There’s a new 3-part documentary by James Cameron called Secrets of the Octopus (on Hulu and Disney+). Fascinating creatures, particularly their use of tools.

So, octopuses have a lot of disadvantages. Non-social, hard to keep in a lab, etc. They have one big advantage that shouldn't be overlooked however. No skulls. Are there any other intelligent animals without skulls that I'm overlooking? Anyway, one of the things that goes wrong when trying to make smarter mice (mice used more often than rats because they happen to be easier to genetically modify), is that when you upregulate brain cell growth genes you end up squishing their cortices into their skulls in a bad way, causing malformed gyri/sulci and disordered long-range connections or killing them outright. No trouble there with octopuses. Just stick the genes into a clutch of eggs (external eggs: another nice advantage) and <bam>, bigger brains. ❤

Velocity Bot loves this market.... too much.

@Duncan digital tentacles intensify

@stone Smart, sure. Raising 1000 of them 'in vitro' in your basement lab from time-of-egg-fertilization so that your 1% genetic modification success rate gives you a reasonable breeding population... uh, that's gonna get costly fast. Not impossible, but wouldn't be a first go-to for the pareto frontier of biohackers.

@MartinRandall Personally, I'd like to give a shot at re-dinosauring the Hoatzin. I think their wing-claws and gregarious nature makes them a good candidate for an interesting dinosaur. Expand the claws, give them bigger brains (throw in some parrot and dog genes), and some aligator skin... that'd be a cool animal to have in a giant greenhouse-enclosed jungle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoatzin

Hoatzins are gregarious and nest in small colonies, laying two or three eggs in a stick nest in a tree hanging over water in seasonally flooded forests. The chicks, which are fed on regurgitated fermented food, have another odd feature; they have two claws on each wing. Immediately on hatching, they can use these claws, and their oversized feet, to scramble around the tree branches without falling into the water.

...

This has inevitably led to comparisons to the fossil bird Archaeopteryx, but the characteristic is rather an autapomorphy, possibly caused by an atavism toward the dinosaurian finger claws, whose developmental genetics ("blueprint") presumably is still in the avian genome.

Greenhouse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ma0o8V3uJJY

@NathanHelmBurger I'm in!

@Normal_Anomaly 😭