The Soul of an Octopus Page 19

  Bill’s affection for his animals is as clear as the spine-tipped fin on the chimera’s back. That such a meticulous, caring man has lost the most intelligent, outgoing, and beloved of them all—lost her in her healthy, vigorous, promising youth—and worst, lost her, he believes, because of his mistake—seems brutally, cosmically wrong. The line from Hamlet, spoken by the murdered king, comes to mind: “Our wills and fates do so contrary run / That our devices still are overthrown.” Bill’s sorrow sweeps over my own like a sob.

  And then Wilson appears. He is holding Kali’s necropsy report. Conducted just an hour after her death, the exam revealed that her eyes, arms, ink sac, colon, crop, esophagus, and immature female reproductive organs were normal. Bones from the capelin we had fed her were still in her stomach. She was huge and still growing: Her longest arm stretched four feet, four inches; her head and mantle were a foot long. Everything about her was perfect. Except that she was dead.

  How did she get out? There was a gap in the cover, in back of the pipe. Bill had not overlooked this. He had covered it with a plastic tarp, and stuffed it with a bristly-feeling screening material, which octopuses don’t like. But Kali was not deterred. Weighing 21 pounds and with an arm span of nearly ten feet, she had squeezed out of a hole that measured two and a half inches by one inch.

  A final mystery remained: Kali had died, obviously, because an octopus cannot live for long out of water—a giant Pacific can go about fifteen minutes without sustaining brain damage. But Kali should have found available water in all directions. She had been discovered within an arm’s reach of the open overflow tray of her tank, full of water that was the perfect temperature and chemistry for her. Other octopuses who have escaped seem to have purposely done so in order to enter the tanks of neighbors and eat them. Why couldn’t Kali find another tank and climb in?

  Though not everyone subscribes to the theory, some in Cold Marine guess that Kali might have crawled over the disinfectant mat near her tank, one of which is placed at the entrance to most of the aquarium’s galleries behind the scenes. To protect the animals from disease that could be brought in on the bottoms of shoes and boots, the mat is treated with Virkon, a light-pink solution that kills viruses, bacteria, and fungi. It is also a corrosive chemical and a known skin, eye, and mucous membrane irritant. And the skin of an octopus is one giant, fantastically sensitive mucous membrane. Steinhart Aquarium’s assistant curator J. Charles Delbeek has likened cephalopod skin to the lining of the mammalian gut, with the result that “levels of chemicals, nutrients, pollutants, etc. that are seemingly not toxic to other species and inverts can be toxic to cephs.” One touch of Virkon might have poisoned Kali.

  The irony is almost too painful to bear: Kali escaped because those who loved her most were trying to give her the best life possible, and may have died because of their efforts to protect their animals from danger and disease.

  The pall from Kali’s death spreads like octopus ink in water. “You’ve got to be kidding,” is what Danny said to Christa when she gave him the news at their parents’ house. At first he was confused: Elderly Octavia was the one who was supposed to die, not Kali! But then Christa explained about the transfer, and how Kali found a tiny hole to squeeze through to escape. Danny replied, “Yeah. They’re smart, and they camouflage, and they’re friends. . . . ” And then Danny grew very quiet. Christa asked him whether he wanted her to leave him alone. “And he wanted me out of the room, which is rare,” she told me. “I said, ‘We’ll get to meet a whole new octopus, which is great.’ He said, ‘Yeah, but it’s not going to be Kali.’ She was more than I ever expected. She brought us a great circle of friends.”

  Bill ordered a new giant Pacific octopus on Christmas Eve by e-mail. He promises to let me know when the new one is on the way.

  Eight days later, just three days into the New Year, I get the call: The new octopus is scheduled to arrive the next morning. That’s a Friday, Bill’s day off, and he has left Dave Wedge and fellow aquarist Jackie Anderson in charge. They invite me along to pick up the animal at the Federal Express bay at the airport.

