EigoPro 2級 読解 — The Surprising Intelligence of the Octopus

The Surprising Intelligence of the Octopus If you were asked to name an intelligent animal, you would probably think of a chimpanzee, a dolphin, or perhaps a clever dog. Few people would mention an octopus. Yet scientists who study these strange sea creatures have come to a remarkable conclusion: the octopus may be one of the most intelligent animals on Earth, even though its body and brain are completely unlike our own. Almost everything about the octopus is unusual. It has eight arms, three hearts, and blue blood. More surprisingly, most of its nerve cells are not in its head but spread throughout its arms, which means each arm can taste, touch, and even act partly on its own. An octopus can also change the colour and texture of its skin in less than a second, matching rocks, sand, or coral so perfectly that predators swim past without noticing it. It is the animal's behaviour, however, that has truly amazed researchers. In laboratories, octopuses have learned to open screw-top jars to reach food inside, solved simple mazes, and recognised individual human keepers — greeting some gently while squirting water at others they apparently dislike. In the wild, some octopuses collect coconut shells, carry them across the sea floor, and assemble them into shelters when danger appears. This use of objects is considered a form of tool use, an ability once thought to belong only to humans and a few other animals. What makes octopus intelligence so fascinating to scientists is its independent origin. Our last common ancestor with the octopus lived hundreds of millions of years ago and was probably a simple worm-like creature. This means intelligence evolved in the octopus completely separately from our own. Studying how a creature so different from us can think, learn, and remember may help researchers understand what intelligence really is — and perhaps even how to recognise it if we ever encounter it beyond our planet.

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