The Soul of an Octopus Page 23

  Since laying her eggs, Octavia seemed no longer to want our touch or our company, but she still, at least, seemed to enjoy our food. So Wilson offered her three squid. She seized the first in her left front arm, but dropped it to the bottom of the tank, where it was eagerly devoured by an orange sea star. Wilson placed the second squid directly in her mouth, where she held it for a moment, then let it go. She also dropped the third.

  If Bill moved her, Octavia might feel rescued from the confusion of too much space and too many options. Or she might fight with her last bit of strength to defend her eggs. But in the absence of any cues that the eggs were alive after all these months, perhaps she was now forgetting about them. We didn’t know. Nobody even knew whether Octavia could be moved.

  Bill wasn’t sure what he’d do, but no matter what his choice, the decision would be agonizing.

  “Don’t worry.” Jennifer’s voice, coming from beneath the mosquito net cloaking the bed across from mine in our shared room at CRIOBE, greets me at first light. “We’ll find octopuses. I don’t know how many. I don’t know how good the data will be. But we’ll find octopuses, know that. We’ve got bloodhounds. These people are really good.”

  I haven’t said a word, but Jennifer knows what I’m thinking. Field science is, by nature, unpredictable. I had learned this on other expeditions, too. We did not see any snow leopards in Mongolia; I saw a tiger exactly once in four trips to India’s mangrove swamp, the Sundarbans. Sometimes your study animal does not materialize. Still, you can often accomplish a great deal: We had collected leopard scat for DNA analysis in Mongolia, and I had studied a lot of tracks, and amassed many local stories, in India. But here in Mooréa, we really must actually meet octopuses—because we need to administer personality tests to them to carry out our study.

  Jennifer had created a personality check sheet to measure whether an octopus was bold or shy. Writing in pencil underwater on a plastic dive slate, we were to record how the animal reacted to different situations. What does the octopus do when you approach it? Does it hide, change color, investigate, ink? What happens when you touch the octopus gently with a pencil? Does it jet from its burrow? Retreat? Grab the pencil? Aim its jet at the intruder? Just watch?

  Our study aims to test three hypotheses about what these octopuses eat and why. David, a behavioral ecologist, suspects octopuses prefer big crabs, but will eat a wider menu if they can’t find them. Tatiana, a marine ecologist, predicts that octopuses who live in more complex environments will eat a more varied diet. And Jennifer is testing for the effect of personality on food choices. She reasons that, much like many confident, intrepid people, bold octopuses may make more adventurous diners. To find out, we’ll collect and identify the prey remains around each octopus den.

  Jennifer had developed the personality test over many years—in spite of many arched eyebrows from skeptical colleagues. She’s sixty-nine, and began her career at a time when few scientists believed animals had personalities—or that women made capable field scientists. That’s why she trained as a psychologist. At Brandeis University, she studied human sensory-motor coordination, specifically eye movements, for her PhD; she later went on to study the eye movements peculiar to people with schizophrenia. But she was fascinated by cephalopods and set up tanks for Octopus joubini in the basement of Brandeis’s Psychology Department, and began cataloging octopuses’ movements and how they used their tank space.

  “So when I started asking deeper questions about octopus than just ‘what is it doing?’ I turned to psychology,” Jennifer tells me as sunrise parts the clouds over the jungle-clad volcano out our dormitory window, and roosters start to crow. “I’m quite aware octopuses don’t have a mother complex—Freud is no help! But I am also aware that in animals, as well as people, there is an inborn temperament, a way of seeing the world, that interacts with the environment, and that shapes personality. There’s nobody else doing what I’m doing. It may be weird, but it’s unique.”

  Once overlooked or dismissed outright, Jennifer’s work now is respected and cited by cognitive neuroscientists, neuropharmacologists, neurophysiologists, neuroanatomists, and computational neuroscientists—including a prominent international group of whom gathered at the University of Cambridge in England in 2012 to write a historic proclamation, the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness. Signed by scientists including physicist Stephen Hawking in front of 60 Minutes cameras, it asserts that “humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness” and that “nonhuman animals, including all birds and mammals, and many other creatures, including octopuses [italics added], also possess these neurological substrates.”

  No one knows octopuses like Jennifer does. If she says we’ll find octopuses, I have to trust that we will.

  We head out that morning to snorkel at one of the potential study sites we scouted earlier, an area with a gentle, sloping bottom that comes to a steep drop-off, boasting both live and dead coral, a hard top, and numerous gullies. While the others search the shallows, David and I swim off to the deeper area. David almost immediately finds octopus evidence: two crab claws piled on a flame scallop shell as carefully as a stack of plates piled in the kitchen sink after dinner. “A den, but no octopus,” he observes. “But I declare this site very promising.”

  I feel like I’ve won the lottery. Jennifer seems most interested in searching in only three or four feet of water. But I find the shallows difficult. There we constantly plow our lips, foreheads, and chins into big clots of brown, bristly algae called Turbinaria ornata; at every turn, I fear I’ll scrape my nipples off on the jagged skeletons of dead coral. I’m afraid I’ll kick one of the few living corals, or squash a sea cucumber, or, God forbid, impale myself on the tall, black, poisonous spines of one of the sea urchins we see everywhere, or a deadly stonefish, which we don’t see, because they are exactly the color of sand. (Their sting can kill you, but not before inflicting pain so unbearable that victims beg doctors to amputate the afflicted body part.)

