why-animals-do-the-thing:sighinastorm:gifsboom:Octopus makes a rolling armor with a coconut. [video]

why-animals-do-the-thing:sighinastorm:gifsboom:Octopus makes a rolling armor with a coconut. [video]When humans are done with this planet, I nominate cephalopods to succeed our stewardship.@@why-animals-do-the-thing This sure LOOKS like boredom and fun, but maybe you have a less complimentary interpretation.  Off the top of my head, I’m inclining toward vestigial instinct from when the ancestors of these molluscs had shells.Actually, you’ve hit upon a really interesting topic because there’s a lot of deate about what this behavior is. Some marine biologists think it’s tool use, whereas others think it’s more like what you described - creating shelter from hollow objects in lieu of an external shell. This species is the coconut octopus (often called the veined octopus) and they’re fairly well known for odd behaviors such as burying itself entirely in sand, bipedal locomotion, and using sea- and coconut-shells for this sort of shelter. So the question is: is this sort of behavior tool use or not? Some researchers think so, because they think the octopus is gathering and assembling the shells with foresight that they might useful in the future for shelter or protection. Others argue no, it’s just shelter and a house is not a tool - they define a tool is “an object used by an animal to interact with and change their environment.” The argument for that definition is that you’ve got to draw a line somewhere between using an object for protection and actually thinking about and creating a tool. (Source)However, there are other examples of supposed octopus tool usage - such as shooting water to clear sand (or turn off pesky tank lights) and rock-stacking for concealment - that make it seem not unlikely that there’s some aspect of tool usage in the behavior in the gifs above.  -- source link

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