GL's Mascot: Why an Octopus? 🐙

Our company name, Gill Learning, has its roots in our family name: Orgill. Somewhat unfortunately, though, Gill can be pronounced two different ways in English depending on its meaning: it can be pronounced with a hard g sound, as in "fish have gills"; or alternatively, it can be pronounced with a soft g sound, as in "Jack and Jill went up the hill". In both our family name and our company name, it is a hard-sounding g, but how best might we convey this? It’s certainly not obvious to newcomers. 🤔

Could we perhaps find a link to a famous Gill? A mathematician or a physicist, perhaps. As a forename, Gill is often short for Gilbert or William (likely from Quilliam, meaning son of William), although it is more commonly a surname. First name or surname aside, we couldn’t find many well-known Gills, either dead or alive! Our best option appeared to be the singer JB Gill, formerly of the British boyband JLS, and star of Strictly Come Dancing 2024. Even though Michael’s guilty pleasure is Strictly (the new season starts just next week at the time of writing!), and despite JB’s smooth baritone voice, we didn’t feel that he was quite the right fit for our company, and thus he couldn’t help to solve our pronunciation dilemma.

Instead, in the end, we decided that we needed a mascot - one with gills! And we fell in love with the octopus.

These bizarre creatures have been around for hundreds of millions of years (long before the dinosaurs), and their unique anatomy has inspired countless monsters, from the sailor-eating Kraken of Nordic legends, to modern monsters and villains, too. Disney’s sea witch Ursula and Spider-Man’s mentor turned nemesis Doctor Octopus surely spring to mind.

But octopuses are far from being monsters of the deep themselves. Written off by the Greek philosopher Aristotle as "stupid creatures", they are in fact remarkably intelligent. With some 300 species, weighing in from as little as 1g all the way up to a sizeable 70kg, they have big brains relative to their size (a rough guide to any creature’s intelligence), and are genuinely able to figure things out.

Indeed, octopuses can…

• navigate mazes

• solve problems

• remember solutions

• learn by observing the behaviour of others

• use tools - small individuals of the common blanket octopus have even been observed to carry tentacles from the Portuguese Man O'War as a weapon!

House-building day, Step 1: collect up sea shells. Photo credit: Serge Underwater Photography.

Research has shown that individual octopuses have distinct personalities, and in common with other intelligent species, they also do things just for fun, such as dismantling objects, and even playing catch by squirting jets of water at a floating bottle.

They’re smart cookies in ways both similar to, and very different from, ourselves as humans. Two-thirds of an octopus' neurons reside inside its tentacles, not its head, and they are often thought of as having nine brains (and about as many neurons as a dog). As a result, one tentacle can independently figure out how to crack open a shellfish all on its own, while the octopus itself is busy doing something else, like checking out a rockpile for more edible crustaceans.

These soft, squishy creatures have big eyes, large optical lobes, areas of the brain dedicated to vision, and appear to be able to recognise individuals outside of their own species, including us. We confess, though, that despite those big eyes, octopuses cannot rival the cuteness of a kitten!

In the deep oceans, where there is so little light, looks matter not!

As well as nine brains, octopuses also have three hearts, trumping Dr. Who's measly two hearts. Two of their hearts work exclusively to pump blood through the octopus' gills, where the blood releases carbon dioxide and gains oxygen, much like in the alveoli of a mammalian lung - some GCSE Biology for you there. The third heart circulates that oxygen-rich blood to the organs and the muscles. This third heart actually stops beating (!) when the octopus swims, explaining the species' penchant for crawling rather than swimming, which it consequently finds rather exhausting. Can you imagine if your heart stopped beating every time you ran? 🏃‍➡️ 🏊

As if they weren't already cool enough, to top it all off, octopuses have alien-like blue blood. To survive in the deep oceans, octopus blood is powered by a copper-containing protein called haemocyanin, instead of the more common, iron-based haemoglobin found in human blood, which turns red when bound to oxygen. When octopus blood becomes de-oxygenated, the blue colour fades altogether, and the blood appears colourless - so their veins then appear empty! Haemocyanin is a bigger protein than haemoglobin and transports oxygen more efficiently in the cold, low-oxygen environments inhabited by octopuses.

Hopefully by now, you can see that the octopus has plenty of symbolic attributes which make it a great mascot for us here at Gill Learning. As we continued our reading and our research, we were certainly pretty convinced by this stage…

But frankly, we can pinpoint the exact moment when we knew that we’d solved our dilemma for certain: it was when we found the mimic octopus. Given our well-established Mimic-to-Thinker pedagogy (yet another word featuring both the hard and the soft g sound), this find was just too good to turn down. While many octopuses can change the colour and the texture of their skin to camouflage themselves very effectively, the mimic octopus has the unique ability to actually mimic other species. In order to deter predators, they impersonate:

• lionfish

• flatfish

• mantis shrimp

• sea snakes

• sea horses

• jellyfish

• stingrays

And they do a mighty fine job of it, too!

The Mimic Octopus impersonating a plethora of other ocean-dwelling creatures.

We felt a synergy with this three-hearted, nine-brained creature that...

• has the tenacity and intrigue to fathom things out

• has the ability to complete a side problem at the same time as remaining focused on the main task at hand

• is a mimic, when the challenge dictates, but is first and foremost a thinker

• has two gills, each with their own dedicated heart

• has the mathematical-sounding classification of an octopod

The humble octopus, then, had suckered us in (pardon the pun!) - we had found our mascot.

Nine brains; three hearts; eight tentacles; and too many suckers to count.

So, we put on our creative hats and conjured up our very own Oleander the Octopus.

Oleander the Octopus - chilling at the beach!

But is she just a bit too cute?

Let us know in the comments. Does she stay, or does she go?

---