Good question, I hadn’t thought about that. Here’s the relevant passage from the book:
In the lab, however, [octopuses] are often quick to get the hang of how life works in their new circumstances. For example, it has long appeared that captive octopuses can recognize and behave differently toward individual human keepers. Stories of this kind have been coming out of different labs for years. Initially it all seemed anecdotal. In the same lab in New Zealand that had the “lights-out” problem [an octopus had consistently been squirting jets of water at the light fixtures to short circuit them], an octopus took a dislike to one member of the lab staff, for no obvious reason, and whenever that person passed by on the walkway behind the tank she received a jet of half a gallon of water in the back of her neck. Shelley Ddamo, of Dalhousie University, had one cuttlefish who reliably squirted streams of water at all new visitors to the lab, and not at people who were often around. In 2010, an experiment confirmed that giant Pacific octopuses can indeed recognize individual humans, and can do this even when the humans are wearing identical uniforms. (56)
On the one hand, if “stories of this kind have been coming out of different labs for years,” this suggests these may not exactly be isolated incidents (though of course it kind of depends on how many stories). On the other hand, the book only gives two concrete examples. I went back and checked the 2010 study as well. It looks like they studied 8 octopuses, 4 larger and 4 smaller (with one human always feeding and one human always being irritating towards each octopus), so that’s not exactly a whole lot of data; the most suggestive result, I’d say, is that on the last day, 7 of the 8 octopuses didn’t aim their funnels/water jets at their feeder, while 6⁄8 did aim them at their irritator. On the other hand, a different metric, respiration rate, was statistically significant in the 4 large octopuses but not the 4 smaller ones.
Also found a couple of other studies that may be relevant to varying degrees by looking up ones that cited the 2010 study, but haven’t had a chance to read them:
tl;dr: I’m not really sure. Most of the evidence seems to be anectodal, but the one study does suggest that most of them probably can to some degree, if you expect those 8 octopuses to be representative.
Good question, I hadn’t thought about that. Here’s the relevant passage from the book:
On the one hand, if “stories of this kind have been coming out of different labs for years,” this suggests these may not exactly be isolated incidents (though of course it kind of depends on how many stories). On the other hand, the book only gives two concrete examples. I went back and checked the 2010 study as well. It looks like they studied 8 octopuses, 4 larger and 4 smaller (with one human always feeding and one human always being irritating towards each octopus), so that’s not exactly a whole lot of data; the most suggestive result, I’d say, is that on the last day, 7 of the 8 octopuses didn’t aim their funnels/water jets at their feeder, while 6⁄8 did aim them at their irritator. On the other hand, a different metric, respiration rate, was statistically significant in the 4 large octopuses but not the 4 smaller ones.
Also found a couple of other studies that may be relevant to varying degrees by looking up ones that cited the 2010 study, but haven’t had a chance to read them:
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-007-7414-8_19 (talks about octopuses recognizing other octopuses)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0539018418785485
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0018710 (octopuses recognizing other octopuses)
tl;dr: I’m not really sure. Most of the evidence seems to be anectodal, but the one study does suggest that most of them probably can to some degree, if you expect those 8 octopuses to be representative.