  “These pickups don’t always go smoothly,” says pretty, ponytailed Jackie, an expert on jellyfish culture, as we climb into the white aquarium van, its backseats torn out to make way for aquatic cargo. One day, Jackie was sent to Logan Airport to retrieve some jellyfish arriving from the Bahamas. The trip should have been a quick errand at the start of her busy day’s work. But the airline had mistakenly filled out paperwork claiming it was a domestic shipment, so there was no evidence it had cleared customs. Jackie arrived at the airport at 8 a.m. and spent the day trying to reason with the airline. With each passing hour, the chances grew that the jellies would be dangerously stressed or even die. Finally, at 4 p.m., exasperated and spent, Jackie threatened to abandon the package. The officials relented—because, she said, “They didn’t want a bunch of dead jellyfish hanging around the airport.”

  At least the jellyfish survived. As Jackie drives, she tells the story of what happened to the cuttlefish from Japan.

  An outfit in Galveston, Texas, used to breed cuttlefish for the aquarium trade. After the facility was destroyed in a hurricane, Japan became the world’s major supplier. There, the animals are wild-caught. But since the 2011 tsunami wrecked the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor, which leaked into the ocean, all animals caught off Japanese shores were rendered radioactive. When shipments of radioactive cuttlefish arrived at Logan airport, perplexed customs officials there kept them for three days—by which time the sensitive animals had all died. (The aquarium now arranges to have cuttlefish shipped to New York, where customs personnel are more familiar with unusual cargo, and staffers drive down to get them.)

  Jackie pulls up to the airport’s first FedEx bay, and Dave goes inside to inquire after our cargo. The package is waiting for us just a few bays down: a 33 x 25 x 25–inch corrugated cardboard box that was originally made to ship a 27-inch flat-screen TV. It says THIS SIDE UP. It says RUSH. The box does not say LIVE ANIMAL. You would never suspect it contains an octopus.

  Twenty minutes later, we have wrestled the 135-pound box out of the van, onto a cart Scott has wheeled to the aquarium’s loading dock, and pushed it into the elevator and up to Cold Marine. Inside the box is a custom-made white Styrofoam barrel. Dave lifts the lid. An ice pack wrapped in newspaper is inside, and beneath it, knotted and sealed with a tangle of beige rubber bands, a 30-gallon bag of heavy, clear plastic, containing a top layer of pure oxygen, about ten gallons of water, and our octopus. Dave cuts through the knot so we can peer inside at the occupant.

  Please, please, please, I pray silently, let it be all right.

  Sitting in the water is a big, light-orange blob punctuated with white discs.

  “You awake?” Dave asks the animal. We see the delicate tip of one arm curl and then twist.

  Jackie sniffs the water. “He smells stressed,” she announces. The water in the bag gives off the scent of geraniums. Jellyfish also smell like geraniums when distressed, Jackie explains. But that varies with the species. Stressed anemones give off a sour, salty smell.

  “It’s nasty-looking in there,” she says, peering inside the bag. Shed sucker caps are floating in the yellowish water like fake snow in a souvenir globe. It’s normal for a rapidly growing animal to shed sucker caps, though in seawater this detritus would be carried away—as would the thin ribbons of excrement at the bottom of the bag.

  “Nobody’s at their best after a cross-country flight,” I observe, “especially if you have to travel in a bag filled with your own excrement.”

  “I think I’ve been on that airline,” says Dave.

  “How’re you doing?” he asks the octopus. An arm waves wanly. We can’t see the animal’s eyes, but we can see the funnel and the opening in the mantle leading to one gill inhaling and exhaling shallowly. At least it’s breathing.

  Dave siphons some of the dirty water into a drain on the floor, while Jackie uses a yellow plastic pitcher to pour
in some clean water from the sump. The octopus tentatively explores the pitcher with the tip of one arm.

  We’d love to get the octopus out of the bag, but we don’t want it shocked by a sudden change in temperature or water chemistry. Jackie sends a water sample to the lab to measure pH, salinity, and ammonia levels; Dave takes the temperature: 45°F. The water in the sump is 50°F today. As we wait, I stare into the plastic bag at the new octopus. Part of the second right arm is missing its bottom quarter. What happened? Does the octopus remember? Maybe the memory resides in the lost arm. Or perhaps the other arms know about it, but the brain doesn’t.

