The Soul of an Octopus Page 13
But then when I step away from the tank to speak with Bill, Kali rises up instantly and turns bright red. Is she looking for me? Wilson calls me back. I stroke her head and she stays with me for many minutes before dropping again to the floor of her barrel. She stares up at us, her eyes inscrutable.
Wilson is worried. After I leave for the day, he speaks with Bill.
“The number of contacts Kali has is significantly higher than any other octopus. Are you with me, Bill?” he asks.
“Definitely.”
“Last week, everyone was there before us. And I say too many other people are coming.”
Bill agrees. He’s been thinking about this very problem. Research including Jennifer’s shows that wild octopuses choose to spend 70 to 90 percent of their time crammed into tight dens. But that still leaves time for Kali to be bored. When people want to interact with her, if she’s not in the mood, she can’t get away. She can’t hide in a lair like Octavia can in her big tank. In the barrel, Kali is, as Wilson puts it, “a sitting duck.”
A few weeks ago, with Bill’s permission, I gave Kali a clean terra-cotta pot in case she wanted to hide in it. At the Middlebury octopus lab, the octopuses so valued these pots they could be used as a reward for correctly negotiating a maze; but to our knowledge, Kali has never used hers. We’ve never seen her hiding in it. She’s always at the top of the barrel when we open the lid. So Bill removed it. The pot seemed to be just taking up space—and space in the barrel is getting short. Kali is two thirds the size of Octavia now.
Bill’s options are limited. He can’t put her in the big tank with Octavia. One octopus would almost surely try to kill the other. “I want her in a new system,” Bill tells Wilson.
But that’s easier said than done. “All the dominoes have to fall into place,” as Wilson puts it when he tells me later. “You want to move this fish, but you have to move this other fish first, and before that you have to move this other fish, and because they’re moving, these other animals over there have to move,” he said. “What you get and when you get it is something you can’t always control.” Every day, animals at the aquarium are being born and dying, arriving from collection expeditions or from U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service agents, or getting shipped to and from other aquariums throughout the United States and Canada.
The comings and goings are always delicate, frequently surprising events. One morning I find Bill has been gifted with a 21-pound lobster caught off Nauset Beach in Orleans, Massachusetts—given by the anonymous winner of a raffle at Cap’n Elmer’s fish market to benefit Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. The lobster’s claws are so heavy he cannot lift them out of water. Another day, eighteen Amazon stingrays arrive in Freshwater, each as large as a bathmat. They had been living in a huge tank owned by a paraplegic man whose ground-floor apartment is being renovated; they have grown too large for him to keep. (He was grateful the aquarium could take them, but wept when the aquarium van pulled away.)
And then one Wednesday I come upstairs after watching Octavia to find Scott’s team catching angels.
There are twenty-six of them. As well as sixteen plecostomus, one lilith, seventeen Geophagus, two silver arowanas, and a host of other species. The angelfish and their tank mates are being moved, after a year of planning, from behind the scenes, where they have thrived since their arrival from the Amazon, to the Amazon exhibit out front. The big round tank out back, behind the scenes, has been largely drained so that Christa and another volunteer, Colin Marshall, both in wet suits, can catch the fish in shin-deep water with their nets, working by chasing the fish toward each other. Colin and Christa transfer each fish in the net to Scott, who’s wearing his wet suit too and holding a net of his own. As he transfers each to the new tank, he calls out the species name, and since there are often several fish in each net load, how many there are. Anna records their number as Wilson, Brendan, and I watch and try not to get in the way.
It takes an hour to move the fish. Immediately we troop down to the public area to see them in their new home. I have never seen Scott so tense. He was up all night last night, worrying. “Fish could be eaten. Fish could die of stress,” he says. But the moment we arrive in front of the tank, Scott falls silent. “He’s watching the fish language,” Wilson whispers to me. The angels’ stripes are lighter than usual, a sign of distress. But happily, an hour later, the normal dark color is restored. They’re even eating in the new exhibit. Scott breathes a sigh of relief.
