The Soul of an Octopus Page 20

  What drives these animals to make the choices they do? Why pick this mate, and not another? Why choose this route, this fight, this den, and not that one? Is this behavior random or conditioned by experience? Robotic responses to outside cues? Instinct? Do animals—or people—have free will?

  Though the question remains one of the great philosophical debates of history, if free will does exist, research suggests it exists across species.

  “Even the simple animals are not the predicable automatons that they are often portrayed to be,” researcher Björn Brembs of Berlin Free University said—not even fruit flies, whose brains hold only 100,000 neurons (a cockroach, by contrast, has a million). He reasoned that if these small insects were mere reactive robots, then in a completely featureless room, they would move randomly. So he glued them to small copper hooks and placed them in uniform white surroundings.

  Their flights were not random. Instead, they matched a mathematical algorithm for a pattern called the Lévy distribution. This search pattern is an effective way to find food, a method also known to be used by albatrosses, monkeys, and deer, and the flies made reasonable, not random, choices, too. Scientists have found similar patterns in human behavior, in the flow of e-mails, letters, and money (and, Brembs observed, in the paintings of Jackson Pollock).

  Flies even display individual variation in the choices they make. Most fruit flies typically move toward light when startled—but not all, and not with equal urgency. Harvard University researchers were surprised by the degree of individual variation the fruit flies in their laboratory showed—even among flies who were genetically identical. And like us, apparently fruit flies make choices propelled by emotions like fear, elation, or despair. Another study found that male fruit flies, dejected after their sexual advances had been rejected by females, were 20 percent more likely to turn to drink (liquid food supplemented with alcohol in the laboratory) than males who had been sexually sated.

  The choices available to a complex animal like an octopus are uncountable, even in a pickle barrel. Karma now rises to the top of the barrel when I slap the water, so calm in our presence she often turns nearly pure white when we play with her. She’s active, but not nearly as exuberant as Kali. She prefers to suck on us with her larger suckers, sometimes hard enough to give us hickeys that persist for twenty-four hours. When we try to interact with the tips of her arms she lets them slip from our hands. After twenty minutes or so she typically relaxes, holding us gently. But then she grabs us again, more emphatically, as if to remind us: I am strong enough to pull you in. I am gentle because I choose to be.

  One weekend, though, Karma was not gentle. Andrew opened her barrel to feed her a fish, and her arms shot out to grab him. She twisted, turned bright red, flipped upside down. To his surprise, at the confluence of her arms, Andrew saw her beak, and realized she was trying to bite him.

  Characteristically, he kept his cool. Now twenty-five, he’s been keeping fish since he was six, managing to breed them when he was seven. (When all the fish in his tank turned up dead, he didn’t cry, but instead asked his mom to borrow her scissors so he could dissect the corpses and find out what went wrong.) He is so at ease with aquatic animals that, a year ago, when he was at the convenience store across the street and felt an epileptic seizure coming on, his first thought was to get back to the aquarium and specifically, to the area behind the piranha tank—to have the seizure where he felt safe. So when attacked by a giant Pacific octopus, Andrew, who also runs a business with a partner designing and maintaining tropical fish tanks, calmly peeled off Karma’s suckers and stuffed her back in the barrel. “We got off on the wrong foot—or arm,” he said.

  Karma’s sudden dislike of Andrew seems as capricious as the female lumpfishes’ continued indifference to their ardent suitor. The tireless male still hasn’t given up. His nest site is impeccably clean. No algae besmirches the smooth rocks that could so safely shelter hundreds of precious eggs. No sea star or urchin dares approach his carefully guarded site. He has kept even the lobster at bay. The male swims back and forth near the top of the exhibit, almost like a pacing tiger, frantic for at least one of the females to notice and admire his real estate. Yet, still, both females ignore him. Bill hasn’t given up hope either. Maybe next week, he says. . . .

  I’ll be missing the next episode of the lumpfish saga. For next Thursday is Valentine’s Day, and, with my husband’s blessing, I have a date in Seattle. I’m flying across the country to watch two octopuses have sex.

