Octopuses in a Dartmouth lab learned to use mirrors to locate food hidden behind them — a skill previously seen only in vertebrates, quietly narrowing the gap between us and an animal that split from our lineage half a billion years ago

Octopuses in a Dartmouth lab learned to use mirrors to locate food hidden behind them — a skill previously seen only in vertebrates, quietly narrowing the gap between us and an animal that split from our lineage half a billion years ago

The mirror part is what makes the story memorable. An octopus sees food in a reflection, does not simply attack the glass, and learns to move through the tank toward the real location of the food it cannot directly see. That is not the same as saying the octopus recognised itself in the mirror. The Dartmouth work described in public reporting is more specific and, in some ways, more interesting: octopuses in Peter Tse’s lab were reported to lear…