Scientists gave MDMA to octopus and they started hugging

Octopuses are notoriously antisocial. The 300 known species live in solitude, tolerating only brief periods during the breeding season. And when they do not mate, they are aggressive and aggressive. If you put two octopuses together in a tank, they will attack each other, but not if you give them MDMA. Because scientists have discovered that large octopuses want to snuggle up like humans.

"Why on earth would you not be interested in what happens when octopuses take MDMA? As she explained, her team wanted to know if a reputable social drug could affect a known antisocial animal and, if so, what that could tell us about the universality of brain mechanisms.

"Octopuses do not cease to be antisocial for short periods during mating. But that said to me: maybe they have a brain infrastructure that allows them to be social, but it's just cut off most of the time. "

Scientists have chosen the octopus bimaculoides, commonly referred to as California's two-point octopus, for the study. They did it because it's the only octopus to have its genome fully sequenced. And while the bimaculoides octopus The overall sequence of the genome is roughly 60-70 percent to humans, the similarity between the individual genome that allows for changes in social behavior is close to a perfect match.

First, the researchers put the octopus in a tank, where they swam for 30 minutes. From one side of the tank was an octopus placed under a flowerpot in order to avoid any potential aggression. On the other side of the tank sat a toy. The octopuses were largely sedentary and spent most of their time with the toy.

The octopuses were then placed in a container containing liquefied MDMA for 10 minutes. Twenty minutes later, when the effects of the drug were expected, they put them back in the tank. They then spent much more time with the other octopus instead of the toy.

Scientists prefer to measure results in quantitative terms: goals, measurable things like time and space. But anecdotally, Assistant Professor Dölen said that octopuses were really high.

"Before MDMA, they were very reserved. They had their arms piled up. After the MDMA, they were very relaxed, they touched and put their mouths on everything, and they hugged the flowerpot with the octopus inside.

"They were in a puddle of hugs."

There is currently a revival of scientific studies on how psychedelic drugs affect humans. LSD, psylocibine and MDMA are currently under investigation to determine their effects on post-traumatic stress disorder. The recorded therapeutic effects are "really dramatic," said assistant professor Dölen, "far beyond therapy or antidepressants." But there is still work to be done to determine how far.

Assistant Professor Dölen said that she wanted to continue to study the mechanisms of MDMA and other drugs in animals.

"In terms of study, this has laid the foundation for other things we can do. It may now be possible to study the impact of psychiatric drug therapies and behavioral changes in other animals far removed from humans, not just the octopus. These results are preliminary and need to be replicated in other experiments, but what we found is very cool.

More genomes of animal species are sequenced each year. This progress allows scientists such as Assistant Professor Dölen to learn more about the timeliness of evolution.

"We can now compare the genomes of different species and calculate the probability of one type of change compared to another type of change," she said. "It helps us establish a timeline of when animals have diverged from one another and when different genes have diverged from each other. This is the perfect time to examine evolution issues with these tools in hand. "

Although most octopuses are generally antisocial, there is one species of octopus, the largest striped octopus in the Pacific, which has been confirmed as truly sympathetic. Assistant Professor Dölen said that Australia's east coast is home to another so-called social species, the octopus tetricus. "It's usually found in Sydney Bay," she said. "Some people have said that octopus is actually very social, but I'm not convinced yet."

This article originally appeared on VICE AU.