  The top of the 3,000-gallon, two-part tank is strung with heart-shaped red lights, its glass walls adorned with shiny red cutout hearts. A bouquet of plastic roses, tied together with red satin ribbon, floats in the water. By 11 a.m., the crowd has started to build. One hundred and fifty sixth graders have arrived by school bus. Mothers are pushing babies in strollers larger than shopping carts. Eighty-eight second graders and nineteen adult chaperones, and children as young as five from other elementary schools are here. About three quarters of the people here are kids, but there are lots of adults: one fellow, sporting a red ponytail and a black leather jacket, tells me he and his girlfriend have come every year for the past four years to spend Valentine’s Day here at the Seattle Aquarium’s annual Octopus Blind Date.

  “It’s crazy, but it’s pretty amazing,” says a cameraman for the Seattle NBC affiliate, KOMO. Clips he films of the event will run on the four-, five- and six-o’clock news. The Octopus Blind Date has been a regular event at the Seattle Aquarium for nine years—the jewel in the crown of Octopus Week, the biggest draw of the aquarium year. The typical winter weekday draws three or four hundred people, perhaps up to a thousand on a busy Saturday or Sunday. But a weekend during Octopus Week might bring six thousand visitors.

  “It’s funny to think they come to see two animals mate,” says Kathryn Kegel, thirty-one, the aquarium’s lead invertebrate biologist. But for her, too, even after working here seven years, it’s one of the most thrilling days of the year. “The matings I’ve seen are such a ball of arms, you can’t tell apart the individual animals.” She’s never missed a Blind Date during her tenure. She reckons there’s “about a fifty-fifty chance they’ll be interested.” They may do nothing. Or one might attack the other. If this happens, she and another diver will try to separate them—if they can. “There’s too many arms to do much about it, though,” she admits.

  One year, the female killed the male and began to eat him. Fortunately this didn’t happen in front of the public, but after the aquarium had closed and the animals had been left together in the tank. And once, one octopus managed to remove the barrier separating the two tanks, and the two mated the night before the Blind Date. Now the barrier is bolted shut and tied with cable in four different spots.

  With eight arms and six hearts beating as one, you might think octopus sex offers a Kama Sutra of possibilities. But the octopus is an almost staid lover compared with other marine invertebrates. Take the nudibranch, Chromodoris reticulata, a sea slug found in shallow coral reefs around Japan. All have both male and female sex organs and can use them both at the same time. The penis of each fits into the opening of the other, and they penetrate each other at the same time. But that’s not all. After a few minutes, they both shed their penises, which fall to the ocean floor—but twenty-four hours later, they regrow them so they can mate over and over again.

  Although there are exceptions, most species of octopus usually mate in one of two familiar ways: the male on top of the female, as mammals usually do, or side by side. The latter is sometimes called distance mating, an octopus adaptation to mitigate the risk of cannibalism. (One large female Octopus cyanea in French Polynesia mated with a particular male twelve times—but after an unlucky thirteenth bout, she suffocated her lover and spent the next two days eating his corpse in her den.) Distance mating sounds like the ultimate in safe sex. The male extends his hectocotylized arm some distance to reach the female; in some species, this can be done while neither octopus leaves its adjac
ent den.

  Because octopuses are difficult to find and observe, little is known about their love lives. Much may be happening that we don’t expect. Males fight over females, and they fight dirty: a male will bite off a rival’s ligula and then eat it. Monterey Bay Aquarium researcher Crissy Huffard in 2008 documented an Indonesian species with a surprisingly complex mating system: She discovered that males will guard their chosen females, even though “sneaker males” sometimes cuckold them. Then in 2013 researchers reported that the strikingly beautiful, newly rediscovered larger Pacific striped octopus lives in communities of up to forty animals. Males and females cohabit in dens, mate beak-to-beak, and produce not just one but many broods of eggs over their lifetimes.

