RESUMO
Welfare metrics have been established for octopuses in the laboratory, but not for octopuses living in the wild. Wild octopuses are constantly exposed to potentially harmful situations, and the ability to assess the welfare status of wild octopuses could provide pertinent information about individuals' health and species' resilience to stressors. Here, we used underwater photos and videos to identify injuries and stress-related behaviors in wild Octopus insularis in a variety of contexts, including interacting with fishermen, interacting with other octopuses and fish, proximity to predators, in den, foraging, and in senescence. We adapted established metrics of octopus welfare from the laboratory to these wild octopuses. In addition to observing all of the stress measures, we also identified two previously unknown measures associated with decreased welfare: (1) a half white eye flash and (2) a half-and-half blotch body pattern. More than half of the individuals analyzed had arm loss, and almost half of the individuals had skin injuries. We also observed that irregular chromatophore expression and abnormal motor coordination were associated with interactions with fishermen. This is the first study to apply measures of welfare from the laboratory to wild octopuses. Our results may also aid in the identification of welfare measures for other wild invertebrates.
RESUMO
The current global threat brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic has led to widespread social isolation, posing new challenges in dealing with metal suffering related to social distancing, and in quickly learning new social habits intended to prevent contagion. Neuroscience and psychology agree that dreaming helps people to cope with negative emotions and to learn from experience, but can dreaming effectively reveal mental suffering and changes in social behavior? To address this question, we applied natural language processing tools to study 239 dream reports by 67 individuals, made either before the Covid-19 outbreak or during the months of March and April, 2020, when lockdown was imposed in Brazil following the WHO's declaration of the pandemic. Pandemic dreams showed a higher proportion of anger and sadness words, and higher average semantic similarities to the terms "contamination" and "cleanness". These features seem to be associated with mental suffering linked to social isolation, as they explained 40% of the variance in the PANSS negative subscale related to socialization (p = 0.0088). These results corroborate the hypothesis that pandemic dreams reflect mental suffering, fear of contagion, and important changes in daily habits that directly impact socialization.