Another Wednesday, I arrive to find Bill has just rearranged all the rocks and moved the purple sea urchins, giant acorn barnacles, whelks, giant green anemones, feather duster worms, and tube anemones in the Pacific Northwest exhibit next to Octavia’s. He’s pleased with the rearrangement, which looks great—but he hates to upset his animals. “They’ve been here longer than me,” Bill says. His purple sea urchins can live about thirty years; the feather duster worms survive a century; and the anemones, if unmolested by predators or stricken with disease, can theoretically live almost forever; scientists note that they do not appear to show signs of aging.
But these potentially long-lived animals can be finicky, especially the delicate anemones. When conditions are right, each opens like a beautiful flower in bloom, capturing nutrients with its petal-like tentacles. When disturbed, it withdraws into a compact blob nobody would notice. These animals have no brains and the barest of nervous systems. And yet their behavior is eloquently expressive. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio briefly mentions anemones in his book on consciousness and emotion, The Feeling of What Happens. He does not argue that anemones possess consciousness; but, he writes, in their simple, brainless behaviors, we can see “the essence of joy and sadness, of approach and avoidance, of vulnerability and safety.”
“The anemones might not like where I put them,” Bill says worriedly. One of the four tube anemones, whose tentacles were still withdrawn yesterday, has opened up today; but a white spotted rose anemone is still unhappy and hasn’t opened. “Everyone you disturb takes a while to recover,” Bill explains.
But the most disturbing disruption in the history of the aquarium lies ahead. The Giant Ocean Tank, the centerpiece of the aquarium, is going to be rebuilt from the top down. Four hundred and fifty animals of one hundred species will be moved—more than half the animals in the aquarium. Space that’s already tight will be at a premium. For the next nine months, nothing will be routine. It’s going to make finding space for a large, new, octopus-proof tank for Kali fantastically complicated.
“This is the biggest project the aquarium has ever done since it was built,” Billy Spitzer, vice president of programs and exhibits, announces to the staff and volunteers gathered for the brown-bag-lunch presentation on this last Wednesday in August. He’s wearing a hard hat and orange safety vest for effect. “This is even bigger than when the aquarium was built—because it’s being done while it’s open to the public.”
Many of the animals to be moved—including Myrtle and her chelonian colleagues, the sharks, rays, and moray eels, as well as hundreds of large and small reef fish—will be relocated to the shallow penguin tray. Its 110 gallons, chilled to 61°F for the penguins, will be heated to 77°F for the tropical fish. The eighty African and rockhopper penguins were already moved last week to the aquarium’s Animal Care Center in Quincy to make way. The little blues will move to a corner in the New Balance Foundation Marine Mammal Center on the first floor. The whale skeleton is coming down so the ceiling can be fitted with new lighting. After more than forty years of salt water and pressure, the sixty-seven glass panels of the Giant Ocean Tank spiral will be removed and replaced by clearer-than-glass acrylic panes. Over the course of the next nine months to a year, two thirds of the two thousand sculpted corals in the tank will be removed and replaced with two thousand new, softer, more colorful and easier-to-clean coral sculptures. And when the $16 million project is finally done, the GOT will be renewed from top to bottom. It will be more accessible and offer better visibility. And with many new ad
ditional hiding places for fish among the new coral sculptures, the tank will host nearly twice as many animals.
“It’s a great opportunity,” the vice president told the staff, “but we’ve got to admit, it’s stressful.” Some staffers are already mourning the changes. Some speak of “the psychology of loss.” For nine months, no penguins will greet the staff or public as they enter the building. For much of the year ahead, the aquarium will be bereft of its centerpiece. Some of staffers’ favorite animals will be moved off-site. People and animals will be cramped to make room for construction workers in hard hats and their tons of equipment. What was once beautiful will become ugly. What was once tranquil will become noisy. Nothing will be the same.
Next Tuesday, he tells us, the aquarium’s transformation will begin.
And although I didn’t realize it then, a transformation of my own would soon follow.
CHAPTER FIVE
Transformation
The Art of Breathing in the Ocean
I am drowning.
