Abstract

This study discusses the mimic octopus’ acts of imitation of a banded sea-snake as an antagonistic response to enemies from a cognitive-semiotic perspective. This mimicry model, which involves very close physical resemblance and highly precise enactment, displays goal-orientedness because the octopus only takes it on when encountering damselfish, a territorial species, and not other sea animals that the octopus has been shown to imitate, such as lionfish and flounders. Based on theoretical principles and analytic tools from Mitchell’s typology of deceptive acts, Zlatev’s Mimesis Hierarchy and Zlatev’s types and levels of consciousness, this research raises the possibility that T. mimicus exhibits the following attributes: bodily self-awareness; cognitive empathy, which builds upon deception and perspective-taking strategies to imagine or project itself into the place of the antagonist; and capability to reflectively reorganise the standard complete imitation pattern into a partial one in order to optimise its effect, based on conscious visual appraisal of the stimulus position. These capacities would place T. mimicus at the dyadic mimetic level on the Mimesis Hierarchy. For this reason, it is suggested that the name mimic octopus could be replaced by mimetic octopus.