Octopuses and fish caught on camera hunting as a team
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Octopuses normally hunt alone, but footage captured by divers has revealed that they can collaborate with fish to find their next meal. The videos, described today in Nature Ecology & Evolution1, show that the different species even adopt specific roles to maximize the success of joint hunting expeditions.
“The octopus basically works as the decider of the group,” says co-author Eduardo Sampaio, an animal-behaviour researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz, Germany. “There’s a sign that some cognition is occurring here, for sure.”
Sampaio and his colleagues used several synchronized cameras to collect 120 hours of footage while diving in the Red Sea. They captured 13 instances of cross-species group hunting, in which a big blue octopus (Octopus cyanea) worked alongside different species of fish to find and capture smaller fish and molluscs.
Each of these scenes hinted at complex group dynamics, with different species adopting different roles. Goatfish (Parupeneus spp.), for example, tended to prompt fish of other species to move forward and explore new environments, and octopuses could ‘convince’ the group to stop moving by staying in a particular location. “The other fish provide several options, and then the octopus decides which one to take,” says Sampaio. “There’s this element of shared leadership.”