  Kathryn has high hopes for this year’s giant Pacific couple, Rain and Squirt. Rain, the male, weighs an impressive 65 pounds. Kathryn describes him as “a big crawler and a really mellow, easygoing octopus.” He was collected in May from the waters right outside the aquarium and has grown very fast. A volunteer saw him double in size since he arrived and tells me that “he’s noticeably bigger every week.” He’s a handsome fellow, a good shade of red. One of his larger suckers stuck against the glass of his tank is two and three eighths inches in diameter, big enough to lift more than 25 pounds. He’s had his turn with various toys—he particularly enjoyed handling the squishy waffle ball the otters like to play with—but he is less interested in toys these days. Time to put away childish things. Already in the past two weeks, he left two spermatophores in his tank. They look like clear, yard-long worms; keepers at one aquarium were convinced, upon finding them in their octopus tank, that their male was suffering from an infestation of parasites. The spermatophores were proof: Rain is sexually mature, near the culmination and, soon after that, the end of his short life.

  The female, Squirt, is smaller, 45 pounds, and shy. She created a den when she first went on exhibit in this new tank, which octopuses don’t usually do. She’s named Squirt because she does—though mostly it lands on the acrylic walls, not on passersby. She enjoys opening jars, usually at night.

  The two have been reaching out to one another, tasting one another, interacting suckers-to-suckers on either side of the porous barrier separating the two tanks.

  The date takes place at noon, but I score a good spot by eleven thirty. Viewed from above, the tank would look like a misshapen figure eight lying on its side, with a tiny top and bigger bottom, connected with a clear passageway, which is currently blocked with a Plexiglas barrier with small holes drilled in it. Rock walls built into the back of each tank offer each octopus at least one good hiding place. Starfish and snails cruise the sandy bottom, and greenlings and two species of canary fish swim nervously around the water. Sometimes a fish disappears, eaten.

  At first, Rain is resting in the upper corner of his tank, but he then turns red and begins moving around. He returns to his corner and changes to a mottled grayish color. “I’d be petrified if I were swimming and saw an octopus like that!” a teen in a leather jacket says, with his arm around his girl. Squirt is more active in her smaller tank. She is a lovely dark orange color and has raised many of her papillae.

  At 11:35, the aquarium’s PA system starts playing Barry White’s deep, sexy bass: “I can’t get enough of your love, babe.” Kathryn, now in a red dry suit, sets up a stepladder by the tank. She and fellow staffer Katie Metz will remove the bolts and cables holding the barrier in place between the two tanks, and urge Squirt through the tunnel.

  “Today we’re getting ready for our Octopus Blind Date,” announces the emcee, introducing herself as Roberta, over the PA. “If you want to be in the first few rows in front of the tank, you can sit on the floor. If you prefer to stand, do so behind those already seated.”

  “Crisscross applesauce, guys,” says a teacher to her second graders as the little ones settle on the floor. Behind me, the crowd around the tank is lined up twelve rows deep.

  “Our octopuses are very unpredictable,” continues the emcee. “I can’t guarantee where they’ll be. If you’re having trouble seeing, our cameras will display the scene on the large screen behind the white table. I’m going to ask you not to get up and move, but stay in your spot for a few minutes to see what happens. We’re going to get started in ten minutes!”

  All the children scream with excitement.

  The beat of the music swells. Now Roberta Flack is singing, “Baby, I love you!” To pass the time, one of the teachers shows the children how to “rave” to the rhythm. “Move your hands!” she says, like a preacher at a revival meeting. “Move them hands!”

  At 11:55, Roberta again addresses the crowd, standing by Rain on the larger side of the tank. “Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone! I’m going to introduce you to the animals who are having a blind date today! This is Rain, our adult male,” she says, gesturing to the grayish ball of suckers resting in the upper corner of the tank, “and in the smaller tank is Squirt, our female. They’re going to be introduced for the first time. These animals are very solitary. Till the very end of their lives, they don’t want to meet another octopus.”

  Unseen by most of the crowd, which is gathered round Rain in his larger side of the tank, Kathryn and Katie enter the water to loosen the bolts that hold the barrier in place. “How many of you have been on a blind date?” vamps Roberta. “Sometimes it works out. Sometimes it doesn’t. We will have to see!”

