Research Updates

 

It's been a while since an update. It's been a busy few months, but after some setbacks, in January, the spatial learning training began. Six of the twelve were assumed to be alive. About three octopus were observed, but none were seen actively participating in experiment. This was possibly due to their small size and relative larger size of the rocks preventing the cameras from viewing everything from above.

Due to the lack of the results, experiment 1 was halted and redesigned to a different learning experiment.

In February, I began an experiment testing for food preference. The octopus were offered 1 gram of four different food options: their usual ghost shrimp, fresh shrimp from the store, blue crab, and scallops. Each food was placed into individual jars and positioned in a zone (ring of black rocks) facing each other. The food that was chosen the most from that experiment was to be used in an associative learning experiment where the octopus would then be trained to associate their favorite food item with a specific pattern.

This food preference experiment was also stopped when only one octopus was observed on the 24hr running cameras. The others were deemed deceased and experiments were halted.

Of the six octopus that had died previously, four were still viable. These were embedded into wax, sectioned, and then stained. Slides of these sections are scheduled to be viewed and measured to examine brain structure and size at different ages of the Bimac octopus hatchlings.

A final result post will be published soon.