Australian scientists have discovered an octopus in Indonesia that collects coconut shells for shelter — unusually sophisticated behavior that the researchers believe is the first evidence of tool use in an invertebrate animal.
The scientists filmed the veined octopus, Amphioctopus marginatus, selecting halved coconut shells from the sea floor, emptying them out, carrying them under their bodies up to 65 feet (20 meters), and assembling two shells together to make a spherical hiding spot.
The difference is the octopus carries the shell before using it. The hermit crab hunts for a new shell when they feel the need and then abandon the old shell and move in permanently, they don’t actually carry the new shell around until they need to use the shell.
This point was touched on in the article, but I must admit that I myself wondered at the qualitative difference between the comparatively passive (hermit crab) and active (octopus) use of found objects for shelter. To my usual thinking, taking shelter, even the greyer area of manipulating independent objects as they are in order to get it, generally would not strike me as tool use; instead, tool use would be something less direct: for example, if the octopus set up the coconut shell as a lure to attract prey, then I would definitely consider that tool use. But, the more I think about it, the octopus doesn’t simply and passively take coconut shells as accident presents itself: instead it chooses and matches halves, cleans them to make them habitable, and carries them for an intended future and without immediate use. If that’s not exactly tool usage, then I think it arguably qualifies as a protoform of it, to borrow a linguistic term.
Here’s an afterthought along the same lines: let’s say someone in a rainstorm grabs a banana leaf - or a newspaper, for that matter - to use as an umbrella. Is this tool usage, or not?
BTW, in the course of my Googles I found that in traditional Hawai’ian lore the octopus is an escapee life form from a previous universe that was destroyed before the forming of this one. I find it very, very easy to get behind that idea. Anyway, its challengingly peculiar otherness aside, if any critter could jump universes my money would be on the octopus, what with its mad skillz.
