The Soul of an Octopus Page 11

  We’ve been together like this for only about three minutes when Kali looses a water bomb. We all feel it, but Anna is hit directly in the face. She’s soaked. Freezing salt water drips from her dark hair and from the tip of her nose. A full second later, Anna yells: “AAAHHH!”

  It takes a moment for us to understand what has happened. At first, we assume her yell is a delayed reaction to the soaking. But then we see that three of Kali’s arms have closed like a Venus flytrap around Anna’s left arm. We rush to peel the suckers away, each cup making a loud pop as the suction is broken. Anna steps back from the tank, with impressive calm, to examine her left hand. Just at the lowest joint of the thumb there are two dents bearing the imprint of Kali’s upper and lower mandibles.

  Marion helps her rinse off the wound at the sink. Though the skin is broken, no blood yet wells from the punctures. But this may be because of Anna’s low blood pressure.

  Anna is not in pain, nor is she frightened. But the rest of us are alarmed. Christa, hearing the commotion from the hallway, rushes in, and helps Wilson and me as we try to stuff the octopus back in her tank to put the lid on. It’s not an easy job. As soon as Kali sees the lid coming, she starts scrambling out, rising over the top like the foaming head on a beer. Her arms grip the lip and sides of the barrel as fast as our six hands can peel her suckers away. I feel bad about ending our interaction so soon; this is certainly the most interesting part of Kali’s day, and it seems clear she doesn’t want it to end.

  But we need to attend to Anna. Almost instantly, two of the aquarium’s team of first aid workers appear at her side. They were on the floor when the bite happened. Now Anna is nervous. She doesn’t want this to turn into a big deal; she doesn’t want to get in trouble. Most of all, she doesn’t want to be banned from interacting with Kali.

  The first aid responders are worried. Even though the wound is tiny, less dramatic-looking than a nip from a parakeet, this is an octopus bite, and there hasn’t been an instance of this in nearly a decade, since Guinevere bit Bill. “Do you feel dizzy?” they ask Anna. Though the giant Pacific’s is among the least toxic octopus venom to humans, still, envenomated wounds can take many weeks to heal; plus there is the possibility of an allergic reaction, like some people have to bee stings. “Do you have a burning sensation?” they ask. Anna does not. Soon it’s clear that, although Kali could have chosen to chomp down and inject venom, instead she merely gave Anna a little pinch. Anna is fine.

  Yet Wilson is horrified. “She is being aggressive!” he says in astonishment. “I’ve had hundreds of interactions with octopus. My granddaughter interacted with an octopus when she was just three years old!” And Kali is one of the sweetest, most outgoing octopuses he has known, the octopus who has interacted with humans far more frequently than any of her predecessors.

  What was going on? Might Kali have mistaken Anna’s hand for a fish? Such an error is unlikely. Even our clumsy fingers, bereft of chemoreceptors, can tell the difference between a person’s skin and a fish’s slime-covered scales. Did Kali bite Anna randomly? She could have bitten any of us just as easily; all our hands were in the tank. But with her funnel’s perfect aim, she purposely targeted Anna’s face, right before biting her. The bite was intended for Anna and Anna alone. Why would she nip this gentle, smart, loving, experienced teen?

  I wonder if it’s because of Anna’s tremor. Kali had squirted Danny, too, when he was shaking. But more likely, I wonder about Anna’s medication. She’s on several different meds, and her doctors change these frequently. Perhaps Kali could taste them, and the switch confused her. Maybe Anna doesn’t taste like her usual self today. And in fact, Anna tells me, her doctors did recently change a prescription.

  We head for an early lunch, to reassure Anna she’s done nothing wrong. We trade stories about various species that have bitten us. The anaconda, Kathleen, bit Scott when he was holding her for an X-ray. (No reptile likes contact with a cold metal table.) I had been the toast of my aerobics class at home when I turned up with a bandage on my hand, whose origin was a bite from an arowana, a predatory Amazon fish who had leapt from out of the water of its tank to bite me when I was feeding it behind the scenes. Anna had already been bitten by a remarkable number of animals—including a piranha (whom she was removing from a hook on a trip to Brazil with Scott’s sustainable fisheries organization), a small shark at the aquarium, and, more surprisingly, a chicken. She seems rather pleased to add octopus to her list.

