I knew there was something I forgot to reply to last week! Now that I'm here... I remember hearing about the octopus stealing the fish a while back, too. It is surprising enough to know that they can move out of water well enough to pull off this sort of heist, but there's definitely a lot of advanced thinking and planning going on here, too. As smart as we think dogs are, we never see them taking any sort of steps to cover up their crimes, do we? And yet this was an octopus planning a full-on heist and executing it successfully, repeatedly. That means it had to be able to see the fish in the other tanks, understand what they were, understand that it could only attempt this feat while there aren't any humans around, figure out how to open its lid from inside its tank, find its way to the other tanks, enter, take a fish, close the tank up afterwards, find its way back home and close its own tank back up--a lot of humans aren't even this smart!

I do need to give these guys, and aquatic races/species in general, more thought. The oceans are an aspect that I barely do much with even in my most developed fictional worlds. As the way I designed my alien cephalopod mixes the facial features of a cuttlefish with features of squid and octopi, I'm thinking there might be some bone or shell or other rigid structures present that help give them their shape--that might reduce their flexibility and capacity to squeeze into really tight spaces a bit, but I'll give that more thought later. The idea of decentralizing their brain and nervous system a bit sounds like it could have some potential as well, if they turn out to be an aggressive and war-like race I'm sure being able to survive injuries that would leave most brain-having critters a permanent vegetable at best would have some advantages!

Although, I am thinking these guys are going to be of the "enlightened and curious" variety, rather than the "aggressive and warlike" path one might expect. A decentralized brain might enable them to do a bit of internal "cloud computing" or think about complex ideas in one portion of their neural net while performing other complex tasks without the two distracting from each other, for example. This does also make me wonder what, if any, technology they might actually use, what sort of structures they may build and inhabit, and so on. There's a distinct potential that they don't worry about the "horizontal" and "vertical" planes the way we do, as being underwater would enable free movement in all three dimensions, and even being on land they might just be able to use their suction cups to move up a wall or wrap tentacles around rails installed for that specific purpose--assuming they wouldn't just fill any terrestrial structures they inhabit with water anyways... There's a lot of potential here and it's a good "leave it on the back-burner" sort of concept.

Of course, for them to be space-faring and even colonizing other worlds, they'd need spaceships, and now I do sorta like the idea of their spacecraft vaguely resembling squid...

That is an interesting read, I've wondered just what the point of sleep is sometimes myself. That's not to mean I don't enjoy it, of course!

That makes me wonder what they dream about, though...