Despite its extraordinary intelligence, the life of an octopus is a solitary one. So perhaps it is no wonder that the mighty brained cephalopod engages in a little thuggery to relieve the boredom.
Scientists have discovered that, on occasions, an octopus will “punch” a fish for no reason other than “spite”.
It is known that octopuses are able to escape captivity, solve problems, use tools and even possibly show humour, but they are, in fact, the playground bullies of the undersea world. Indeed, according to new research, they assault fish when they are supposed to be working together.
A report led by Eduardo Sampaio, a researcher at the Marine and Environmental Sciences Centre in Lisbon, found that the octopus has a tendency to punch fish while they are working together to find food.
In these joint hunting sessions, the octopus will look for prey within rocks and crevices while other fish, such as yellow-saddle goatfish, will search the sea floor around a wider perimeter, and smooth cornet fish will act as guards.
However, the researchers found that in videos it studied of this type of hunting session in the Red Sea near Israel and near Egypt, in 2018 and in 2019, octopuses were shown to engage in an “active displacement” of the fish during their hunt for food. Multiple octopuses could be seen on various occasions performing “a swift, explosive motion with one arm directed at a specific fish partner, which we refer to as punching”, the report said.
Mr Sampaio said that while the punching was sometimes done to allow the octopus access to prey it did not want the fish to have, at other times there seemed to be no logical reason for it. However, it could be because the action had “delayed benefits”, keeping potentially misbehaving fish in line so they could work better together in the long run.
Mr Sampaio noted that in these hunting sessions with multiple types of species, “conflicts between partners can arise over the level of investment and distribution of payoffs” and octopuses may be essentially showing that there should be no misbehaviour.
The other alternative is that octopuses are, simply, bullies, who get nothing out of what they are doing except the thrill of punching something smaller than them. In this scenario, the “benefits are disregarded entirely by the octopus, and punching is a spiteful behaviour, used to impose a cost on the fish regardless of self-cost”.
The report, published in Ecology, notes that the relationship between octopus and fish while hunting is complex and more studies are needed to determine if there is a reason that scientists are missing as to why octopuses throw a punch every so often.
