Octopuses in captivity demonstrate impressive learning abilities and show welfare benefits from environmental enrichment that challenges the assumption that invertebrates have simple inner lives.
The learning capacity and apparent emotional complexity of octopuses have welfare implications for how they are housed in research and public aquaria. Octopuses denied environmental complexity show boredom behaviors and sometimes escape attempts. Enrichment programs providing novel objects, prey to hunt, and textured environments reduce these behaviors and improve welfare outcomes. Given the growing evidence for octopus cognition, housing standards that provide cognitive stimulation are increasingly considered a welfare requirement rather than an optional enhancement.