Last week HuffPost UK reported on a great feat of scientific endeavour – in which octopuses were found to be “more friendly” when exposed to the party drug MDMA.
But animal welfare campaign group PETA has slammed the octopus experiment by the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in the US as “nonsense”.
A spokesman told HuffPost UK: “These experiments are indefensible, curiosity-driven nonsense that only benefit the experimenters who make a living from them – and from ignoring what we already know about awe-inspiring octopuses.
“Octopuses are capable of complex thought processes, can use tools, and are particularly sensitive to pain, having nerve receptors distributed throughout their bodies. These clever cephalopods also have well-developed cognitive abilities, amazing memories, and the capacity to solve puzzles and live in multifaceted environments – a far cry from the bright lights of a laboratory tank.
“To drug these highly intelligent animals and then make sweeping statements about developing medical treatments for human-based disorders by testing on species that are so far removed along the evolutionary line from humans is absurd – especially as octopuses don’t suffer from autism.”
The experiment in question showed octopuses became distinctly more sociable when exposed to MDMA, which according to researchers indicates an evolutionary link between social behaviours of the eight-limbed molluscs and humans.
The PETA spokeswoman, scientist Julia Baines Ph.D., called the ethical considerations of ‘drugging’ octopuses into doubt.
“Finding distant ancestral links to other animals does not excuse drugging them. Animals are not earlier forms of humans, and experiments on animals for autism and other conditions have been a dismal failure,” she said.
“The best way to understand and treat human disorders is to study humans, but that would be inconvenient and could require more training than these experimenters have.”
The experiment took place with three connected water chambers; one empty, one with a plastic action figure under a cage and one with a female or male laboratory-bred octopus under a cage.
Four male and female octopuses were exposed to MDMA by putting them into a beaker containing a liquefied version of the drug, which is absorbed by the octopuses through their gills.
“The brains of octopuses are more similar to those of snails than humans, but our studies add to evidence that they can exhibit some of the same behaviours that we can,” said Gül Dölen, assistant professor of neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the lead investigator conducting the experiments.