I get the comparison, but personally I think it only works if we found tool-using behavior in aquatic species that shows they are actively modifying their environment to improve their survivability, so that they can have some meaningful basis for judging us as like them. Such as dolphins using agriculture. Otherwise we're just part of the freak show up where there is more light and less pressure.

Octopuses have been observed using tools, and we're very quickly determining that they are extremely intelligent. If they had longer lifespans and weren't solitary, who knows what they may have become.

Given that they breed fast, I'm a bit surprised nobody has tried to breed sociable octopuses.

I think there have been a few instances where they found enough octopi clustered that they were shown to be sociable. This article is about the Octopi cities https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/octopus-city-obser...

Not that sociable: http://metazoan.net/55-octlantis-media/

> Octlantis is not in any sense a city. It is not a cooperatively built and maintained structure, designed to allow many individuals to live in close quarters. It is an unusually dense collection of individual dens, most of them dug into a bed of scallop shells.

" actively modifying their environment to improve their survivability"

does a hermit crab count?

No more than bees making a beehive.