Octopus vs Underwater Maze

this is my pet octopus

named sashimi and this is a vault filled with all her favorite food the

only problem is in order to get to this fault she'll have to rely

on her incredible intelligence

and dexterity to make it all the way through this nine-part

underwater obstacle course and just like when I made my backyard obstacle course for

squirrels out of the gate I will admit in hindsight

I completely underestimated the capabilities

of this remarkable creature but to understand how we even ended up at this

spot we need to go back in time 6 months when I decided to

get a pet octopus to see for myself

if they were really as smart as people say they are and after bringing

her home to Crunch labs and putting her into a saltwater

optimized and appropriately decorated

tank she made herself right at home and the first thing that stood out

is just how curious

they are for example when you put anything into the tank including your arm

they immediately swim towards it and just want to interact

and we'll cover this in a minute but beyond just being able to really

securely latch on to things like my hand she's so strong wrong

oh my God her suckers are also gathering

information about me like my smell

taste and color and so after just a few weeks given how playful she

is it's hard not to form a quick bond for example she loved to

go up and wave for tentacles

in the jet stream which I assume is the octopus equivalent of a dog

sticking its head out a car window she could play catch with us she

had a propensity for selfies

anytime she saw a camera and whenever we'd put a toy submersible

in her tank she would go full 20,000

Lees under to see and as I did more research I learned that for

the 100 million octopi

every year us humans put on a dinner plate or in a pet store

basically all are born

and originally raised in the ocean meaning they aren't bred in captivity

which is when I was hit with a startling realization

that essentially made me

the bad guy in Finding Nemo and since no one wants to be the

bad guy in Finding Nemo

as much as we'd already come to love Sashimi

here at crunch Labs I did some investigating

and found out from the pet store we got her from the exact spot

they pulled her out of the ocean the only problem with my plan of

returning her was she'd been hand-fed

now for quite some time so the idea was that if she could figure

out and remember how to solve an obstacle course maze then I would be

assured that she could figure out and remember

her early days hunting in the ocean

and we could send her back home with confidence phase one of the plan

was to give her some challenges

and then observe her behavior

to understand what capabilities

she actually had and as it turns out

it's a lot for starters

their ability to color and shape shift is unmatched

in the animal kingdom for example

Can you spot the octopus

hiding in plain sight

right here and the only thing more impressive than that is when you slow

it down and play it in reverse

to see just how quickly

and convincingly these changes

occur and it's not just camouflage

as a form of protection

they can also mimic the shape of larger more predatory

animals like eels and as Simi shows here and you can see here they've

even come up with some pretty creative ways to scoot

themselves around and on top of that there's stories from octopus

researchers where they will recognize and shoot shoot water at only one specific

person anytime they walk by the tank and they'll still recognize

that person even if they switch clothes with other people or there's other stories

where the octopus will repeatedly shoot water jets at the light switch to turn

off the lights in the room it's also not uncommon for them to escape

their tanks at night to better map out the room they're being stored in

or to even raid the other tanks for food only to return to their

tank in the morning like nothing ever happened

and after a month or two of observation

once we had really come to

understand each other we had all the data we needed to interface

too so after a lot of brainstorming

CAD 3D printing and laser cutting

we eventually landed here starting at the conclusion of the nine part obstacle course

with the Golden Vault

if she can figure out how to unscrew

the vault door well then she's earned the 3 lbs of her favorite food

shrimp contained therein and the reason we know it's her favorite food is because

over the course of a week we prepared an underwater seafood buffet with four

different food options and all four times we repeated the experiment

the aroma from the shrimp was consistently

the most irresistible but in order to earn that succulent reward she's got her

work cut out for her starting back at the beginning with challenge number one

the over under if she finds a way to get under this barrier through

these rocks well then she's got to find a way to get over this

barrier through these floating balls

and if she manages that then it's through the green circular

portal where she'll find herself face to face with this four panel revolving door