  “There’s a certain thrill to being bitten,” says Christa. This might not be true for most people, but those of us gathered at our lunch table agree: Being bitten is an intimate interaction—and often, especially with marine creatures, one that carries no malice. Even “attacks” on humans by great white sharks are thought to be exploratory, not predatory. This might well have been the case with Kali and Anna.

  Behind the scenes in the Freshwater Gallery, one of the young volunteers has drawn a cartoon of an electric eel in black magic marker on the wall, with a thunderbolt emanating from the head and the words Have you tried it? And yes, I, too, experienced the thrill of 600 volts coursing from Thor, the electric eel behind the scenes (the one on display is named Mittens), through my skin when I purposely touched the soft, slippery back of his head. (“Use your right hand,” Scott advised me jokingly, “since the left is closer to your heart.”) It feels like putting your finger in an electrical outlet. Being shocked by the electric eel is sort of an initiation into an exclusive club.

  Some of this is just plain fish-nerd machismo. Still, most bites are accidents, and we all know most accidents happen when you’re being lazy or sloppy, which is nothing to be proud of. Yet a bite is proof of a kind of contact that—even when it goes wrong—at a time when most people are increasingly isolated from the natural world, we are privileged to experience. Though the denizens of the aquarium live in captivity, they are still, at heart, wild animals. A bite from a fish or an octopus is proof we are willing, even eager, to literally give ourselves (even tiny, actual pieces) to the animals here, in order to touch the wild.

  During the summer of Octavia’s eggs, I find transformation everywhere I look.

  Octopuses are masters of change. One day, I find Octavia white as a sheet—a color I have only seen on her in patches before. White is the color to which an octopus increasingly reverts when it gets older, as the muscles controlling the color-producing chromatophores lose tone with age. Another day, I find that the tip of Octavia’s third right arm, R3, is missing. Was this always the case and yet none of us, mesmerized by all those arms, always in motion, ever noticed before? Julie Kalupa, a diver and medical student at the University of Wisconsin, writes that a giant Pacific octopus can regenerate up to one third of a lost arm in as little as six weeks. Unlike a lizard’s regenerated tail, which is invariably of poorer quality than the original, the regrown arm of an octopus is as good as new, complete with nerves, muscles, chromatophores, and perfect, virgin suckers. Even the specialized arm of the male, the ligula, can be regrown (though this reportedly takes a while longer).

  Kali, too, continues to astound. One day, we discover she is training us. Christa, Marion, and Anna join Wilson and me as he unscrews the lid of her barrel. Kali is already at the top, reddish brown, looking at us with curious, animated eyes. The moment the lid is off, two arms, three arms, five arms, then her whole body comes heaving out of the tank. Her suckers are eager to grab us and anything else she can reach. We gently detach her suckers from the outside of the barrel, hoping she will be content to play with us instead of trying to escape. Her twisting arms explore our hands for a moment, but then she sinks and flips upside down, like a frustrated child flops down for a tantrum. Then she floats up, suckers first, hovers at the top for a moment—and then, like an upside-down umbrella opening, expands her body. Before we can see her funnel swing and aim at us, she lets loose a torrent.

  We women see our pants and shoes are wet, but it’s only Wilson—the person she likes the best, the person w
ho usually hands her the first fish of the day—who is roundly hosed. “That was meant for me,” says Wilson, his face dripping. “She is going to be a handful!”

  Why did she squirt this time? Is she annoyed we pushed her back in her tank when she wanted to explore? Is she playing?

  I sense it’s something else. I suspect she is holding us up for capelin at gunpoint—a squirt gun, that is. “I think she wants you to give her a fish,” I suggest, “and she wants it first thing.”

