The Great Escape

In 2016, Inky — an octopus at New Zealand's National Aquarium — slipped out through a small gap at the top of his tank, crossed the floor, found a drainpipe that led to the sea, and squeezed all the way down it to freedom. He was never seen again. With no rigid skeleton, an octopus can pour its whole body through any gap wider than its hard beak.

A Mind Built Differently

Put the pieces together and octopus cognition challenges our assumptions about what intelligence requires. No bones, a life of only a year or two, no schools and no parents to teach them — and yet they plan, solve, and remember.

Finding tool use, forethought, and clever escapes in an invertebrate tells us something big: a complex mind does not need our kind of body or our kind of upbringing to develop. There is more to come — how octopuses remember, and how they play.