and if she works out how revolving doors work and makes it through the

next screen portal well then Sashimi

will basically be met by a wall

and at this point it's game over unless she correctly deduces

that by pushing this block out she can pass through the corter

and continue her journey upwards

to the ball drop and this is where things level up a notch because

dexterity becomes much more critical

in this case she has to grab this lever and rotate it in this

slot which will allow it to fall down with the balls trailing

behind clearing up the pathway upwards through the tube but then once she swims

up the tube she'll be trapped because the port hole out is blocked by

this Red Gate that is unless she figures out how to hit the emergency

exit button which will push this glass counterweight

ball down off the edge thereby by pulling the gate up and allowing entry

into perhaps my favorite obstacle

The Fish Out of Water

because here the only way for sashimi

to continue her progress would be to flex her ability to comfortably

live on land for up to an hour by crawling out of the water

up over and back down

on the other side where after passing through the portal she gets a bit

of a power up because on the back side of the snorkeling fat Gus

is a shrimp now this is a bit of a throwback

to the tourist trap on the squirrel maze where a strategically

placed snack led to a timely photo op but in in this case I

call it the Medusa

because the hope is that as she eats the shrimp with her beak on

the underside of where her legs all come together it will look like fat

Gus has eight braids

of beautiful flowing hair and now that she's feeling refreshed

Sashimi can hopefully finish strong strong with the penultimate

challenge which is sort of a double obstacle

because there are six holes in the top ranging from small to really small

and if she takes the easy route by squeezing through the least small hole

well then she has a lot more maze to deal with as opposed to

the smallest hole that puts her right at the Finish either way at this

point she's made it here here and if she solves the final puzzle by

unscrewing the vault door she's not only earned the all you can eat seafood

buffet but she's proven she's quick enough on her tentacles

to handle being returned back to her ocean home to the very tide pools

she was raised in so with everything in place all that was left to

do was open this ball valve and as the smell of fresh shrimp made

its way to her tank she made her way down the tube like an

eight-legged Gladiator to her saltwater

Coliseum so while we wait for her to make that 40c

Trek this is the perfect time to mention that if you want a Christmas

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now back to Sashimi

after making it into the main tank then sort of exploring

the borders of the maze for a bit she made her way inside

fairly quickly but then sort of just chill

like she really didn't

understand what she was supposed to do next

but since you can only ignore the ambrosial

smell of raw fresh shrimp for so long she eventually got curious and started

exploring and one of the first things we observed is that anytime she's in

a new environment she kind of maps things out by walking

around Gathering data with her arms as opposed to just swimming around freely through

the middle and soon enough

she had things figured out now mid's

first challenge was a bit of a softball

because having observed Sashimi in her home tank I knew she was good at

digging and burrowing herself

in the sand using the water propulsion

from her siphon tube to clear the Rocks away the floating balls were even

less of a challenge for her and after making it through you really get

a sense of how much she sends out her arms as Scouts

to gather critical information

especially in the wild they can reach their arms around

and in inside crevices

not only to smell and taste but as we'll cover in a minute even

see and independently think so obstacle one was pretty straightforward

but figuring out how to operate a revolving door would be a much

wow okay I see how this is going to be

this was my first real indicator

that we were headed for a real battle of wits

it was a similar feeling

to when the squirrels

eventually outsmarted my rope Bridge of instability

by just jumping over it all together

and I really should have seen this coming because as you can see in

this video of an octopus escaping from a ship as long as an opening

is bigger than their beak which is the only actual hard part of their

body then they can eventually

squeeze through it in fact if we roll that back you can see sashimi's

beak or mouth right here and while this part looks like a big nose

that's actually their main body where all their vital organs reside

like their brain stomach

gills kidneys inks saac

siphon and their three

hearts two other cool facts about octopi

is their blood is blue

because it's copper based since that's more efficient in cold low oxygen environments

and if they lose an arm they can regrow it completely

and it will look indistinguishable

from the original next up was the block push once again she got to

this point and was sort of stumped without an obvious path forward but this

is where their Natural

Curiosity pays off because she's not just feeling surfaces with her arms but also

