His skin color changed, he spun around, he extended his mantle and he inked-all behaviors linked with fending off predators. But suddenly-and without apparent provocation-the animal began frantically moving. At first, Costello was sleeping peacefully. What he saw in the footage surprised him. To look for some explanation, Ramos checked the tapes from cameras pointed at Costello’s tank 24/7. Ramos was immediately intrigued, since expelling ink is typically a defense mechanism that cephalopods use to ward off predators-but Costello only shared his tank with tiny, non-predatory fish. The curious observations began when Eric Ramos, a neuroscientist at The Rockefeller University, entered the lab one morning and discovered that the water in Costello’s tank was murky and filled with ink, reports New Scientist’s Michael Le Page.

Though Costello died naturally less than two months later from an intestinal parasite, his short-lived stint in captivity may someday help scientists unravel the mysteries surrounding octopus neurology and evolution. In the study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, the team describes Costello’s bizarre behaviors while sleeping, which suggest octopuses can have vivid dreams.Īfter the cephalopod’s unfortunate run-in in the wild, a vendor caught and sold him to researchers in New York in early 2021.

That’s the theory posed by researchers in a paper published last week on the preprint server bioRxiv. That traumatic incident apparently stuck with Costello, a male Brazilian reef octopus-so much so, that he may even have had nightmares about it later in life.

While living off the coast of the Florida Keys, he got into a fight with another sea creature, losing the majority of two arms and suffering damage to a third arm from the unknown predator.

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