The Soul of an Octopus Page 22

  It was not for lack of expertise. Jennifer is one of the world’s few preeminent researchers of octopus intelligence. Google “octopus intelligence” and her studies are the ones you’ll see cited most. David Scheel, fifty-one, whom I had met at the Octopus Symposium, has studied giant Pacific octopus for nineteen years in the cold, murky waters of Alaska, where he pioneered the first workable way to track octopuses with telemetry—by piercing a hole in the octopus’s gill slit, like you would an earlobe to accommodate an earring, and attaching a satellite tracking tag with a locking bolt. Brazilian researcher Tatiana Leite, thirty-seven, who had completed her doctoral studies with Jennifer as one of her advisers, has found and named a new species of octopus off Brazil’s Noronha island, and is in the process of describing five more. A few days into our trip, we had been joined by Keely Langford, twenty-nine. She’s not a scientist, but an educator at the Vancouver Aquarium, where she is renowned for her athletic diving and swimming skills, her encyclopedic knowledge of marine life, and her eagle-eyed observations.

  But even with this team of experts, our first three days of scouring the shallows had passed without our spotting a single octopus.

  Even by octopus standards, our study species is a master of disguise. Because it is active by day, Octopus cyanea is one of the best-camouflaged octopuses in the world: University of Hawaii researcher Heather Ylitalo-Ward reports that it has one of the highest numbers of pigment cells of any octopus species. And it’s also, she says, one of the smartest. In Hawaii, they often carry halved coconut shells as they walk. When the octopus travels, a coconut acts as portable armor protecting the underside from predators who lurk in the sand. When the octopus flips it over, the shell can provide a handy Quonset-hut-like shelter in an area with no suitable crevices in which to hide.

  Keith certainly did not expect to find an octopus on his first dive.

  But he did.

  With divemaster Franck Lerouvreur, Keith had departed in the boat via the channel just behind the dive center at CRIOBE, the French research station where we’re staying. Within 20 minutes, they arrived at a spot to drop anchor, where they could easily search along the barrier reef to the east of Opunohu. Even though Keith, forty-two, had been diving since he was sixteen, and has dived all over the world, he had never before seen or photographed a wild octopus. But Franck’s sharp eyes had been drawn to two empty scallop shells—evidence of an octopus meal. Inches from the shells, he and Keith found a hole filled with two purplish circles, each about an inch in diameter, set in a whitish background. Above the circles, like a crown, they saw the arc of what turned out to be an arm studded with suckers. The circles, they saw, were the bulbous eyes of an octopus watching them from its den. Keith was able to take several photos before the octopus retreated.

  The next day, Keith and Franck returned to the site. To Keith’s delight, they found the octopus right away. And this time, the animal was not shy. It allowed him to hang around while it traveled over a roughly 50-square-foot area of reef, changing color and pattern all the while. “It was like this dude was showing me around,” Keith said. “He seemed playful, and not afraid at all.”

  My philosopher friend Peter Godfrey-Smith and an Australian dive buddy, Matthew Lawrence, had discovered a site three hours south of Sydney that they call Octopolis, where, at a depth of about 60 feet, they have found as many as eleven Octopus tetricus living within one or two yards of each other. These are fairly large octopuses, with arm spans of six feet or more, and distinctive, soulful white eyes that also give the species the nickname “the gloomy octopus.” Matthew told me, “I’ve had a couple of experiences where we were diving at this site and an octopus grabbed my hand, and took me to its den, five meters away.” Once, an octopus took him on what he called “a big circuit” around the area, a tour that lasted for ten or twelve minutes. Afterward, the octopus climbed all over Matthew and investigated him with his suckers, as if, having shown him around the neighborhood, he now wanted to explore his human guest in turn. The octopuses he met, Matthew told me, were “not aggressive—they’re curious.” Because he dives Octopolis regularly, Matthew is certain the octopuses there recognize him. Perhaps, he mused, they even look forward to his visits. He often brings them toys—bottles, plastic screw-apart Easter eggs, and GoPro underwater video cameras—all of which they dismantle with interest and sometimes drag into their dens.

  To Keith’s amazement, after giving him a guided tour, the first octopus met up with a second octopus. Keith couldn’t decide which one to photograph. How can you decide which of your subjects is more photogenic, when both change color and shape before your eyes?

  Keith chose to stick with the first one, who crawled around the side of a rock. As Keith was photographing it, the second octopus traveled up and over a higher rock nearby, stood up tall on its arms, as if on tiptoe, and, with what looked like keen interest, leaned toward Keith and the other octopus he was photographing. “It actively positioned itself so it could observe me,” Keith said. “It was so amazing to be observed like that. In all my years photographing animals underwater—sharks, tuna, turtles, fish—I’ve never encountered anything that watched me like this. It was like a person watching a model at a fashion-photo shoot, or watching a pro football player at a game. Most of the time, fish observe you and notice you. But they don’t look at you like this, like they are watching and learning. It was one of the most incredible experiences of my life.”

  Possibly the first octopus had recognized Keith, and that was why it had allowed him so close, and to stay with him so long. On his second dive, Keith had spent about half an hour all told in the company of the first octopus. Perhaps the animal will feel even more at ease if they meet for a third time. And what of the second octopus? Were the two still together? Maybe there are even more octopuses in this area. We might, I hope, make a discovery of great interest to the team.

  Keith and I swim over two deep channels that run parallel to the beach. In the crystalline water, we have an excellent view in all directions. Below us, a rubble-strewn landscape tells of destruction and renewal. The reefs here were relatively undisturbed until the 1980s. Then came a plague of reef-eating starfish in 1980 and ’81; hurricanes and cyclones struck the island for the first time since 1906 in 1982, and again in 1991, breaking branching corals and smothering others with runoff from heavy rains. Baby corals have now begun to recolonize the area, making Mooréa a valuable living laboratory for researchers studying reef recovery. Meanwhile, the underwater landscape of holes and crevices seems custom-made for octopuses.

  We descend toward the den site, 69 feet below the surface. Holding Keith’s steadying hand, breathing easily underwater, and supported by the comforting pressure of the sea, I feel free, again, to join the floating parade of beautiful, improbable lives around me. Keith points to a school of yellowfin goatfish, their chin whiskers equipped with chemoreceptors that let them taste and smell food hidden among coral and under sand. Right now these 11-inch fish sport electric yellow stripes over satiny white; but, like those of the octopus, their colors aren’t static. These fish are capable of a feat that earned their Mediterranean relatives an unenviable star turn at Roman feasts. Goatfish were presented to guests live, so that diners could watch them, in their death throes, change color. Around us, teacup-size butterfly fish, citrine slashed with ebony, glide alongside their mates, demonstrating a bond they will honor throughout their lives, which may last for seven years. Beneath us, emerald and turquoise parrot fish pluck algae from coral with their beaks—actually mosaics of tightly packed teeth. Each sleeps in its own private mucous cocoon, a slimy sleeping bag secreted from the mouth, to conceal its scent from predators. Parrot fish are sequential hermaphrodites: All are born female, and later transform themselves to males.

  The very existence of such creatures reminds me: Anything can happen.

  Keith easily locates the octopus den. The two scallop shells are still there, exactly as the octopus had left them. But the octopus is not home. Carefu
lly we explore a 100-foot radius around the den, an area pocked with nooks and crannies into which an octopus could melt as easily as butter into an English muffin. Perhaps Keith’s octopus is out hunting, and if it’s nearby, there’s a chance we’ll spot it.

  We swim together, searching, surrounded by fish with cartoon names, in Godspell colors, trailing drama-queen fins. Keith points, and then fins away briefly for a photograph. Treading water furiously so as not to flip or sink, I look up: My dive buddy is surrounded by eight peaceful, four-foot blacktip reef sharks. Backlit by the sun above, all nine swimming creatures are cradled in light like a halo.

  We surface too exhilarated to be disappointed. But as another precious day passes with no octopus, it’s hard for me not to remember what else I’m missing. The day I arrived in Mooréa was the day of Marion and Dave’s wedding. Today the transformed Giant Ocean Tank officially opened to the public, filled with its spectacular new coral sculptures and hundreds of new fish. I miss my aquarium friends, both vertebrate and invertebrate—especially after what we’d been through together earlier that spring.

  It was remarkable: Even inside the aquarium’s dim halls, far from a source of natural light and enclosed in their tanks of filtered water, so many animals seemed to sense it was spring. Even though some fish, especially from the tropics, breed year around, March’s melt into April had spiked a surge in piscine sex hormones.

  A male fallfish—the largest member of the minnow family in northeastern North America—started showing off to the females. Carrying pebbles in his mouth, he built a mound of gravel on the bottom of the tank, and then garnished it with a silk plant he plucked and then planted in the middle. This behavior is similar to that of the male bowerbird of Australia, who, rather than flash gaudy feathers, builds elaborate, brightly decorated sculptures to attract a mate. Though the fallfish is common to swift streams and clear lakes, its elaborate mating rituals have seldom been witnessed.

  In Cold Marine, the male lumpfish has finally scored. One of the females is bloated up like a beach ball, full of eggs. Any day now, she will lay her hundreds of orange eggs in the male’s rocky nesting area, which he will fertilize and then assiduously guard.

  In the neighboring tank, the goosefish produced another veil.

  “If I ever get married,” Anna told Bill and me, “I’m going to design my veil to look like this.”

  “Only a little less slimy?” I suggested.

  Bill countered, “No—for Anna, she’d want it slime and all.”

  And in Freshwater, one morning I arrived to witness a historic birth. Brendan held the lip of a rare, two-inch Lake Victoria cichlid open with one hand and gently squeezed her belly with the other. Out shot twenty-three babies, each the size of guppy fry! Each female incubates her fertilized eggs in her mouth. This species, Scott explains, is so rare it hasn’t got a Latin name yet; they are virtually extinct in the wild, and to his knowledge, no birth had been recorded before in captivity. “We have probably just tripled the world’s population of these fish just now,” Scott said.

  All the breeding had added excitement to my visits that spring. Not that I needed more—my approach to Octavia’s tank was thrilling enough. Though I could have easily taken an elevator or the back stairs, I always loved the anticipation of walking up the spiral ramp, past the penguin tray full of tropical fishes, past the flooded Amazon forest, past the Suriname toads (one of whom, now fully trained for display, was always visible to the public), past the anacondas and electric eel, past the Isles of Shoals and Eastport Harbor exhibits, past the goosefish and her veil, past the velvety green anemones washed by the artificially crashing surf . . . to finally arrive in front of Octavia’s tank.

  Until one morning, before my trip to the South Pacific, I came in and found her left eye had swollen to the size of an orange.

  At first I told myself I must be mistaken. Maybe what looked like a horrible infection was really an illusion created by the water in dim light. I turned on my flashlight. Octavia’s cornea was still bulging, so opaque I could not see her slit pupil.

  “Oh, there you are,” Wilson said. He had been waiting for me to feed both octopuses.

  “Look at this!” I cried, too distressed to even greet him. “Look at her eye!”

  “Oh, no,” said Wilson. “That isn’t good. Let’s get Bill.”

  Bill peered into Octavia’s exhibit. By this time she had turned slightly, and we saw to our dismay that the other eye was swollen and cloudy, too, though less so. “Her eyes weren’t like that on Monday,” Bill said with concern.

  Then Octavia began to move. Sucker by sucker, she peeled away from the ceiling and sides of her lair, loosening her grip on her precious, shrinking eggs. Finally, only a few suckers of one arm remained in contact with the mass. Her seven other arms began to meander aimlessly along the bottom.

  Her action mystified us. The sea star was in his usual position, as far from her as he could get. No one was threatening her eggs. There was no food on the bottom. She seemed to be . . . just wandering.

  I wondered if she were blind—but perhaps that would not matter. Octopuses who have been experimentally blinded navigate flawlessly using their senses of touch and taste. Worse, she could be in pain. (Though cooks who throw lobsters into boiling water insist invertebrates’ attempts to escape are mere reflexes, they’re wrong. Prawns whose antennae are brushed with acetic acid carefully groom the injured sensors with complex, prolonged movements—which diminish when anesthetic is applied. Crabs who have been shocked rub the hurt spot for long periods after the initial injury. Robyn Crook, an evolutionary neurobiologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center, finds octopuses also do this, and are more likely to swim away or squirt ink when touched near a wound than when touched elsewhere on the body.)

  “What is happening, Bill?” I asked helplessly.

  He watched the old octopus for a few moments. Her movements seemed restless and disoriented. Her mantle was throbbing. Her body looked like the embodiment of a big headache.

  “This,” he said to us sadly, “is senescence.”

  In her old age, Octavia’s tissues were simply breaking down. The previous weekend, I had seen this in my neighbor, who is ninety-two. She was thinner, dimmer, frailer. Her delicate skin bruised easily. She mentioned having seen an elephant on the lawn. Body and soul, she seemed to be deliquescing like fallen fruit.

  When other octopuses go through this phase, “they sort of wander around,” Bill said. “They get white patches. I haven’t seen this with the eye before, though.”

  Again I felt the panic that had risen in my chest that night the previous August, when Octavia’s body had looked like a bloated tumor, and Wilson and I both thought she was dying. But now, it seemed, the time we had dreaded had finally arrived.

  “What should we do?” I asked.

  There is no cure for old age, no treatment for an octopus with senility. “I like finishing up the natural process on exhibit,” said Bill. “But that’s not always possible. . . . ”

  Was there anything that would make Octavia more comfortable at the end of her long life? Should she be moved to the cozy safety of the barrel? Wild females on eggs often wall up their dens with rocks. The barrel re-created that situation more fully than the exhibit tank with its big front window.

  Moving Octavia would also free up the exhibit for young Karma. She was outgrowing the barrel, as Kali had. She appeared to have given up on trying to get out. At our slap on the water, she would come up to the surface to greet us, a dark reddish brown, eat her food, and then sink to the bottom of the barrel and turn white. She was a sweet, gentle octopus, but we wondered whether it might be healthier for her to be more active.

  Wilson strongly felt Octavia and Karma should be switched. Andrew and Christa were horrified at the suggestion. Interestingly, the young people were more concerned about the old octopus, and the elder was arguing for the welfare of the young one. “Take her off exhibit, away from her eggs?” Christa said. “That
would devastate her!” Andrew was afraid it would kill her to move.

  “But that’s what we do with old people with dementia,” I observed. “When they go senile, we take them off exhibit.” Wilson laughed, a little sadly. “I never thought of it this way,” he said, “but it’s true.” People with dementia can’t safely negotiate the wider world. Many seem calmer in a smaller, simpler space. But what about an octopus?

  We owed Octavia repose in her old age. Karma, too, of course, richly deserved the best life we could give her. But we knew Octavia better than we knew Karma. Octavia had enriched our lives since she arrived in spring of 2011, then already a large octopus with knowledge of the wild ocean, an octopus who understood camouflage better than any other Bill or Wilson had ever met. Shy at first, she had opened up to us, and we’d won her over. I remembered so well the first time she had briefly extended the tip of one arm to my friend Liz’s finger, and both withdrew; I remembered the first time she chose to interact with me—and nearly pulled me into the tank. Octavia had made us all laugh when she surreptitiously managed to seize a bucket of fish unseen, while no fewer than five people were watching her. Octavia’s touch had eased Anna through the agony of losing her best friend. We had a history together. For sharing with us her surprising and revelatory life, we owed Octavia comfort and respect at its end.

  We were all tortured by the uncertainty. Nature offered no advice; her model is not kind. In the wild, Octavia surely would have been dead by now. Even if she had survived long enough to lay eggs and see them hatch, were she wild, she would have spent her last days wandering, alone, starving and senile, to be eaten by a predator or scavenged, like Olive, the octopus off Seattle’s coast, by sea stars.

  We humans changed that natural path when we took Octavia from the ocean. Because of human intervention, Octavia never got to meet a male to fertilize her eggs. Despite her assiduous care, she would never see her eggs hatch. But we had fed her and protected her; we had provided her with marine neighbors, interesting views, and entertaining interactions with people and puzzles. We had kept her from hunger, fear, and pain. In the wild, virtually every hour of every day would have brought the risk that a predator would bite off part of her body, as had happened to Karma, or that she would be torn limb from limb and eaten alive.