Scientists Gave Octopuses MDMA
Tom Kleindinst/Marine Biological LaboratoryA California two-spot octopus at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass.
Researchers gave the party drug MDMA to octopuses in the name of science – and got some startling results.
In humans, the party drug MDMA changes a person’s perception and elicits a feeling of euphoria. The drug sends a wave of chemicals like serotonin and dopamine to a person’s brain, making them feel happier and extra loving towards others.
Scientists found that when octopuses are given MDMA, they react pretty much the same way humans would. This is surprising partly because octopuses are typically anti-social and solitary creatures, but while rolling, they completely transformed and became more outgoing and engaged with other octopuses.
The California two-spot octopus (Octopus bimaculoides) used in the study shares a nearly identical protein for signaling serotonin to brain cells with humans. The researchers wanted to test out this similarity to see if octopuses would have a comparable reaction.
“Just because they have the protein doesn’t mean that when MDMA binds to the protein it’s going to do anything like what it does in a human or a mouse,” Gul Dolen, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University who came up with the idea for the study, told NPR.
To conduct their study, researchers began by giving the octopuses high doses of MDMA to see if they would have a reaction to it at all. The octopuses reacted, but in a way that caused them to look “freaked out” and just “sit in the corner of the tank and stare at everything.”
So researchers decided to lower the dosage. They gave the octopuses roughly the amount that a human would take and saw a startling personality switch.
CBSI/CNETAn octopus in the wild.
Octopuses are so anti-social that they usually need to be kept in separate cages while scientists study them so that they don’t kill or eat one another. However, when octopuses on MDMA were put in the same enclosure, there was no bloodshed, just love.
The rolling octopuses approached their cagemate and spent a considerably longer amount of time together. They also reportedly engaged in nonaggressive exploratory touching. Basically, they gave each other the octopus version of a hug.