  The dish of fish is only an octopus-arm’s length away from her barrel, and Wilson grabs a capelin. He hands it to the suckers of one of her arms. Then Christa places a second fish in the pillowy, white cups of another arm. Instantly Kali becomes exceptionally calm. Lying upside down at the surface, arms splayed, she gives us an extraordinary view of her shiny, black beak. This is the first time even Wilson has seen the beak inside a living octopus. It is a private and trusting moment, her sharing with us this surprising part of her, normally hidden inside at the confluence of her arms. We watch the first fish pass from one sucker to another, tail first. The three-inch capelin disappears in ten seconds. The second fish is eaten a bit more slowly. Its pink innards squish out from the chewing motion of Kali’s beak, but then the fish slides slowly inside her . . . the silvery eye, and then the top of the head, gone.

  After that, we always greet Kali immediately with a fish or squid. The hosing stops for the entire summer.

  Kali now gets many visitors these days besides us—perhaps too many, Wilson worries. He fears she may be overstimulated and closes the lid on the barrel.

  At times like this, after Kali has been fed, when the front of Octavia’s tank is too crowded for me to observe her, and there’s nothing pressing going on in Cold Marine or Freshwater, Anna, Christa, and I cruise the other tanks of the aquarium, roaming like girls window-shopping downtown. But to us, each tank is more like a station of the cross, a site for a series of devotions. Here we are sanctified, baptized over and over by the beauty and strangeness of the ocean.

  In the tank two down from Octavia’s, a 60-foot-long veil of gossamer, studded with pearls and diamonds, floats at the surface above the flattish, three-foot-long goosefish, an animal the color and texture of bottom detritus, whose large mouth bears long, sharp, backward-curving teeth. The veil came from her body. The diamonds are air bubbles, and the pearls are her eggs. It is such a delicate and pristine object, more beautiful than any wedding dress train, yet issued from such an unlikely creature. It reminds me of the angelic voice of Susan Boyle, the dowdy, unemployed forty-seven-year-old who first appeared on the stage of Britain’s Got Talent in 2009, and wowed the world with her singing.

  Bill has known this goosefish for nine years, and he knew she was pregnant. This past weekend, he had led a group of teens on a camping expedition. The weekend was long and challenging. Nonetheless, he came in Sunday night to check on the pregnant goosefish. “I was getting nervous,” he tells us, “because she was just massive.” The goosefish before this one had grown to twice this one’s size and had to be shipped to a larger tank in Quebec. Birthing her egg veil had caused a prolapse, and she’d needed surgery to repair it. The next year, her egg veil had gotten stuck inside her, like a human baby in breech position, and the vet performed a second surgery to remove it. The next year, she produced yet a third egg veil, and the vet removed both her ovaries. That tough old goosefish survived all three surgeries, but Bill wanted to spare this younger one such an ordeal.

  “She was very uncomfortable,” Bill said. “She looked like she’d swallowed a basketball. She couldn’t even rest on the bottom.” He was relieved when he came in the previous night to check on her again—and found her eggs floating in the dark water like the Milky Way in the night sky. Like Octavia’s, these eggs are also infertile. But that does not diminish their unlikely provenance or their breathtaking beauty.

  Everywhere, impossible changes unfold before our eyes. In the leafy sea dragon tank, the male gives birth to the babies, who come shooting out of a belly pouch that is like an opossum’s. Among the corals of the Giant Ocean Tank, a species of fish called the bird wrasse starts out life as a black or brown female, then turns into a male. The commonest of sea creatures are miracles. Take the jellyfish. Many are born here; from eggs and sperm, they begin life as plankton, then turn into brown blobs and settle on rocks or docks, as polyps. They start out looking like something you’d scrape off the bottom of your shoe, then grow into something more beautiful than an angel.

  “In the ocean, it seems that anything is possible,” I comment one day as Christa and Anna and I stand watching the rays and turtles sweep past us in the GOT.

  “Wouldn’t you love to actually be in there with them?” says Christa.

  “Wouldn’t you love to be actually in the real ocean with them?” says Anna.

  “Then, let’s!” I suggest. “This summer—let’s learn to scuba together!”

