September 21, 2018 — The psychoactive drug known as ecstasy can make people feel extra loving toward others, and a study published Thursday suggests it has the same effect on octopuses.
Octopuses are almost entirely antisocial, except when they’re mating, and scientists who study them have to house them separately so they don’t kill or eat each other. However, octopuses given the drug known as MDMA (or ecstasy, E, Molly or a number of other slang terms) wanted to spend more time close to other octopuses and even hugged them.
“I was absolutely shocked that it had this effect,” says Judit Pungor, a neuroscientist at the University of Oregon who studies octopuses but wasn’t part of the research team.
The eight-legged invertebrates are separated from humans by more than 500 million years of evolution, Pungor says. Octopuses’ closest relatives are creatures like snails and slugs, and their brains have a host of strange structures that evolved on a completely different trajectory from the human path.
“They have this huge complex brain that they’ve built, that has absolutely no business acting like ours does — but here they show that it does,” says Pungor. “The fact that they induced this very sort of gentle, cuddly behavior is really pretty fascinating.”
The idea to test the drug’s effect in octopuses came from Gul Dolen, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University.