Written by: Lacey Bishop-Schouster
Edited by: Courtney Myers
This piece was written in collaboration with the 2025 ComSciCon-MI Write-A-Thon.
When we think about intelligence in the animal kingdom, our minds often go straight to ourselves. Then maybe to apes cracking nuts with tools, dolphins playing games, or elephants who “never forget.”
However, there’s another group of animals that is often overlooked and should be included with these examples: the cephalopods. Cephalopods—octopuses, squids, cuttlefish, and nautiluses—are a class of mollusks distinguished by their soft bodies, tentacles, and ability to move by jet propulsion. Although they are invertebrates, they show some of the most complex behaviors on the planet. In fact, they have the largest brains of any invertebrates, and their path to intelligence looks nothing like ours.
Continue reading “Intelligence without a backbone”
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