From Clever Octopus Caught with Tentacle in Shrimp Jar:
A common octopus in a German zoo has learned to open jars of shrimp by watching zoo attendants perform the act underwater.
I’ve heard of this before. Evidently, not all invertebrates are slugs. An on-line review of The Octopus and the Orangutan cites some more examples:
In addition to running vertical mazes with ease, learning by observation to choose a red ball over a white one, figuring out creative ways of accessing the meat in mussels and clams sealed by researchers, Octos have often stunned owners and aquarium curators with unexpected bursts of creativity. This includes escaping from “maximum security” tanks, crawling out on perfectly-timed “raids” on tanks of crustaceans, sliding bolts on tank covers open by extending arms through airholes, jetting water (for some inexplicable reason) at redheaded women, and in one remarkable instance even “telling” a teuthologist in no uncertain terms what it thought of being fed slightly stale shrimp!
Who needs to fabricate sci-fi creatures when we’ve already got an intelligent mollusk that can change colors almost instantly, regrow lost limbs, and spray ink as an underwater smoke screen? Frankly, they don’t quite seem of this earth — especially if you’ve ever seen one crawl across the beach out of the water.