Eight flailing arms that hold enough brain power to make their own decisions, and certainly to command their own movements; a slimy, stretchy skin; no bones to inhibit movements; black ink to cloud herself. Octopuses couldn’t possibly be farther away from our own bodily and mental experiences. Yet the research on the life functions in […]
“I got to know the octopus in the year 1911: I was nine years old and drove with my family to Roscoff, where the marine biology station consisted of a large aquarium that you could gaze into. I was so fascinated that I wanted to study zoology (…) The octopus became the theme of my […]
The life of octopuses ends within senescence, a phase of terminal decay unrelated to disease. Skin retracts from around their eyes, white lesions build on the body that fail to heal, they stop eating, movements become uncoordinated and their activities undirected. In female octopuses this phase has a tragic-heroic quality. After mating, she carries her […]
In the 1970s, a philosopher famously pondered if and how the question “What is it like to be a bat?” can be answered. The newly emerging academic field of human-animal studies would lead extensive debates about the possibility, limitations, relevance and necessity of knowing what it is like to be another animal for understanding our […]
“The question “What is it like to be another animal?” has often been rhetorically leveled against insinuations that we could know what the world might feel like for an other animal. One cannot help but get the impression that it circumvents the more uncomfortable question what it is like to be another animal in captivity? […]