The Most Sentient Creatures on Earth

Just a quick post before I jump into working on the interview book with Dude. We’ve been working on the interview book but we’ve veered way off course and I’ve been learning from Dude all about other creatures that he feels are as or more developed, more sentient than humans. I’m not sure but I may excise that section and stick it in the conversation book.

So just quickly, here’s a summary. He told me about 2 creatures in particular that fascinated me. An as yet undiscovered ant in the highlands of Venezuela and an as yet undiscovered giant cuttlefish (over 1 m) that lives in deep waters off Scandinavia and Japan – Alaska and smaller populations in deep water between Africa and India. The largest currently known cuttlefish is the Giant Cuttlefish which grows to 50 cm. I once found a dying one on Griffin Island in Port Fairy and it was the most alien creature I have ever seen and extraordinarily beautiful !

So here are a couple of incredible facts from Dude. The ant remembers everything from birth to death but when it remembers, it’s memory begins with remembering the constellation of it’s internal experiences and that brings forth the sensory memory. Think about that for a minute, that’s quite incredible ! That’s the opposite of how we function. It also has a colony memory that spans hundreds of generations. The cuttlefish has an abundance of defense mechanisms, including the ability to move up to 45/kmh and then change direction in an instant and accelerate to the same speed. It also has the ability to disrupt the visual system of any predator with a solvent it squirts out and it can emit a magnetic energy field that confuses predators. This particular cuttlefish has light sensitive photoreceptors all over it’s body and not just in it’s retina and an incredible double sectioned brain that contains some of the most diverse cell types and connections of any creature on earth. It has more brain cells connected to different kinds of brain cells and other cells in the body. This diversity is part of the reason that it has developed a high degree of sentience and a complex social system and complex mental states. The ant will be discovered in 2070 and the cuttlefish will be discovered in 2036 in deep waters between South Korea and Japan by researchers working with fishermen to document a number of oceanic variables and fish types for a Japanese fishing company. soon after it will receive global protection.

It’s exhilarating for me to have Dude present another perspective. He keeps reminding me that there are so many things that we don’t know about our own world and yet we obsess constantly about going into space. Dude maybe a diplomat but his real love is life and so I really enjoy when he tells me stories about the extraordinary diversity of life here and on other worlds.