  We announce our plan to Scott and Wilson over lunch at one of our favorite places, a hybrid Mexican-Irish restaurant named Jose McIntyre’s. Scott thinks it’s a great idea. Scott’s job has included many scuba research and collecting expeditions. One of them was in the West Indies. Standard scuba safety procedure forbids a person dive alone, and Scott had promised to buddy up with a researcher whose quarry was active before dawn. “But almost everyone was out partying late at night,” Scott tells us. Scott’s partner was an excellent diver and didn’t need monitoring; but still, Scott faithfully accompanied him to the dive site at four thirty each morning. They worked beneath the arch of an underwater cave in eight feet of water. Scott, exhausted, would strap on his tank, put his regulator in his mouth, inflate his buoyancy control vest, park himself beneath the arch among some brain coral—and sleep for two hours. Then his buddy would wake him up and they’d go back to the hotel. “But at night,” Scott says, “I’d wake up in my bed and forget where I was, and thrash around trying to find my regulator.”

  I ask what to do if you need to cough or sneeze while diving. “No problem. They even teach you how to vomit correctly underwater,” Scott replies. He says this actually happened when some partying visitors paid for a special pass to dive in the Giant Ocean Tank.

  “Oh, my,” says Christa. “What . . . ?”

  “Tacos from this place,” Scott answers.

  One of Octavia’s arms is under her body. Another is attached by twenty-eight large suckers, some of them more than an inch across, to the rock ceiling of her lair. Another arm adheres by its suckers to the wall. The skin between Octavia’s arms hangs like drapery. Then, at 8:25 a.m., her arms begin vigorously sweeping the skein of eggs farthest away from me, an athletic action that reminds me of a woman vacuuming blinds or curtains. She continues to work at this for two minutes. Then she turns and blows water at them with her funnel. No wonder the eggs are still so white. How does she avoid tearing the egg chains from their holdfasts?

  The soft light goes on in her exhibit. The staff is gearing up for the public. Octavia’s body grows as she draws water into her gills, her mantle expanding like a pink lady slipper orchid in bloom. I count the seconds between her breaths. Sixteen. Seventeen. Fifteen. One of the tendrils of her arms has turned into a knot. Then she unknots it to a corkscrew with three loops, as carelessly as a person would draw a doodle.

  One huge breath takes three seconds to inhale and Octavia’s whole body balloons. Only one arm is moving, her left front arm, cleaning the eggs at the back of her exhibit again.

  At 9:10 I hear the first shrieking toddler of the day. My golden time alone with Octavia is about to expire. But the next hour at Octavia’s tank is valuable for another reason: Though my view of Octavia is often blocked by jostling children and pushy adults, I can immerse myself in the tsunami of emotions, memories, and misconceptions that an octopus draws from visitors.

  “There’s the octopus!” cries a young woman.

  “Beautiful!” says her bearded companion.

  “Creepy, but beautiful!” adds a t
all woman in back of the couple.

  “Is that the octopus?” asks a little boy, pointing to the bottom of Octavia’s tank.

  “No, it’s an anemone,” his father replies.

  “That’s the octopus’s enemy?” the child asks, worried.

  I point out Octavia in her corner, and show the boy her eggs. “Wow!” he says, and then announces, “I’m a scientist, an animal rescuer, and an ocean explorer!” And with this, he runs off, parents in pursuit, to save the sea.

  At 9:20, a family of three surrounds me. “Oooh! Octopus!” the mother says, reading the plaque by the tank. But they don’t see Octavia at all until I point to her, and then I show them her eggs. They are tremendously excited. “Will there be babies?” the son, who looks to be about eight, wants to know. No, I explain—there was no dad, so there won’t be babies. “Just eggs, like a hen lays eggs even when there’s no rooster.”

  This distresses the boy. “She needs a dude!” he cries. His dad agrees. “Can’t they fly in a dude octopus to help her out?” he suggests. A romantic thought, I concede, but, I tell the family, because octopuses may eat each other, blind dates in the confines of an aquarium, where nobody can jet away if they don’t get along, are even more risky in captivity than in the wild.

  “Can’t they just inject the eggs with sperm?” asks the mother.

  Unlike fish, octopus eggs must be fertilized before they’re laid. And then, I note, there’s the issue of what to do if the eggs did hatch: “What would you do with 100,000 baby octopuses?”

  “Sell them to other aquariums!” says the dad, clearly an entrepreneurial type.