Octopuses do occasionally attack people, giving a venomous nip or stealing an underwater camera when threatened or annoyed, but in general they are gentle, inquisitive creatures.
Octopuses seem to be these slimy odd moving creatures that you wouldn't think would have the ability to attack. But they indeed do take the need to attack if needed. It is unique to know that they have a killer instinct to them.
An octopus is an eight-armed, soft-bodied mollusc. Its arms are covered in suckers and arranged radially around a sharp-beaked mouth. It eats by catching prey with one of its arms and moving it through a conveyer belt of undulating suckers to its mouth – in that sense an octopus’s arms can also be thought of as its lips. On top of its arms rests its head, which contains its brain and features two large eyes with horizontal, dash-shaped pupils, like a cat’s eyes turned on their side.
I like how the text helped give a better image of what the octopus looks like and the different things that also come with the octopus. Before I didn't really have and understanding but now I completely do.
Peter Godfrey-Smith is a philosopher and diver who has been studying octopuses and other cephalopods in the wild, mostly off the coast of his native Sydney, for years. The alienness of octopuses, in his view, provides an opportunity to reflect on the nature of cognition and consciousness without simply projecting from the human example.
This text allows me to get an understanding on what the goal is for Peter Godfrey-Smith as he dives to get a complete understanding of the octopus vs the human example of them.