  While the divers remove the barrier, Roberta gives the crowd some species info: size, life span, growth rate. “Our diver is going to encourage Squirt to try to come and meet Mr. Rain,” Roberta says.

  And now we can see Squirt flowing toward us, bright red with excitement. She crawls purposefully over the sandy bottom of the tank toward Rain. He has now turned from grayish to red but is still not moving. A bright white eyespot appears on Squirt’s “forehead” as she stretches her second left arm toward him, reaching within three feet of his closest arm. And then, at 12:10, she reaches a second and a third arm toward him. At her touch, Rain pours down the side of the rock wall to meet the female on the bottom.

  He races into her arms. She flips upside down, giving him her vulnerable, creamy white underside. They embrace mouth-to-mouth, thousands of glistening, exquisitely sensitive suckers tasting, pulling, sucking on each other. Both of them flush with excitement.

  Finally, Rain completely envelops Squirt with his interbrachial web, like a gentleman might cloak his lady with his coat on a cool night. Only a few of her suckers remain visible on the Plexiglas.

  Still perched above the tank, Kathryn and Katie look down on the lovers like two Cupids. These are tense moments for the biologists. Each Blind Date runs a risk. “There’s always a level of concern,” Kathryn told me. “But this is what happens in the wild, and whatever happens is okay.” But she and Katie know both these animals personally. They love them and don’t want to see them injured; they want the mating to be a success. In the past, some females inked and tried to get away from the males, so Squirt’s willingness to approach Rain is a good sign.

  Now that the mating octopuses are no longer moving, the children start to decamp for their school buses. Many of the kids seem baffled. To them, human sex is incomprehensible, octopus sex unimaginable. A number of adults still hang around, watching. Two guys stand solemnly in front of the tank, arms around each other. A woman with short hair doesn’t understand that what looks like one octopus is really two. “They’re doing it?” she asks, puzzled. “Where’s the other one?”

  The two animals don’t move, but Rain is becoming paler and paler. “It’s a date, after all,” a male voice behind me says. “There’s definitely got to be communication.”

  “Maybe psychic communication,” says a woman’s voice in reply.

  “Could he be hurting her?” asks another woman, worried.

  “It does happen,” explains Katie. “You can’t control these things. But his respiration—he’s breathing deeply at a comfortable rate—and her not trying to get away are good in
dications this is going very well.”

  “This is the most laid-back and gentle mating I’ve seen,” says Kathryn.

  The two animals are very still now, and at 12:35, Rain is pure white, the color of complete contentment. “They’re having the cigarette now,” chuckles the man in back of me.

  “He’s never looked this white,” says a tall man whose shoulder-length hair curls out beneath a rain hat. He has been watching the scene since I got here. “Oh, it’s beautiful,” he says softly. “They’re beautiful.” The man’s name is Roger, and he confides that, for the past year, he’s come to the aquarium twice a week, mainly to visit the octopuses. He bought a membership to the aquarium in better days. Since then, his mother died of breast cancer, his house was foreclosed, and now he is living at Compass Center, a shelter for the homeless. He is taking photos of the octopuses for an 8-by-12-foot painting he’s creating for the center, “as a gift to give back to the people who’ve been kind to me.” At first he thought he’d paint an orca, but the octopus seems more appropriate: The compass has eight points, and the octopus has eight arms. Of all the animals in the aquarium, the octopuses are his favorites. “Going here is almost meditative,” he says. “Living in the world is hard, being emotional. But being with these guys gives me peace.” Recently he’s been offered a home in a friend’s apartment; better days are at hand. “Having the peace of being with these guys,” he tells me, “has lent me the time to have something good like that happen to me.”

  Now that the school buses have left, most of the visitors to the tank are adults. They all seem to recognize a sweetness to the scene in front of us. “It’s not the sex,” explains Roger. “It’s that this is the culmination of their lives.” I hear no snickering or jokes. Some couples come by holding hands and stand in front of the tank like they might visit at an alcove in a church. They are looking at a blessing they, themselves, enjoy. The murmurs from the people quietly watching the animals are tinged with awe.