挣脱锁具的章鱼

二零一六年,新西兰一家小水族馆的工作人员某天早上上班时,发现了一桩真正的谜案。馆里一只其貌不扬的章鱼,名叫因基,一夜之间从水箱里消失了。玻璃没有破损,警报也没有响起。它就这样不见了,仿佛从未在那里待过一样。

In two thousand sixteen, staff at a small aquarium in New Zealand arrived one morning to a genuine mystery. One of their octopuses, an unremarkable looking creature named Inky, had vanished from his tank overnight. No glass had been broken and no alarm had sounded. He had simply gone, as if he had never been there at all.

对整栋建筑的搜查最终给出了答案。趁着夜色,因基撬开了自己水箱的盖子,又拖着身体爬过冰冷的地板,来到一根通向大海的窄排水管前。它挤了进去,在狭窄的金属管道里艰难前行了好几米,最后滑进了开阔的海水中。天亮时,它已经自由了。

A search of the building eventually supplied the answer. Under cover of darkness, Inky had prised open the lid of his own tank, then dragged his body across the cold floor to a narrow drainpipe leading to the ocean. He squeezed inside, worked his way through several metres of tight metal piping, and slid out into open water. By sunrise, he was free.

这个故事真正惊人之处,不只在于因基做了什么,更在于它揭示了章鱼是如何思考的。章鱼是现存最聪明的生物之一,神经元数量大致和狗相当。这些神经元大多不在头部,而是分布在腕足上,因此每条腕足都具有一定程度的独立性,几乎像是有自己的思想一样。

What makes the story remarkable is not just what Inky did, but what it reveals about how an octopus thinks. Octopuses rank among the most intelligent creatures alive, with roughly as many neurons as a dog. Most of those neurons sit not in the head but along the arms, so each arm operates with a degree of independence, almost as though it had a mind of its own.

这种智力在世界各地的实验室里一再显现出来。章鱼学会了拧开罐盖取出食物,解开多步骤的谜题从上锁的箱子里取出蟹肉,甚至能凭视觉认出不同的研究人员,朝它们不喜欢的人喷水。

This intelligence turns up again and again in laboratories worldwide. Octopuses have learned to unscrew jar lids to reach food, solved multi step puzzles to retrieve a piece of crab from a locked box, and even recognised individual researchers by sight, squirting water at the ones they seemed to dislike.

即便如此,科学家仍然无法完全解释这种智力从何而来。它沿着生命进化中完全独立的一支演化而成,远早于哺乳动物出现之前,这也是为什么面对章鱼的心智,感觉就像是地球上最接近遇见外星智慧的经历。

Even so, scientists still cannot fully explain how such intelligence arose. It evolved along an entirely separate branch of life, long before mammals existed, which is why meeting an octopus's mind feels like the closest thing on Earth to meeting an alien one.

因基本身再也没有被人见过。水族馆后来找了另一只章鱼来代替它,不过这一次,他们确保新的水箱要难逃得多。

Inky himself was never seen again. The aquarium eventually replaced him with another octopus, though this time they made sure the new tank would be considerably harder to escape from.