Octopus. The ocean’s intelligent invertebrate.

This book, with its elegant appearance, including the wonderful cover picture showing the "intelligent" glance of the octopus, represents a nice and timely overview on the cognitive capabilities of this amazing cephalopod species. It is authored by Jennifer A. Mather, a leading scientist on animal personality, professor at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, where she teaches a variety of human and social psychology courses. The second author, Roland C. Anderson, is a Seattle-based biologist; while the last one, James B. Wood, is an outreach expert in a major aquarium and an accomplished underwater photographer. The relevance of this book for public health in general resides primarily in a major change occurring on these days in European legislation on the protection of animals used in experimental procedures. Following in fact a norm implemented in the UK already several years ago (the Animals Act Order 1993), the new Directive states in Article 1 (3b) that live cephalopods are among the animals falling within the scope of the Directive. This legislative step follows the awareness raised by cognitive experiments performed with octopus, which showed unexpected cognitive abilities (among these studies, we want to remember the studies by Graziano Fiorito at the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn, in Naples). Generally speaking, remarkable cognitive abilities are thought to be linked with the possibility of experiencing significant level of sufferance, including psychological suffering. These considerations have moved European politicians to embrace the British norm at European level. Therefore, experimenters willing to carry out studies on octopus, cuttlefish or squids will soon have to provide written justification to motivate their experiments, while veterinarians will have to evaluate psychophysical suffering of these molluscs. In sum, despite a few points where the narrative style resembles the one of a coffee-table book, this volume remains a nice contribution to a hot topic issue that has seen invertebrate species among sentient animal deserving special protection.