Female octopuses are larger and more aggressive toward males in the wild, indicating that the mood-altering MDMA did not override caution. When a female octopus was put underneath the pot, however, the MDMA-dosed octopus retreated to his tank. But in three of four tests, the MDMA-dosed male octopuses ignored the figurine and tried to touch the second male animal.
"With the plastic pot, they could see each other and touch each other but not kill each other." Normally the two octopuses would have kept their distance and instead played with the toy. "We didn't want to stick them into a tank together and watch because they might hurt each other," Dölen says. In the third chamber was a second octopus, which had not been dosed with MDMA, underneath a similar structure. On one side was a Star Wars figurine within an upside-down flower pot with holes. The team then released the octopus for 30 minutes into the middle chamber of a three-compartment fish tank. The test animal-a male California two-spot octopus-was put in a seawater solution containing dissolved MDMA for 10 minutes. "Their brains are completely different, but they have some of the same molecular machinery." Dölen wanted to know if she could induce social behavior in a normally antisocial animal. "I've always been interested in evolution, and looking at the octopus offered a really neat opportunity to examine the evolutionary mechanisms of social behaviors," Dölen says.
Contextĭölen and her colleagues are interested in the biological basis of social behavior, as well as how the mood-altering drug MDMA (aka Ecstasy) works to release serotonin, a hormone that is known mostly for its influences on moods but that also plays an important role in regulating sleep patterns and digestion. So when Gül Dölen, a Johns Hopkins assistant professor of neuroscience, wanted to test some ideas about how neural circuits govern social behavior, she reached for an octopus-or rather seven of them-from the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. But over the past few years, marine scientists have been discovering some surprising behavior from octopuses: stealing fish from neighboring tanks and fishermen, identifying "nice" and "mean" keepers, and turning off lights by squirting water at overhead bulbs to short out the power supply. Five hundred million years of evolution separates humans from the seafloor-scuttling octopus, an invertebrate that stores most of its brain cells in its eight arms.
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