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Personally, I enjoy octopus sightings when they're on my dinner plate, rather than in the ocean.

Kinda contradicts your alias .....personally..I prefer squid (calamari).

Hey Moose GREAT sighting!

Just out of interest of 10 years of spending many a weekend at the Langebaan lagoon (at Churchhaven to be precise) I have encountered these fascinating creatures 5 times in the shallow water. 3 of the sightings included dead animals while the other 2 sightings were very similar with the individual coming to investigate me lying on the beach on one occasion and the other sighting was of an individual who came to watch me play some beach bats

Another interesting bit of info (might be mentioned somewhere):
Some scientist somewhere had two tanks in his lab. Apparently on spearate tables some distance away. One tank had an octopus and the other had mussels. After a while, the mussels went missing and the scientist couldnt work out the dissapearance of his mussels until he discovered (by evidence) or caught the octopus in the act of climbing out of its tank down the table, up the other table and stealing a mussel, devouring it and then returning to its tank . This is true and is definately a good example of why it is regarded as one of the most if not the most intelligent animal in the invertebrate world!

Check what happened recently in a Santa Monica aquarium:

Little octopus, major expense
By Ashley Archibald

A worker from Serv Pro repairs the damage made by a curious octopus at the Heal the Bay Santa Monica Pier Aquarium on Thursday. photo by Ashley Archibald.

http://www.smdp.com/Articles-c-2009-03- ... pense.html

From the Sunday Herald Sun:

A PLAYFUL octopus managed to disassemble a valve in her enclosure and flood a California aquarium with 760 litres of seawater.

The two-spotted, tiny octopus at the Santa Monica Pier Aquarium apparently swam to the top of her enclosure and took apart the valve of the recycling system.

“It grabbed the tube that pulls out the water and caused it to spray outside the tank,” the aquarium’s education specialist Nick Fash told the Los Angeles Times.

The water that swirled around for 10 hours caused no major damage, except to the new ecologically sensitive, linseed-and-cork flooring in many offices.

Taking into account the fact that octopus are considered to be intelligent invertebrates with good memories, the aquarium has now fastened the tank with clamps and tape.

“She would need tools,” Fash said of the unnamed octopus.”

“Some people are suggesting we call her ‘Flo’,” he said.

Source: http://www.waterdamageteam.com/blog/200 ... -aquarium/

Liked your post, O-dog...

It seems that OCTOPUSES ARE SMART SUCKERS! as per one of the articles below.

If you would like to know more about octopus, check out the overview of the octopus brain in The Biological Bulletin (herewith a short excerpt):

This adaptation, or acclimatization, can easily be perceived by humans, as it involves a clear transition from a frightened, hiding octopus to a pet-like animal that behaves in a friendly way and attends to any event occurring in its aquarium area.

It involves the acquisition of recurrent positive experience in obtaining a reward (i.e., food) that makes the octopus attack more often and faster, thus resulting in a "positive learning process" ...

A second reason for the octopus’s suitability for research on the neural basis of complex behavior is that the animal shows highly stereotypic predatory behavior, which is easy to activate (e.g., by offering a crab tied to a string) and to quantify (Boycott and Young, 1955a). Furthermore, due to the octopus’s natural "curiosity," this pattern of behavior can be initiated by various artificial targets, thus creating conditions ideal for visual discrimination experiments ...

Third, octopuses are resilient to invasive surgery and recover rapidly following lesions in their central nervous system under deep anesthesia ...

As solitary hunters, octopuses are exploratory, attending to any novel object in their visual field. They show sensitization, habituation, associative learning including visual and tactile discriminative capabilities, and spatial learning ... Octopuses demonstrate a sophisticated and extraordinary ability to adapt their behavioral repertoire to the current environment and circumstances ... and this may have contributed greatly to their success and that of other cephalopods in their evolutionary competition with fish ...

The octopus also shows observational learning—that is, the capability of utilizing information from conspecifics on how to solve a visual discrimination task. Observational learning induces a memory trace that is stable for at least 5 days after the observation phase ...

Source: [i] http://www.biolbull.org/cgi/content/full/210/3/308

We know that the octopus is amazingly smart. They are capable of associative and observational learning, they are curious and adaptive, and can invent new solutions to problems. They have a large brain relative to their body size, containing about 500 million cells, and they have condensed the classically distributed invertebrate central nervous system into a dense, discrete brain.[/i]

Source: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006 ... brains.php


Another excerpt:

The same question about octopus behavior intrigued both authors, though at different places and from different backgrounds. While watching an Octopus vulgaris in Bermuda, the first author observed it sitting in its sheltering den after a foraging expedition, where it caught several crabs, took them home and ate them. Suddenly it jetted out directly to a small rock about two meters away, tucked it under its spread arms and jetted back. Going out three times more in different directions, it took up three more rocks and piled the resulting barrier in front of the entrance to its den. It held them in front with several arms and went to sleep. This didn't look like random action, but planning.

The second author came in one morning to the Aquarium to find one of the giant Pacific octopuses had been busy overnight. The gravel on the tank bottom was dug up, the nylon cable ties that attached the undergravel filter to the tank had been bitten through and the detached filter had been bitten or torn into small pieces, which now floated on the water surface (experienced octopus keepers know that Murphy's Laws seem to apply especially to octopuses!). Again, this looked like a careful sequencing/planning of actions and learning put to use, though the reasons weren't at all obvious. These observations made both of us believe that octopuses could possibly be intelligent and use their intelligence for unexpected purposes.

Source:
http://www.manandmollusc.net/smart_suckers.html

Thanx Elzet!

Likewise great info posted about this fascinating animal

Wow, I never knew octopuses were so cool! This post has been really fun to read. Thanks everyone

Elzet: I just burst out laughing in a deathly silent, crowded library when I read your post about the octopus that flooded an aquarium

In the library... seems you are also a clever sucker! Happy that I was able to put a smile on your face, although, as you have pointed out, the library is perhaps not the best place for a giggle or two...

Hehe- I am a 'clever sucker'. I'm like a human octopus. Seriously though, it was very traumatizing laughing out loud like that. You need to be far more considerate for where people might be reading the forum, and be careful when posting things that could have such an effect...

Moose, I'll try my best to be more cautious in future!