Well, not quite. But there is water in my airway, I am 14 feet underwater, and it appears even more water is pouring in. My usual response to such a state of affairs, one that has worked well for over half a century, is to get my head out of the water and gasp. But my scuba instructor is horrified.
“No, no, no! You must not surface so fast!” the young guy with a French accent admonishes once I bob back to the life-giving air.
“I’m sorry,” I gurgle. “Water was coming into my regulator. Why is this happening?”
Later that day I learn from another instructor that my problem was the same that sinks ships: loose lips. I need to grip the regulator more strongly with my lower lip, which I am not doing very well because, apparently, I am spending a lot of time underwater actually smiling. Here in the MIT swimming pool, I am practically delirious, reveling in my amphibious transformation. I am imagining my not-so-distant future, swimming among corals, among fishes, among sharks and rays and moray eels and most of all, among octopuses. I can’t help but grin like a lunatic.
But nothing wipes a smile off the face as fast as nearly drowning. The French fellow admonishes me, “Baby steps!” But for me, the very idea of scuba is a giant leap from everything I have previously known.
I am taking the intensive scuba course just outside Boston, as Scott had suggested—alas, without Christa, who had to cancel at the last moment. Though I miss my friend, I wasn’t worried about taking the class. I have always been somewhat aquatic. I’m not a particularly graceful or strong swimmer, but I’m a fearless one. From the Gulf of Siam to the murky waters of the Amazon, I have always felt confident I’d be fine if I obeyed Rule One of swimming, and that is: Don’t Try to Breathe Underwater.
Except now this is exactly what we are supposed to do.
Everything in scuba is completely different from life on land, and also from previous experience swimming. Scuba equipment is intimidating and heavy. Just assembling the gear—the nearly 40-pound air tank, the vestlike buoyancy compensation device, or BCD, with its additional pounds of lead weight in the pockets, the hoses and gauges and mouthpieces that hang from tubes everywhere like sleepy eels—takes seven complicated steps to accomplish. Screw up any of these and you have a big problem. Yet the assembly still seemed to me—a person who had managed to make it through not just one, but two high schools without mastering the combination to my locker—an impenetrable mystery.
In my rented gear, my body feels utterly alien. The giant fins are big as clown shoes, the mask prevents peripheral vision, and breathing through the regulator in my mouth makes me sound like Darth Vader. The BCD has air pockets that you can inflate or deflate to make you float or sink in ways you never did before. I’m wearing a rented mask that somebody else spit in (you spit in your mask to defog it), a wet suit somebody else peed in (we’re told everyone does—in the ocean, not the pool), and a regulator that somebody else may have thrown up in. And in this gear, I’m not even supposed to swim normally. I’m supposed to fold my arms in like a kangaroo and propel myself only by kicking my fins.
Nothing looks right: Objects seem closer and 25 percent bigger in the water. Nothing sounds right: Sound travels four times faster in water than in air, and directionality is distorted. Nothing feels right: Since you’re not really swimming, you can’t warm up, and water carries heat away from the body twenty-five times faster than in air. Even though the pool is 80°F and we are wearing wet suits, everyone’s lips are blue with cold by the end of the first session.
Yet I was doing the impossible and having a blast.
It was only when the water started filling the regulator that I panicked.
I was certain things would get easier as the weekend progressed. But I was wrong.
Everyone was spent after the first day of scuba lessons. Even our main instructor, fit, twentyish Janine Woodbury, admitted she was pretty beat. And, she confessed, her ears hurt. Mine too. Bad enough that I had taken a sleeping pill the night before, because the pain was keeping me awake. (I later learned this was dangerous and could have damaged my heart or lungs.) But on hearing (though more faintly than usual) my young instructor’s admission that her ears hurt too, I felt better. Maybe your ears are supposed to hurt. In this I was wrong.
The pain did not decrease, but to my surprise, I was able to assemble the gear. I didn’t have to think twice to remember how to clear my regulator or inflate or deflate my BCD. I felt strong and ready to learn new skills, including breathing from a buddy’s emergency air supply, which is, to my delight, called an octopus. But my ears felt as if they were going to explode.
