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Octopuses are remarkably intelligent creatures, as was demonstrated by Inky the Octopus's famous escape from the National Aquarium of New Zealand through a drainpipe back to sea in 2016.
A new Dartmouth study shows octopuses can use mirrors to find food out of sight, demonstrating spatial cognitive abilities. The results are published in Current Biology.
"Our findings are the first to demonstrate that invertebrates can use mirrors to understand their environment to find prey," says lead author Mary Kieseler, Guarini '25, who conducted the research as a PhD student in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth and is now a postdoc at Switzerland’s University of Fribourg. "It's a skill that previously has only been documented in vertebrates, such as in some mammals and some birds."
The researchers trained three California two-spot octopuses (Octopus bimaculoides) in the Octopus Lab at Dartmouth to not attack a crab image that they see in a mirror but instead to infer and move to where the hidden stimulus was displayed behind them.
