“It was hard not to laugh underwater and flood your [scuba] mask,” says biologist Mark Norman who, together with fellow researchers from Melbourne’s Museum Victoria, photographed an octopus crawling along the ocean floor off the coast of Indonesia with two coconut shell halves suctioned to its underside.

After finishing its journey, the octopus reassembled the coconut and squeezed itself into its homemade and very well camouflaged hiding spot.

The Australian research team also encountered 20 veined octopuses carrying coconut shells nearly twice as big as their 8 cm bodies.

Using tools is generally regarded as a sign of mental sophistication and octopuses are considered to be among the most ingenious creatures on the planet. They are the only invertebrates which have been conclusively shown to use tools, and research involving maze and problem-solving tasks has unveiled that they have both short- and long term memory.

When kept in captivity, octopuses often manage to sneak out of their tanks, e.g. to get to a nearby aquarium and devour its inhabitants at night. They are also known to board fishing boats in search of food and can open up holds to get to the cargo.

Their restricted lifespans limit the amount they can ultimately learn; some species live for at little as six months while others are known to reach an age of five years in ideal conditions. The males die within a few months after mating and the females pass away shortly after seeing their eggs hatch.

In some countries, octopuses are afforded legal protection not extended to other invertebrates and it may for instance be illegal for researchers to perform surgery on them without anaesthesia.

After acknowledging the failure of current fishery policies within the union, EU officials are now considering banning the practice of discarding fish at sea.

“What’s the point of setting a quota if fishermen aren’t accountable for the fish they actually catch?” says Mogens Schou, a Danish fishery official.

The EU’s quotas limit the size of the annual catch that countries and their fleets can sell on their return to harbour, but instead of protecting remaining fishing populations from depletion, the system is making fishermen dump lower-value fish at sea to maximize profit. According to officials in the European Commission’s fisheries office, most of these fishes do not survive.

“To stay under their quotas, and make more money, fishermen discard half of what they catch,” says Schou, “They ‘high-grade’ – in other words, only keep the most profitable fish.”

Last month, an EU report was released highlighting the failure of current EU fishing regulations by showing that 88% of fish species in EU waters are being fished out faster than they can reproduce. In response to the report, fishery ministers from the 27 EU nations are currently discussing how to protect the remaining fish stocks from complete eradication.

As a part of these talks, Denmark has proposed an amended quota system where fishermen and their countries are held accountable for the amount of fish caught rather than the amount returned to port. To make it harder for fishing fleets to cheat, Denmark is also proposing that fishermen voluntarily equip their boats with on-board cameras. In exchange, the fishermen would get bigger quotas.

Denmark has already designed a surveillance kit consisting of four cameras, a GPS (Global Positioning System) device, and sensors that notice when fish is being hauled or dumped. The Danish kits are currently being used on six fishing boats with Danish officials monitoring the footage.

Danish fisherman Per Nielsen installed the kit on his trawler Kingfisher in September and believes it to be a good investment. The kit cost roughly 10,000 USD, but Nielsen was compensated by being allowed to catch several extra tens of thousands of dollars worth of cod.

As of now, EU fishermen throw overboard an estimated 50% of the fish they catch and did for instance dump 38% of the 24,000 tons of cod they caught last year, according to the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea.