The Soul of an Octopus Read online

  “Look how white he is.”

  “And all those bumps on his skin! He looks fluffy as a lamb.”

  “He looks happy.”

  “Yeah—content.”

  “They’re so peaceful.”

  “So dear. The dear, sweet things.”

  “They’re beautiful. Just gorgeous.”

  And from right next to me, I hear Roger speaking softly. “I love you, Rain,” he says, his voice almost a whisper. “I love you, Squirt.”

  The animals have hardly moved for three hours. People float by them like plankton, trailing comments like tentacles. “All the octopus’s internal organs are in that thing that looks like a nose!” explains a naturalist volunteer to a five-year-old.

  “Their legs are coming out of their lips!” exclaims another child.

  “They mate on Valentine’s Day?” says a woman to her date. “How do they know it’s Valentine’s Day?”

  Then at 2:15 the aquarium naturalist, Hariana Chilstrom, comes over. “Moving the spermatophore to the ligula is like ejaculation,” she tells me. “The ligula becomes engorged like a penis.” The spermatophore is produced by an actual penis inside the mantle. One spermatophore is moved from inside the mantle to the funnel. The flexible funnel moves to the groove in the hectocotylized arm and releases the single spermatophore into the groove. The spermatophore then moves down the groove in an arch and pump action down to the ligula, the tip of the hectocotylized arm.

  The mating male’s heart skips a beat as the spermatophore passes to the female, whose respiration increases. Just like us. And why not? “They have the same neurotransmitters as we humans do,” says Hariana.

  And every octopus is different. Hariana remembers one who had “a thing” for people in wheelchairs or using canes. The octopus would come close to take a look each time a person using such a device came into view. Another was particularly interested in watching small children. Often captive land predators like tigers show such preferences, too. Captive tigers are often riveted by the sight of someone with a disability, perhaps knowing they might make easy prey. Peter Jackson, chair of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature tiger specialist group, has noted that circus tigers used to stop in the middle of a performance to stare at his child, who has Down syndrome. Zoo tigers snap to attention when my friend Liz’s daughter, Stephanie, rolls by in her wheelchair. But the octopuses must have other reasons. We are not on their menu, so perhaps the metal of the chairs or canes flashes like silvery scales. Or perhaps they are simply curious because these folks move differently from the able-bodied masses.

  At 2:50, Rain and Squirt have shifted slightly. The scene is a peaceful and domestic one. A couple of his suckers are plastered to her face, as if he’s giving her a kiss on the cheek.

  At 3:07: “It might be getting toward the end,” says Katie. “They’re moving apart from each other.” Much of Squirt’s underside is now plastered to the tank’s glass, the skin on the underside of her arms pink between the white suckers. Her head and mantle, gray now, are lying on their side in his arms. A curious greenling approaches and looks at them. “She’s very nervy,” says Hariana of the fish. She tells me they used to have a wolf eel in the tank, too. His name was Gibson. “He was a home wrecker,” she says. He lived there three years, but he’d squabble with the octopuses over the dens. Gibson would bite off pieces of the octopuses’ arms, and in turn would get beat up.

  After so much inaction, we are all eager to see the two animals part, and watch what they do next. “I know this is going to happen the minute I get coffee. I know it, I know it,” says Hariana. We stay glued to the tank.

  3:45: Rain now has some dark mottling on his light webbing. Squirt’s face and eye have popped up into view, showing she’s bright red. We still can’t see her mantle opening. Roberta climbs up the ladder to look down into the tank but she can’t get a better view.

  4:05: Squirt is moving slowly upward along the wall of the tank, sucker by sucker. She is much darker than Rain, who is now a pale red. Two minutes later she stops in her tracks.

  An elderly Irish couple walks by. “They’re mating, Leo!” the wife exclaims to her husband in a charming brogue. Until she overheard a volunteer explaining what was happening, she tells me, she had looked at the immobile octopuses and “thought it was a cardboard cutout!” Turning to her husband, she says emphatically, “It’s a very beautiful experience! Very touching actually. Very moving.” Her frail husband, openmouthed and clinging precariously to his walker, seems not to understand. And yet she is radiant with eagerness to share her discovery with him, animated with the same excitement they must have felt together in the early days of their long marriage.

  At 4:37 Rain begins slowly moving the tips of two of his arms. He has turned white again. Squirt is now lying on her side, her mouth and the suckers surrounding it pressed against the glass, her arms outstretched in all directions like a starburst. The largest of her suckers are the size of a silver dollar. Rain molds his arms and body around her head and mantle. His funnel begins to heave. Some of her suckers seem to be flowing, as if she’s fidgeting.

  At 5:03, Squirt continues her slow crawl up the side of the tank, two arms stretching up high. A third arm looks like it is petting Rain. He has one arm draped over her.

  5:10: Squirt turns bright orange as the two of them abruptly jerk apart. Suddenly they unfurl in an explosion of arms and webbing. He jets to his right. She follows. She hits the floating plastic roses then and pauses at the bottom of the tank for a moment. A three-foot-long white spermatophore trails like a rope out of her mantle opening.

  “The couple has separated!” Hariana speaks into her walkie-talkie to the biologist who will take the night shift. “Copy that,” he answers. Squirt coughs (in octopus, this is known as gill flushing, which exposes the gray gills), turns white, then red—and the two octopuses start chasing each other around the tank.

  They look like great red banners flying in the wind. She starts moving to her left, across the rocks toward the tunnel, as he moves right, back toward his original perch. She gill flushes again, then turns and heads back toward Rain. It looks as if she is chasing him from his corner. She reaches her arms out to him, and he grabs her with two of his. He starts to pull her along with him as the two head off to the left again, wrapping one arm, two arms, three arms, now four arms around each other. Then they pull apart.

  At 5:23, Squirt begins to flow, her interbrachial web spread like a parachute, toward the sandy bottom, but then she gathers her arms beneath her and climbs up the glass to wedge herself into the upper corner of the tank, where Rain originally lay curled before they met. Rain, meanwhile, retreats toward the smaller side of the tank.

  “I’ve never seen so much action postcoitally!” says Hariana.

  At 5:26, they seem to have settled, like this morning, at opposite ends of the tank—but now their positions are reversed: She’s in his large tank, and he’s extending two of his arms into the passageway, about to enter her smaller one.

  “He woke up this morning and he had a nice huge home,” says the dapper, silver-haired man standing next to me, “and this female comes over and has sex with him. Now? Now he’s going to get stuck with a crummy little apartment. I bet he thinks, ‘I never should have gotten involved!’ ”

  The two are still in their opposite corners when the aquarium closes at 6 p.m. Night staff have no instructions to resurrect the barrier.

  In the morning, when I return, the two are back in their original places. The barrier between the two has been restored. The limp white tail of the spermatophore hanging from Squirt’s mantle is gone. Nobody has found it yet at the bottom of the tank, but it’s done its job. Its seven billion sperm would have squirted out, into her oviduct, while the two were joined. By now, the sperm will have already have attached themselves to the walls of her spermatheca, the gland where the sperm can remain viable for days, weeks, or months—until she allows them to fertilize her eggs, at the moment of her choosing
.

  Back at the New England Aquarium, March marks other new beginnings. All but one of the new glass panels of the Great Ocean Tank are in place; the largest of the coral sculptures, each cast from real coral, are finished and installed. Bill has left for a collecting expedition to the Bahamas to procure some four hundred of the thousand new animals that the refurbished reef, with its many new hiding places, will accommodate. Even with saws and drills screaming and the pervasive scent of glue, we can finally see the future taking shape.

  At lunch one day in the cafeteria, Christa describes to us her ten-year blueprint for her and Danny’s lives. “It’s not easy having a twin who’s different like this,” she explains. “You’re supposed to come into the world together, and then something happens. . . .” When she applied to colleges, she was angry and upset that Danny couldn’t come with her. Now her objective is to make sure they can be together. Her dream is for this part-time, temporary job to become full-time and permanent; to make enough money to afford a two-bedroom apartment for her and Danny near the aquarium; and for Danny to work in the aquarium, too, perhaps in the gift shop. Reasoning that an advanced degree in biology might help her qualify for a better job at the aquarium, she is working four days a week here, nights at the bar, and saving money for the $20,000 tuition to Harvard’s extension school, where she will earn her master’s while working full-time. “It’s intense,” she says, “but I can do it.”

  Marion has been missing for a few weeks from our Wonderful Wednesdays, plagued with headaches. But one week she surprises us with happy news: She’s getting married. We’ve met her brown-haired, bespectacled beau, Dave Lepzelter, a postdoc in biophysics at Boston University, who loves Star Wars, their nine pet rats, and the anacondas. They haven’t set the wedding date yet, but they have selected the officiant: Scott, Marion’s hero and mentor. (Neither a minister nor a justice of the peace, Scott did not bat an eye at the request. He and his wife, Tania Taranovski, had chosen evolutionary biologist Les Kaufman to officiate at their ceremony, which was held at the zoo, overseen by zebras and giraffes.)

  Anna, meanwhile, is dreading her seventeenth birthday without her best friend to celebrate with her. The middle of each month is a milestone, every fifteenth an anniversary of Shaira’s death. But last month was different. When she visited Shaira’s grave, she finally let herself cry. “My brain can keep attacking me by making me relive terrible memories I’ve already been through. But now,” she resolved, “I am going to fight back.”

  She chooses to spend her momentous first day as a seventeen-year-old with Karma and Octavia, the eels and anacondas, the chimeras and lumpfish, with Scott and Dave, Bill and Wilson, Christa and Andrew and me. Christa baked tiny cupcakes decorated with icing octopuses; I made a Bundt cake with an octopus banner mounted on toothpicks. Wilson has a special present for her—a large, dried sea horse from his vast natural history collection, amassed over decades of his travels all over the world. He continues to give much of it away, as he prepares to move from the large house he had shared with his wife to a smaller apartment. Every few Wednesdays, he brings us shells, books, corals; he donated his tiger shark jaws from Mexico to the aquarium. One weekend, with Andrew’s help, he packed up his last home aquarium fish, a Lake Victoria cichlid, and its tank to go live with Christa.

  Wilson’s wife has moved, too. She is no longer in hospice, but is in an assisted living community. For unknown reasons, the progression of her mysterious disease appears to have halted. Her doctors don’t consider her terminal anymore.

  With each new interaction, the octopuses remind us of endless possibilities. Karma’s severed arm has started to regrow. Her initial feistiness with Andrew has abated, and she is growing into an exceptionally calm octopus. She is unfailingly gentle with Wilson, Bill, and me. She touches us with her two front arms while applying very little suction. She pulls her face out of the water to look at me, and lets me pet her head. Quite often, she’s pure white, a snowpus, as we sometimes call her—though she does change color beautifully, especially when presented with her favorite toy. She especially enjoys a purple Kong rubber toy on loan from the seals. One day she clung to it from morning till closing time, and produced a series of purple veins on the milk-chocolate background of her mantle and arms to match it.

  Even though Octavia’s eggs are visibly shrinking, she still tends them with inspiring diligence. She appears to have taught the sunflower sea star a lesson. Now he sticks to his customary spot, as far away from her eggs as he can get.

  I can’t help but think about Squirt and Rain. The Seattle Aquarium can exercise an option that the New England Aquarium cannot: Because it was built just yards from the waters in which its display octopuses are caught, it can return its octopuses to the wild at the end of their lives. (Giant Pacific octopuses cannot be released in Atlantic waters; and flying Octavia back to British Columbia Pacific at her age and size would be too dangerous, even if it were financially feasible.) Squirt and Rain were released several weeks after the Blind Date, at the same area where they had been captured.

