Home News Life Daily news 20 September 2018 By Michael Le Page Octopuses given the drug ecstasy become far more social and try to hug other octopuses, a small study has found. The fact that octopuses respond in a similar manner to people suggests the molecular basis for social behaviour evolved more than 500 million years ago in our shared ancestor. Octopuses are normally solitary creatures. “During reproduction they are social for three minutes while they mate and then they go back to wanting to kill each other,” says Gul Dolen of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Maryland, who studies the neural basis for social behaviour. She set up aquaria divided into three chambers connected by open doorways. In the chamber on one side she placed an octopus inside a perforated plastic container. In the chamber on the other side an object was put in an identical container. In the central chamber, Dolen placed another octopus and allowed it to freely explore either side chamber for 30 minutes. Advertisement Eight-legged hug Normally the octopus allowed to explore did not spend much time in the chamber with the other octopus and touched it very cautiously, by extending a single arm towards it. But if it was placed in water containing dissolved ecstasy (MDMA) for 10 minutes before the experiment began, it spent much more time in the chamber with the other octopus and tried to “hug” it, wrapping its whole body around the container. “Right now in neuroscience there’s a really big focus on… [Read full story]
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