Partners in crime

Its pretty well known groupers and octopuses are smart, what's not really well known is the fact both often hunt together in sophisticated fashion as seen by this amazing video.

As they recount in a study published in the journal Marine and Freshwater Behaviour and Physiology, the researchers even started to decipher some of the signals. When octopuses preceded the hunt with what Bayley and Rose called a “pounce” gesture, engulfing corals with their mantle and turning white, it was their fish partners who ate. When instead octopuses made a “groping” gesture, inserting tentacles into a crack or crevice, it was their turn to dine. “It was very much a give-and-take scenario,” Bayley said. Other gestures and skin-pattern signals remain uninterpreted. (Bayley and Rose did not observe octopuses “punching” their partners, as another team of researchers recently documented in the Red Sea.)

Asked to review the footage, Culum Brown, a behavioral ecologist at Maquarie University who specializes in fish intelligence, said “they are clearly communicating with one another.” Brown, who agrees that the hunts are planned, is curious how about how they’re initiated. Do octopuses give the go-ahead? Or fish? And how are partners chosen? Brown pointed to research on groupers cooperating with moray eels to hunt. Those fish select the most competent eels, demonstrating a collaborative sophistication once thought limited to humans and certain primates. He also noted that, while octopuses seemed to take the lead, the collaborations seen by Bayley and Rose demand quite a bit of intelligence from the fish as well.

Partners in crime indeed. :)