章鱼是一个好奇且足智多谋的生物，最近的研究已经看到cephalopod对HDTV的视觉刺激做出反应，从而为科学家提供了一种更好的监视和学习行为的方法。在研究他们对视觉提示的反应时，研究人员被生物的自然栖息地所困扰之前，不知道会通过分散高度视觉的小动物而知道什么会游泳或爬行。这是悉尼海洋科学研究所的研究人员将电视带到头足类动物的想法。
They soon discovered playing video on a liquid crystal high definition television for gloomy octopuses (Octopus tetricus), they could accurately see how the animals reacted to prey (a crab), a new object (a jar), and a potential predator (another octopus), responses usually only seen in the ocean. Observations reveal that that the individual octopuses have episodic personalities, according to details of the study published in The Journal of Experimental Biology.
Lead author Renata Pronk, a marine biologist at Macquarie University in Australia,在《生活科学》说:“这new video playback technique is great news for researchers, because they can use it to study many different aspects of octopus behavior that can’t otherwise be discerned using traditional techniques.”
Don’t let that exterior fool you. Octopuses can spot a fake when they see it, making it impossible for scientists to use mirrors, video or remote control devices impossible to use to study the cephalopods’ interactions in their environment. So in comes the HDTV and the octopuses responded as if they were the real deal.
On top of just the interaction, the researchers took it a step further to see if octopuses had a personality by exposing them to videos over the course of a few days. If an octopus has a distinct personality, the researchers would expect to see the same behaviors from a certain individual consistently over time. Yet during the experiment, an octopus showed interest in the video one day, and seemingly became bored the next. Pronk uncovered that the octopuses have episodic personalities, meaning they display consistent traits over short periods of time, but longer-term, their behaviors changed completely. “In short, they had what appear to be very short-lived personalities,” she said.
Interesting research and possibly a way to get that new big screen HDTV in the lab The Steinhart Aquarium for our resident ceph-head Rich Ross, but can’t see California Academy of Sciences picking up the tab for Direct TV.
