The Use Of Cephalopods In 'Civilization And Limpet' By Martin Wells

Cephalopods, such as limpets and octopuses, played a significant role to help us understand how animals build their own civilizations. Martin Wells, the author of “Civilization and Limpet”, provided a series of factors throughout the essay to guide the readers, also presented the core of how civilization works by the contrasting the human to the cephalopods. Wells first investigated about limpets, finding a probable answer to explain how limpets could return to the exact spot after several hours through the mucus tracking method. He then went in detail of how animals like other insects, birds, and octopuses, use different navigation methods to track and communicate. He went on and provided the readers with more informations about octopuses

Wells made a few focus points shifts during his process of explaining, so that the readers could find similarities throughout the essay. From the beginning of the essay, Wells discussed about the mucus tracking method of how limpets are able to return to its original location, but he suddenly shifted to what methods limpet do not use. It seemed pretty odd at first, especially later on when the readers encountered the exact same situation. Wells digged deep discussing about octopuses and how they were taught to pause through shocking. After having a good understanding of touch learning and octopuses, Wells jumped and focused on what the octopuses cannot discriminate using touch learning. The reason why he structured it this way is to show the similarities of what these cephalopods are bad at, and helped to understand and identify what disadvantages they have to struggle with. Disadvantage such as simply having the lack of joints could make them lose informations on what they are touching, which could potentially present as a danger to these soft-bodied

Wells stated,” Yet we are both here in our millions, and only one of us is bashing the ozone layer” (Wells 17). Wells brought up an interesting opinion for the readers to reflect on. As our technology becoming more advance, human are able to alter the surroundings to fit to our best needs, but not these soft-bodied animals. There are just as much of these cephalopods who are living in the ocean as the human who live on land, yet we single-sidedly creating harmful disadvantages for the cephalopods by polluting the planet. Wells referred the consequences of our actions as “bashing the ozone layer” to emphasize how impactful and critical our actions are endangering the Earth. We should look at limpets not only as a cephalopod, but also in the ways we are indirectly affecting them. In conclusion, “Civilization and the Limpet” by Martin Wells reminded us all about how our joints is the backbone to our way of process informations that hold up a civilization. At the same time, we have to also respect and recognize the cephalopods that do not have joints and still successfully living their lives. Wells presented a handful of informations, which I learned more than just limpets from this informative yet organized essay. Wells truly wanted the readers to comprehend and understand the importance of knowing what is one capable of doing, and improve from