Are octopuses able to keep track of time when different food sources vary in space and time?
Octopuses appear to be worthwhile species in which to explore the evolution of complex cognition in cephalopods. Indeed, some species, such as Octopus vulgaris, live in a similar environment to that of cuttlefish, as they are both shallow-depth bottom dwellers, but possess different means to handle their environmental constraints.
In this study published in Journal of Experimental Biology, we showed that octopuses do not keep track of time when different food sources vary in space and time as cuttlefish do. They favour simpler foraging strategies, with an amazingly high interindividual variability.
The need to optimize the time spent exposed to predators while foraging might have been the main driver of the emergence of episodic-like memory in cuttlefish, while octopuses seem to cope with their environmental constraints by displaying a wide range of foraging strategies varying both within and between individuals. Octopuses and cuttlefish have evolved different lifestyles and cognitive strategies to deal with the environmental challenges they are exposed to, while possessing the same fundamental brain architecture. Comparative studies undertaken in cuttlefish and octopuses show how necessary it is to integrate ecological, cognitive and neurobiological data to understand how complex cognition has emerged.
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