Janine had once actually seen one of her students’ eardrums explode. “Bubbles came out of his ear underwater,” she said. “It was gross.” And incredibly painful. Unfortunately, permanent ear damage from scuba is not as rare as one would hope. Scott no longer dives because of ear damage that he suffered on a relatively routine expedition in Massachusetts waters, collecting live rock—pieces of dead coral that have been colonized with algae and sponges that, back at the aquarium, work as biological filters in tanks—at a depth of 100 feet. While surfacing, he suffered a “reverse squeeze” from pressure changes, and damaged his cochlea so badly his doctor forbade him to dive again.
I made the gesture for “trouble clearing ears” underwater to my instructor. She gestured for me to hold my nose and blow—a trick for equalizing pressure called the Valsalva maneuver. I did so with great enthusiasm and heard a very loud noise from inside my head. “Okay?” she signaled. But now it hurt worse. I signaled “something’s wrong” and pointed again to my ears and blew again.
I ascended a couple of feet and tried the Valsalva again. I also used the Frenzel maneuver, another way of opening the eustachian tubes, by moving the jaw around like a snake trying to swallow something bigger than its head. This didn’t work either.
“Okay?” Janine signaled.
No, I replied with my hand. I Valsalvaed yet again. I tried sinking a little—maybe this was a “reverse squeeze” and could be solved in this manner. But no—if anything, this made it yet worse. I rose again, slowly, pinching my nose and blowing the whole time.
“Okay?”
But I was not okay. No matter what I did, the pressure in my ears was blindingly painful.
I got out, and sat with my eyes closed, doubled over. Pain was not the sole source of my suffering. It was the prospect of defeat. I desperately wanted to be able to enter Octavia and Kali’s world. Encumbered with my awkward skeleton and air-hungry lungs, I could not begin to discover much of anything about what it might be like to be an octopus without at least learning how to breathe underwater. I wanted to meet octopuses who lived in the wild ocean. In the shower, I began to repeat in my head the first words of the Fisherman’s Prayer, the words to which John F. Kennedy kept on his desk at the White House: “Oh God, Thy sea is so great and my boat is so small. . . .” I fervently longed to get out of that boat and enter the Creator’s great ocean, if only for an hour
at a time, as a breathing, swimming sea creature. How could I do this without scuba?
Then I noticed the vertigo and nausea. When Scott suffered his cochlear damage, the pain had been accompanied by dizziness. When he surfaced he had thrown up.
But I was determined to try again. My instructor suggested Afrin, a nasal spray pilots often use. I wobbled to a drugstore and bought some, along with a macrobiotic bento box for lunch. The lunch did not stay down.
Janine gently suggested I bail. I did not want to lose my hearing. I have three smart, resilient friends who are deaf, and even they have a hard time in the hearing world. So I agreed. I would go home early, having failed to complete the first half of the course.
Defeated, I crawled off to my car, where I discovered I was too dizzy to drive.
I lay down in the backseat, on the blanket where our border collie sits, her paws and belly often plastered with mud, on the drive after our hikes in the woods together. Inhaling her scent, I felt instantly calmer. Within half an hour, though my ears still hurt horribly, the vertigo had eased enough for me to drive the two hours home.
When I returned to the aquarium the next Wednesday, everything had changed. The top floor of the Giant Ocean Tank was closed to the public, and the walkway along the big tank was now draped with white cloth to screen the work under way. Eighty-gallon plastic tubs were scattered around, ready to receive fish. The top floor was littered with large wooden boxes in which the larger section of the reef would be carted away.
Octavia was in a strange spot, way farther back in her lair than usual, and at least fifteen rows of egg chains were visible, some of them nine inches long. She hung from her arms as if lying in a hammock, and she was exceptionally still.
Everything, in fact, seemed unnaturally subdued. The aquarium was nearly deserted. Visitors were few. Scott was at a conference in Tucson; Bill was on vacation in Florida; Anna was back in school. The penguins were gone, and their tray held only Myrtle and her fellow turtles.