• chickenf622@sh.itjust.works
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    1 day ago

    I would believe it, those fuckers are smart and if they were social creatures I think they would be in competition with humans for the dominant species . This is an opinion of a person not super well versed on octopi so take this with a good size grain of salt.

    • Sphks@jlai.lu
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      24 hours ago

      Their lifespan is an issue. They live around 2 to 3 years before dying.

      • Bronzebeard@lemmy.zip
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        20 hours ago

        Also, the act of reproducing kills the mother. Basically starved to death protecting the eggs. No generational knowledge transfer.

    • baguettefish@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 day ago

      there are social octopuses, like the larger pacific striped octopus. imo octopuses had 150 million years to rule the planet and they just weren’t good enough. skill issue. us humans only had 2-4 million years. i’d say we’re doing quite well comparatively.

      • Mouselemming@sh.itjust.works
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        1 day ago

        Maybe their version of “rule the planet” involved mostly just hanging out in their den and thinking interesting thoughts.

        • LadyButterfly she/her@piefed.blahaj.zoneOP
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          1 day ago

          Yep they just hang out and do wtf they want to do. They’re not going to work and having politics about whose turn it is to make coffee, or why Will should never have got promoted over Kay. Really they’re the smarter species

          • snoons@lemmy.ca
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            12 hours ago

            For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.

            Douglas Adams, The Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy

      • scratchee@feddit.uk
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        1 day ago

        They ruled the planet for 150 million years and didn’t ruin the environment once ? What are they even doing?

        We’re clearly superior, who else could speed run the mass extinction end game?

        • RobotToaster@mander.xyz
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          22 hours ago

          They ruled the planet for 150 million years and didn’t ruin the environment once ?

          That’s what Cthulhu wants you to think.

        • HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org
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          18 hours ago

          They survived the K-T extiction event or K-Pg event which killed perhaps 75% of species in earth 66 million years ago.

          While we are already causing an extinction event which will probably turn out far worse, by causing temperatures to rise to a level higher than in hundreds of millions of years - far outside the range modern life has adapted to. And I am not so sure that we ourselves can survive that in the long run. Humans are incredibly adaptable, that’s right. But our food sources are not, not even things like grasses, wheat, or trees, let alone mammals, the great mayority of them (except perhaps algae and mushrooms) are far younger in an evolutionary sense, so it is unlikely they can adapt.

    • sudoshakes@reddthat.com
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      1 day ago

      Octopi if the base word was Latin. It’s Greek, so octopodes for plural. Technically.

      Because English is a bastard if a language octopuses and octopi are fine too.

      • grue@lemmy.world
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        23 hours ago

        I nominate “octopodusai” to be the new English plural. (Where’d the “a” come from? To make it easier to confuse ‘ai’ with æ because fuck you, that’s why, of course!)