constantly pulling and pushing to see what she can interact with and so sort

of by default she figured out this red part of the wall doesn't push

back as hard which cleared the way up to the ball drop and I

knew this one would be tough for her because number one there's not enough

room for her to just squeeze by and number two pushing and pulling on

walls wasn't going to solve it either and after struggling in vain to find

out what she was supposed to do for quite some time eventually she got

frustrated and just stopped

and sat there almost like she was processing

all the data she just gathered

and this was the moment I knew for sure

I was in over my head cuz while basically

maintaining eye contact with me as a flex

she reaches up with one arm and then twists the bar

which dislodges the ball

allowing her to clear them out

and move on and this feels like the perfect moment to tell you that

my absolute favorite fact about the octopus

is that they are truly the closest thing we have to intelligent

alien life on this planet

and here's what I mean by that this is a very simplified

version of a tree of life these kind of diagrams show you how all

life is related and what evolved from what how do we know this well

by being true scientific

detectives and looking for clues

for example a few hundred years ago scientists notied that us humans have seven

vertebrae in our necks but so do giraffes

but wait a sec so do whales

mice elephants Lions horses

and bats so that's a clue they all share a common ancestor

and belong to this group called mammals

and it's not just neckbones

watch what happens if you compare the arm bone configurations

of a human to a bat

to a chicken to a turtle

to a dolphin it's wild what tiny beneficial

mutations and millions of generations

can produce and of course with genome sequencing

developing over the last 40 years it's allowed us to compare the DNA of

different species and sort of check our answers in the back of the book

anyways using this techniques if you want to see where our lineage

broke off from that of octopi

in the tree of life you have to go back over half a billion

years ago to a simple

flat Worm but if you look closely

all of what we think of as the smart animals

are over here on this side of the tree of life including Dolphins

dogs pigs horses humans

but even birds dinosaurs

and fish and their intelligence

way of thinking are all related to each other sort of like those armb

bones I showed but octopi

developed their intelligence completely

independently from everything over here like an alien from another

planet and that's why they're built just so differently from us for example they

have twice as many neurons as a cat but unlike all the animals over

here where all the neurons are focused in the brain in octopi

only onethird of their neurons are in the brain and the rest are in

their arms which means they not only smell and taste but they can even

think and act independently

with their AR arms that means that even if their arm is cut off

the arm can still camouflage

itself to the surroundings

by sensing light it would be like closing your eyes walking into a room

touching a wall and having your hand match the color

Having Eight independent mini brains along with a larger Central brain

is as incomprehensible as alien

intelligence to us now back at the maze sushimi

had made it to the emergency

button putting her at the halfway mark and as usual she starts by having

her arms do all the Recon work and it's almost like once she feel

The Red Door she figures out my trick and then immediately

pushes the button to drop the ball

and open the gate to move on to my favorite obstacle

the fish out of water

and I was relieved to see that I had thrown her another curveball

because after quite a bit of exploratory

arm Expeditions she realizes

The Only Way Forward

is up and out

and so after psyching herself

up she just goes for it sliding

up over and eventually

down and this demonstrates

another octopus superpower because they could survive out of water for up to an

hour and as you can see here

sh I there's an octopus

aiding a crab it's one of the reasons there're such successful

hunters in and around tide pools and now that we're coming down the final

stretch I figured she deserved

a bit of a snack break with the Medusa

and just like I'd hoped once she saw the shrimp attached to the back

she starts chomping down with her beak and since that's right at the center

of all her legs we get a couple different hair options for for fat

Gus starting first with a more free flowing sandy blonde option which eventually morphed

into more of a darkhaired

updo now the reason she's able to change your appearance so drastically is because

all octopi have four tricks up their sleeve

first their skin is covered in tiny little sacks called chromatophores

filled with either black red or yellow pigment and then they use their muscles

to stretch those sacks like a balloon

to achieve any combination

of those three colors then they've got a layer below that called idap fores

that bounce back specific wavelengths

of light giving those iridescent

Blues like peacock or beetles

then there's even one more layer that reflects back ambient light called Lucifers

on top of all that they can also use a muscular structure called Papa

to change the texture of their skin creating ridges and bumps

and because they can change any of those in as little as 200 milliseconds

which is literally less than the blink of an eye it makes them the

true Masters of Disguise

in the animal kingdom

now she was on to the Maze and you can see she opted for

the largest hole which of course means she had the maximum amount of maze

ahead of her and I love this because it's sort of classic Sashimi

at this point but you can she's willing to play along for quite a

while and make just about every possible Wrong Turn along the way but then

eventually she's over it and just cuts right to the end and while that's

technically an automatic DQ

I took the high road and let it slide

which brought her to the Golden Vault

after a month or so of training on all the obstacles

she had finally done it and with a tide on her side

she went straight for the door ripped it off the foundation

and then immediately B

in the sweet delicious

Taste of a hard-earned victory

in the largest stockpile

of shrimp she'd ever scene and after letting her Gorge for a bit it

was time for me to uphold my end of the deal and give her

the Finding Nemo happy ending she deserved

by driving her 8 hours down the coast back to the exact Beach where

she was raised having figured out and remembered the solutions to all my dumb

puzzles I was convinced she could certainly figure out and remember what it was

like to hunt for her own food in the open ocean and this was

a Bittersweet moment because there's one octopus

fact I haven't mentioned

and that's that their entire lifespan

is only about 1 and 1/2 years and as a final act after laying

her eggs a female will continually

watch over and protect them to the point that she stops eating

and dies which meant in the exact same CES and tide pools that her

mother did for her soon sushimi

would be extending that everchanging

Tree of Life by One More generation

only perhaps this time creating a new branch

of super intelligent puzzle solving

Offspring with everything you know about Sashimi

at this point it should come as no surprise she also has incredible

taste in toys but we should also hopefully

surprise you after watching the videos I've been making on YouTube for 12 years

is that learning science and engineering

doesn't have to be sucky and boring

which is exactly why I started a toy company called crunch Labs with the

express goal of helping kids think like an engineer

through monthly toys that get delivered to your door where you put it together

with me and having already shipped millions of these boxes

the data is in 87%

of kids rated an 8 out of 10 on a fun scale out of

10 but here's the dirty secret more than three out of four parents said

their child gained a New Passion around stem and Engineering

from the boxes our secret sauce here just like on my videos

is hiding the vegetabl

so everyone leaves feeling stoked about the outcome

on top of that each month your box has a chance to contain the

Platinum ticket and if you get

it well then you're coming out here to Crunch labs to build with me

and my team for a day so if you want to embark on this

monthly Journey with me and get a Christmas morning reaction like this

yes oh my gosh crunch

laab just go to Crunch labs.com

or use the link in the video description where we're giving away those two

boxes free as a holiday

special thanks for watching