  The animal turns a deeper orange now, and I contemplate its mystery. Here is someone who was born the size of a grain of rice and miraculously survived floating helplessly among the plankton until big enough to settle on the bottom. Before me is an individual who has spent months hunting prey while avoiding the jaws that lurked everywhere—fishes, seals, otters, whales—hungry for its flesh. In its short life, the animal in this bag has already survived unimaginable adventures, made death-defying escapes, and overcome heroic odds. Had it once hidden, in its youth, inside a discarded wine bottle? Had it lost an arm to a shark and regrown it? Had it ever played with human divers, amassed a crab ranch, slipped from fishermen’s gear, explored a shipwreck? And how had its experiences shaped its character?

  I stare into the water and ask: Who are you?

  By the time I visit the octopus next, we know a little more about her. Yet again, we have a female. Bill has examined the third right arm, which she kept hidden from us that first day, and found suckers all the way to the end. “She’s pretty feisty and active,” Bill tells me. She weighs about nine or ten pounds, more than Kali did when she first came, and she may be nine or ten months old.

  The shipper, Ken Wong, had procured Bill’s beloved George years ago, though a different shipper had provided Octavia and Kali.

  “Catching an octopus is fairly involved,” Ken told me, when I called him. “They’re elusive. And you’ve got to find one appropriate for display. Thirty- and forty-pound octopuses, you don’t want. You should leave them there to breed. Then there are some that are too small, and aren’t appropriate.” Another problem is that, this time of year, most of the octopuses are missing from one to four arms. Lingcod, voracious predators that grow to 80 pounds, with eighteen sharp teeth, are spawning, and will bite and bully octopuses to evict them from their dens and claim the holes as their own. This is likely how our octopus lost her arm.

  On his first few dives, Ken had not found a suitable octopus. Sometimes he saw no octopus at all. “Sometimes you just get skunked,” he said. But Ken was determined. It took him six dives, but finally he found the octopus that would be destined for Boston.

  He spotted her at a depth of about 75 feet, hiding in a rock formation, with just her suckers sticking out. Ken had touched her gently and she had jetted from her crevice—directly into his waiting monofilament net.

  “The net is so soft you wouldn’t feel its abrasion on your face,” Ken told me. “You have to treat these animals with kid gloves. You can’t yank them to the surface. You don’t want to shock them.” The water temperature at that depth may be more than 15°F colder than the water at the surface, so he had transferred her from the net to a closed container in about 50 gallons of water, and hauled everything slowly to the surface. She never struggled or inked.

  She had lived in a 5 x 5 x 4-foot, 400-gallon tank, equipped with rocks and pipe elbows to hide in, for the past six weeks. Within the first three weeks, she learned to come to him when he slapped the water, bearing food. She especially enjoyed salmon heads and crab. She was fed on a random schedule, rather like in the wild. One day she might eat a single prawn, and two days later, she might feast on two large crabs. “She put on weight at a good clip,” he told me. When he caught her, he estimated she weighed about seven pounds. Now he thought she weighed about nine.

  How, then, did he entice the octopus into the plastic bag for shipping? “You have to convince the animal to get in the bag,” he said. “You can’t force someone that smart, with eight arms. It’s not quick and easy.” He drained some of the water out of the tank to ease his task, but still, it took about an hour to convince her to enter the bag.

  Ken had three other octopuses at his British Columbia facility, each of which was already spoken for. One was waiting for her future aquarist to fix her tank. Another awaited resolution of a problem with quarantine. In some cases, Ken has to hold out for better weather to ship an animal. Airports close for snow or heavy fog, and he won’t send an octopus out if it looks like it might be kept waiting because of weather delays.

  Ken was glad for news of our new octopus. “I’m happy to hear how she’s doing,” he told me. “I love them all.” How does he feel about capturing animals in the wild and sending them to a life in captivity? He has no regrets. “They’re ambassadors from the wild,” he said. “Unless people know about and see these animals, there will be no stewardship for octopuses in the wild. So knowing they are going to accredited institutions, where they are going to be loved, where people will see the animal in its glory—that’s good, and it makes me happy. She’ll live a long, good life—longer than in the wild.”

