Octopuses can have nightmares. It’s a possible explanation for extraordinary behavior captured by cameras monitoring an octopus in a lab aquarium, says Marcelo Magnasco at Rockefeller University in New York.
In 2021, his team buys an octopus (island octopus) caught off Florida for their studies of cephalopod cognition. The octopus, named Costello after one of the “heptapod” aliens in the film Arrival, quickly adapted to captivity and began sleeping in the open rather than in a den like octopuses do in the wild.
One morning, team member Eric Ramos, also at Rockefeller University, walked in…