Octopuses trip on ecstasy the same way we do

Gül Dölen and Eric Edsinger are probably the only people in the world who've watched an octopus have a bad ecstasy trip. "The first couple of animals we tried, we gave them way, way, way too much," says Dölen, a neuroscientist at John Hopkins University, "because I thought, 'well, if it's going to work it's probably going to need monster doses to see anything.'" The masters of disguise sent waves of color rippling down their arms, blanched white, and changed their breathing patterns. Suspecting that the ecstasy--also known as MDMA--was overwhelming the animals, Dölen and Edsinger, a marine biologist at the University of Chicago, dialed down the dosage. Three test trials later, they settled on one one-thousandth of the original as a reasonable amount.