OCTORGY? –
Feb. 21, 2026 – The study was originally published in the journal Current Biology, and examined how the recreational drug impacted on the sociability of the animals.
MDMA, also known as ecstasy, is a stimulant which is illegal in many countries, but is still hugely popular … The study looked at California two-spot octopuses, which are normally not a particularly social species, and put two of them in a tank together at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
In the tank, one octopus was under a mesh pot which meant that the two could touch and interact, but would not be able to hurt each other.
With the sober octopuses, the free octopus typically spent most of their time on the opposite side of the tank to the one under the pot, which is what the researchers were expecting.
But when they were placed in a tank containing dissolved MDMA, their behaviour saw a marked change.
