A new Portuguese-led study has found that octopuses team up with fish to hunt together. Marine biologists spent around 120 hours at sea, observing ‘octopus hunting groups’ and different species of fish.
One of them, Eduardo Sampaio, has told SIC Notícias that: “when the octopus is alone, it hunts speculatively – in other words, it tries out different places to see where there is food.
But when it is hunting with fish that are collaborators, it lets the fish find the food and, when they find it, they send a signal to the octopus and then the octopus moves in (…) Sometimes the posture of the fish points to where the prey is and the octopus realises this.
Obviously all this is very complex and there are various ways of communicating between them, so all this was innovative; it hadn’t been shown in nature before”, adds colleague Rui Rosa. The study took place in the Red Sea, and on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. For more information, see here
