> It makes you wonder if that gland was artificially engineered into them.

There is a comment below by biztos imagining that if octopi lived longer, they would be the apex species that was failing to fight the climate change - in place of humans.

Made me think that maybe they were at one point, and then the octopus civilization itself decided to "solve the problem" by engineering a shorter time-to-live into their species and preventing intelligent behavior :)