  How I wished I could have seen them released! But I did watch an Internet video of the release of another captive giant Pacific octopus called the Dude. He had lived on display at the Shaw Ocean Discovery Centre in Sidney, British Columbia, and had been captured in those waters seven months before, when he had weighed nine pounds, the same as Karma when she arrived. Returning home, he weighed more than 50 pounds.

  Four divers accompanied him, swimming beside and around their friend for a full hour.

  Bright orange and magnificently adorned with large, erect papillae, the Dude used his two rear arms to stride purposefully across a muddy bottom, carrying his front arms curled backward. He paused to explore, and occasionally obscure, the video camera with his suckers. Though it’s not shown in the clip, a post from one of his keepers says that the Dude also caught and ate a crab, and examined several different sites for potential dens.

  “He and I have had an incredible time together,” his aquarist wrote. “He has been extremely social, gregarious, and an all-around great octopus. It is sad to see an empty tank now. He will be missed! Later, Dude!” (One viewer replied sympathetically, “Sorry you had to lose your bud, but now he can find an octopus, and make more dudes.”)

  The affection the aquarists felt for the octopus appeared to be mutual. For the hour that they swam together, though the massive octopus could have easily escaped them, the Dude chose instead to keep his human friends by his side. Only when their tanks ran low on air did the divers reluctantly bid the Dude—“the best giant Pacific octopus in the world,” wrote one—goodbye.

  Watching that video, I longed to return to the ocean to watch octopuses where their choices would be as limitless as the sea. Come summer, I would have a chance to get my wish.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Consciousness

  To Think, to Feel, to Know

  I have entered the azure waters of Paradise—where, to my alarm, I am sinking like a stone.

  Minutes earlier, I had flipped backward off the side of the boat into rolling waves. That part was on purpose. Our boat, the 20-foot Opunohu, is too small for divers to enter the water using the giant stride. So, on my first dive since Mexico, I’ve successfully performed a back-roll entry. You sit facing backward on the edge of the boat with your tank suspended behind you. Holding your mask and regulator against your face with one hand, and your hoses in front with the other, you tuck your chin to your chest and lean backward to fall into the water, head over heels—a maneuver my scuba manual described as “somewhat disorienting.”

  But all went well, and after I signaled to my fellow divers at the surface that I was okay, holding on to the Opunohu’s anchor line and passing hand under hand, we descended for about 20 feet. Everything was fine . . . until I dumped the air from my buoyancy compensation device and let go. Now I am plunging toward the bottom, upside down, like a turtle on its back, a position from which I am able to watch the white bottom of our boa
t recede above me like a bad dream.

  Luckily, my dive buddy, Keith Ellenbogen, former scuba instructor and an acclaimed underwater photographer, grabs my hand and halts my descent. He understands immediately what’s wrong. Most countries use small, light, aluminum cylinders for scuba, but here in Mooréa, still technically part of France, divers remain loyal to the original material for the first Aqua-Lung tank, developed in 1943 by their countrymen Jacques Cousteau and Émile Gagnan—durable, but much heavier, steel. Yet in my brand-new BCD, I am carrying an additional 14 pounds of weight—less than the 17 I carried in Caribbean waters, but still too much for a small person with a steel tank.

  Keith’s grip gives me a chance to right myself. I’m grateful but mortified. We had buoyed each other through the twenty hours of travel from his home in New York, to Los Angeles, to Tahiti, and then the ferry ride to Mooréa, imagining this moment—when after months of anticipation, we would, at last, dive the tropical reefs of Polynesia in search of octopuses. Now that we are finally doing so, Keith—a Fulbright scholar who normally dives with the likes of Philippe Cousteau—has to drag me through the water as if pulling a sled up a hill.

  I’m keen to return to the spot where, just the day before, Keith had experienced what he called “one of the most exciting moments of my life.”

  While Keith had been diving that day, I’d been with the rest of the scientific team snorkeling, scouting study sites in the shallows. Jennifer Mather, the leader of our expedition, doesn’t dive, and doesn’t need to: All her studies of wild octopus have been conducted in shallow water, where she has always found plenty of octopuses. But here in Mooréa, we were having trouble.