  I share all Ken told me with Bill and Wilson as we lean over the barrel, looking at the new octopus. She is a deep, chocolate brown at first, then changes to red veined with pink and brown, and finally fades to a mottled fawn color, her raised papillae flecked with white, almost like snow. “What do you think of her?” I ask Wilson.

  “I think . . . she’s . . . almost sexy!” he answers. “There’s something about her that attracts me to her. How do you describe the feeling?” My straightforward engineer friend sounds positively romantic. “You just see something there,” he says dreamily.

  It sounds to me like love at first sight. Is this how he felt when he first met his wife? “Now you are getting into . . . something else!” he says, laughing.

  But Wilson is clearly smitten. “The pattern, the color . . .” One of the talents that served him well in the cubic zirconia trade is Wilson’s extraordinary eye for color. He can tell diamonds apart from c.z. without a jeweler’s loupe. (He and his partner invented a machine that could do this, by measuring heat conductivity. They once brought it to a party—resulting in a broken engagement.) Wilson can see even more beauty in this octopus than I am capable of appreciating.

  But maybe I am blinding myself to her charms. After losing Kali, I feared I might feel reluctant to open my heart to another octopus so soon. Could I keep from unfavorably comparing the new arrival to our funny, demanding, playful, affectionate Kali?

  Clearly, this is not a problem for Wilson. “She’s so beautiful!” he says again. And it’s true. She is a gorgeous octopus: healthy, strong, glowing with color.

  Christa welcomes her as well. She had observed, the first day the animal arrived, a white “bindi” on the forehead. “It’s just like Kali!” Christa had said. “I think it’s a good omen!”

  Ever since she came, staff and volunteers had been discussing possible names. Some of Bill’s volunteers, who use a red covering for the flashlight when pointing out the octopus on display to visitors, had lobbied for the name Roxanne, after the popular song by the Police about a prostitute (“Roxanne! You don’t have to put on the red light”). But Bill had chosen another. He named her Karma.

  Why? “Because,” he says, “when I moved Kali, and she died, I was forced to get a new octopus. It was karma.”

  In casual Western conversation, karma is used interchangeably with destiny, kismet, luck, and fate. Bill had chosen the name while still in the grip of what felt to us all like a star-crossed tragedy of Shakespearean proportions. During the Elizabethan era, most Europeans believed each person’s fate was predetermined, hardwired by the positions of the planets and the stars. Some people still do. But the idea of karma has a deeper, and more promising, meaning than that of fate. Karma can help us develop wisdom and co
mpassion. In Hinduism, karma is a path to reaching the state of Brahman, the highest god, the Universal Self, the World Soul. Our karma is something over which, unlike fate, we do have control. “Volition is karma,” the Buddha is reported to have said. Karma, in Hindu and Buddhist traditions, is conscious action. Karma is not fate, but, in fact, its opposite: Karma is choice.

  A week later, the male lumpfish is still courting. An orange lobster is standing on his chosen lair and the male is frantic to evict it. Neither of the females has taken an interest in the nest site yet. The two swim past him, seemingly oblivious, little gray blimps with wide eyes, like surprised human babies. Bill feels bad for the male, but wonders whether he ought to add a second suitor to the tank to induce the females to breed.

  Meanwhile, over in Freshwater, Killer the painted turtle has fallen in love. Unfortunately the object of his affection is not another turtle, but a pumpkinseed sunfish. Apparently he considers all the other fish in the tank a threat to his one and only mate. While courting her, he attacks any other fish who comes near, and is biting everyone’s fins. While Andrew Murphy, an assistant aquarist, is explaining this to some visitors, Killer drops to the bottom of the tank and kills two minnow-like killies before the people’s astonished eyes.

  And while the new corals for the Giant Ocean Tank are being sculpted in studios in Charlestown, Massachusetts, and in California, a quarrel has broken out among some of the fishes in their temporary home in the penguin tray. A hogfish and a butterfly fish turned up missing chunks of tails and fins. They are removed for recovery. But who is the perpetrator? Christa reports that staff are betting it’s either Barry the barracuda or Thomas the dark gray moray eel. (Polly the gentle, bright green moray is not a suspect.) Once the culprit is discovered, the staff will try to restrict his movements to a safe area of the penguin tray.