Secrets of the Octopus takes us inside the world of these "aliens on Earth"
arstechnica.com

... Octopuses are like aliens on Earth: three hearts, blue blood and the ability to squeeze through a space the size of their eyeballs. But there is so much more to these weird and wonderful animals. Intelligent enough to use tools or transform their bodies to mimic other animals and even communicate with different species, the secrets of the octopus are more extraordinary than we ever imagined. ...

Ars Technica: What is the focus of your research?

Alex Schnell: I'm a marine biologist that turned into a comparative psychologist"just a fancy word for studying the different minds of animals. What I'm really interested is how intelligence evolved, where and when. The octopus is the perfect candidate to answer some of these questions because they diverge from our own lineage over 550 million years ago. We share an ancestor that looked like a flat worm. So if the octopus shows glimmers of intelligence that we see in ourselves or in animals that are closely related to us, it reveals a lot about the patterns of evolution and how it evolved throughout the animal kingdom.

When you meet an octopus, you really get the sense that there is another being looking out at you. A few years ago, I worked with a team at London School of Economics to write a report reviewing the evidence of sentience in animals. Does the animal have the capacity to feel emotions? We found really strong evidence in octopuses and it ended up changing UK law. Now under UK law, we have to treat octopuses ethically and with compassion. ...