Secrets of octopus intelligence

[David Morris]

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/02/01/the-secrets-of-octop.html#more

The little octopus picks up two halves of a coconut shell and carries
them across the ocean floor with her suckers. Suddenly, startled, she
drops the shell halves and dives inside.

Like a lot of you, I watched that video and wondered, "Just how smart
are cephalopods, anyway?"

Turns out, on a scale of one to chimpanzee, octopuses are probably
somewhere close to matching wits with a dog. We don't really know for
sure. It's difficult to devise intelligence testing for an animal that
is so clearly different from us.

That said, research does offer some tantalizing hints that we may need
to rethink our anti-invertebrate biases. Octopuses have personalities.
They can recognize and respond to individual humans. And there's even
some evidence that they play.