- Scientists have been giving a lonesome California two-spot octopus MDMA to see if it would become more sociable.
- Scientists wanted to know whether invertebrate and vertebrate neurotransmitter systems still share some similarities after hundreds of millions of years of evolution.
- While on MDMA, the males became particularly interested in other females but the team noticed they also engaged more with other males too.
Scientists have been giving a lonely octopus MDMA to see if it became more sociable — and it worked.
In a study, Gul Dolen of Johns Hopkins University chose to give Octopus bimaculoides a dose of ecstasy not because it would be fun, but because it's possible to breed and study their behaviour in the lab.
It's also the only octopus to have its genome fully sequenced, allowing the team to make comparisons between the genes in octopuses and humans.
And there was a question to be answered about whether ancient neurotransmitter systems — octopus and human lineages are separated by more than 500 million years of evolution — are still shared across vertebrate and invertebrate species.
Octopus bimaculoides— the California two-spot octopus — lives mostly alone in caves off the southern Californian coast. They only pair off once to breed, then die.
But given a dose of presumably high-quality lab MDMA, the research team found that it responded in much the same way as humans would — by "becoming much more interested than usual in engaging with one other".
The males became particularly interested in other females, but the team noticed they also engaged with other males while on the drug, including "extensive ventral surface contact".
"That unusual physical contact between individuals appeared exploratory, not aggressive, in nature," the team wrote in the report published in Current Biology.
To ensure that it was only other octopuses that the creature was more interested in after taking the drug, they tested their reactions to everyday objects such as:
- a plastic orchid pot with red weight
- a plastic bottle with green weight
- a Galactic Heroes Stormtrooper figurine, and
- a Galactic Heroes Chewbacca figurine
The findings show that despite being evolutionarily distant from octopuses, humans share a common evolutionary heritage that enables serotonin — the part of MDMA that produces "feelings of emotional closeness and euphoria"— to encode social behaviors.
"Despite anatomical differences between the octopus and human brain, we've shown that there are molecular similarities in the serotonin transporter gene," says Gul Dolen of Johns Hopkins University.
"These molecular similarities are sufficient to enable MDMA to induce prosocial behaviors in octopuses."
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