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Brains are resource hungry, especially oxygen hungry. Earth's air is orders of magnitude richer in oxygen molecules than its water. This likely made it easier f
by Calavar 3mo ago
Brains are resource hungry, especially oxygen hungry. Earth's air is orders of magnitude richer in oxygen molecules than its water. This likely made it easier for intelligence to develop on land. It's worth noting that the smartest aquatic animals are air breathing mammals that spent much of their evolutionary history on land before returning to water.
- onlypassingthru 3mo agoWhen did octopuses start breathing air?
- Calavar 3mo agoOctopuses are smart, but I've yet to see anything that suggests they are smarter than dolphins or whales.
- mapt 3mo agoBoth whales and prairie dogs turn out to have rather advanced degrees of verbal language capability, more complex than any of the Great Apes bar homo sapiens. Crows somehow culturally remember the face of an antagonist multiple generations later. Almost every highly social vertebrate has degrees of intelligence that would get you burned as a witch if you'd suggested it not too long ago, in the era when "Fishes clearly don't feel pain" was just a cultural default assumption.
- onlypassingthru 3mo agoI've heard that the biggest limiting factor in octopus ocean domination is their short lifespans. Tool use, building structures, communication, facial recognition, multiple brains, it's all there. https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/octopuses-keep-surprising-us-here-are-eight-examples-how.html https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/octopuses-keep-surprising-us-...
- SJC_Hacker 3mo agoFemale octopi also die reproducing. Knowledge cannot be passed from one generation to the next. Everything they know is either instinctual or learned.