fetched as some readers might think; there are, in fact already two established octopus settlements that we know of; Octopolis (discovered in 2009) and Octlantis (discovered in 2016). 

      While the latter was constructed entirely from natural materials (sand and shells), the former incorporated scrap metal into its design. Both are located in Jervis Bay, New South Wales, Australia, and are home to a small number of gloomy octopuses (Octopus tetricus). The existence of these sites challenged the previous belief that octopuses were solitary creatures and revealed a surprising level of social interaction, as well as environmental engineering. 

 

They Came from Outer Space

One of the more amusing oh, if only it were true, stories doing the rounds this week concerns our old friend the octopus ... According to a group of researchers, octopuses are extraterrestrial biological entities; i.e. alien beings from another world and not just highly intelligent deep sea creatures. 

Of course, there's no actual evidence to support such a claim and it's not only been rejected by the wider scientific community, but mocked in the media: You've got to be squidding me! being a typical tabloid headline.   

Despite anticipating such a reaction, the authors of the paper published in Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, boldy insist that the so-called Cambrian explosion - a sudden burst of life that occurred c. 540 million years ago - can only be explained as an event with cosmic origins.

Essentially, the idea is that alien viruses were transported to Earth by a meteor and infected the life that already existed here; in this case, a population of primitive squid-like organisms, causing them to mutate into an alien hybrid - commonly known as an octopus. Alternatively, some suggest that fertilised octopus eggs came ready frozen from out of space.

Either way, this is obviously a reimagining of the panspermia hypothesis which posits that life exists throughout the universe and was seeded on Earth via comets, asteroids, space dust, or shooting stars. It's an old idea - very old; even the ancient Greeks were speculating along these lines and the first known use of the term is found in the writings of the pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras.

More recently, Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe have been influential proponents of the theory; indeed, the latter is one of the authors of the new paper on alien cephalopods. He and his colleagues argue that so suddenly did octopuses evolve their astonishing features (including large brains and a sophisticated nervous sytem) that it is plausible to suggest they were "borrowed from a far distant future [...] or more realistically from the cosmos at large".

Having said that, the authors concede that such an extraterrestrial explanation for the emergence of these and other unusual features does run "counter to the prevailing dominant paradigm". And, of course, there are good reasons why this is so ...

For a start, it's borderline crackpot; although they may not wear tinfoil hats, not one of the authors is a zoologist and much of the speculation rests on the claim that the genetics of the octopus is uniquely mysterious. A 2015 paper published in Nature, however, revealed that the genome of the creature in question had been fully and successfully mapped and one of the things it showed was how the octopus fits into the generally accepted theory of (terrestrial) evolution.

Thus there's simply no need to imagine an alien origin - no matter how otherworldly the octopus may be in appearance or how unnatural its abilities may seem to us.        

See: J. Steele et al, 'Cause of Cambrian Explosion - Terrestrial or Cosmic?', Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, (available online 13 March, 2018): click here. 

For an earlier post in praise of the octopus that anticipates this one, click here.