  Swimming here, in deeper water, is pure delight. All around us, fish dazzle and shimmer with iridescent stripes, glowing eyes, fiery orange bellies, black masks, Jackson Pollock spots. A hawksbill sea turtle swims beneath us, oaring the water with its winglike, leathery front flippers. More blacktip sharks slide by, weightless as dappled light. Beneath us, the bottom, flecked with blue and yellow living corals, offers what seems like countless crevices ideal for octopus.

  David teaches me to free-dive. Holding your breath, you dive below to investigate a den site, then emerge blowing water from your snorkel like a spouting whale. He’s found more than ten piles of food remains, so many shells and carapaces he’s stopped collecting them in the lidded bucket attached to his weight belt. Inspecting coral crevices with his waterproof flashlight, David finds the evidence everywhere: Shells are stacked up one atop the other, with crab claws resting on top, like spoons in a bowl. “Nobody else is going to leave these in a pile!” he says. “The octopus must have just stepped out.” In fact, by midmorning, he’s located at least three octopus dens. But none of the occupants is in.

  Overhead, we notice the sky is bruised with the dark clouds of a gathering storm. Reluctantly, we turn toward shore to rejoin the others. In the distance, we can see them waving at us. We swim faster to catch up. Jennifer pulls her snorkel from her mouth. “I’m looking at an octopus!” she announces, and plunges her face back into the water.

  By the time I find the octopus, all I can see in the cavern into which it has retreated are some white suckers along one bluish arm. But there’s more good news: This is the second octopus of the day. Tatiana had found one in the first ten minutes of their foray. The animal had been out hunting, its arms and interbrachial web spread across a shallow gully, its skin an iridescent blue-green. When it saw her, it turned its head brown first, and then its arms, and then poured itself down its hole.

  The clouds now hiss rain down on us, loud as sizzling grease. The water is not a good plac
e to be when lightning threatens, so we decide to head back to CRIOBE. As Tatiana sits down in the foot-deep water to remove her fins, David takes one last look. Right beside her, he notices a pile of shells beside a rock, a hole—and the suckers of a third octopus.

  On subsequent days, we investigate more sites, mostly without octopus sightings. Still, by the end of our first week, we have located six octopuses at three different study sites. We’ve gathered and identified hundreds of prey items; we’ve collected thousands of data points from the habitat. I feel deeply attached to my new friends and, profoundly grateful for the success of our expedition, I want to give thanks. So that Sunday, when the team takes a day off, while the others sightsee and birdwatch, I go with Keith to the octopus church.

  In the village of Papetoai, just a short drive from CRIOBE, there was once a temple dedicated to the octopus, the guardian spirit of the place. To Mooréa’s seafaring people, the supernaturally strong, shape-shifting octopus was their divine protector, its many reaching arms a symbol of unity and peace. Today, a Protestant church occupies that site. Built in 1827, the oldest church in Mooréa still honors the octopus. The eight-sided building nestles in the shadow of Mount Rotui, whose shape, to the people here, resembles the profile of an octopus.

  Taking seats in the back, Keith and I are the only foreigners to join the packed congregation of about 120 people. Almost everyone around us has a tattoo; many of the women wear elaborate hats made of bamboo and live flowers. The minister wears a long, waist-length garland of green leaves, yellow hibiscus, white frangipani, and red and pink bougainvillea; the women in the choir are adorned with headdresses of flowers and leaves. When the choir sings, their voices ring deep and sonorous, like a chant coming from the sea itself. The front of the church faces the ocean, and the sea breeze blows through the open windows like a blessing. “This is like going to Atlantis,” Keith whispers.

  The service is conducted in Tahitian, a language I don’t understand. But I understand the power of worship, and the importance of contemplating mystery—whether in a church or diving a coral reef. The mystery that congregants seek here is no different, really, from the one I have sought in my interactions with Athena and Kali, Karma and Octavia. It is no different from the mystery we pursue in all our relationships, in all our deepest wonderings. We seek to fathom the soul.

  But what is the soul? Some say it is the self, the “I” that inhabits the body; without the soul, the body is like a lightbulb with no electricity. But it is more than the engine of life, say others; it is what gives life meaning and purpose. Soul is the fingerprint of God.

  Others say that soul is our innermost being, the thing that gives us our senses, our intelligence, our emotions, our desires, our will, our personality, and identity. One calls soul “the indwelling consciousness that watches the mind come and go, that watches the world pass.” Perhaps none of these definitions is true. Perhaps all of them are. But I am certain of one thing as I sit in my pew: If I have a soul—and I think I do—an octopus has a soul, too.

  There are no crucifixes or crosses in this church—only carvings of fish and boats, which make me feel free and forgiven. Riding the rolling waves of Tahitian vowels, I’m transported by the pastor’s sermon: to the Gilbert Islands, where the octopus god, Na Kika, was said to be the son of the first beings, and with his eight strong arms, shoved the islands up from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean; to the northwest coast of British Columbia and Alaska, where the native people say the octopus controls the weather, and wields power over sickness and health; to Hawaii, where ancient myths tell us our current universe is really the remnant of a more ancient one—the only survivor of which is the octopus, who managed to slip between the narrow crack between worlds. For seafaring and coastal people everywhere, the octopus’s transformative powers and elastic reach connected land and sea, heaven and earth, past and present, people and animals. Facing the ocean in an eight-sided church, drenched in blessings, immersed in mystery, my natural response, even on an expedition in the name of science, is to pray.

  I pray for the success of our expedition. I pray I’ll finally get to see more than just some suckers under a rock. I pray for my husband, my dog, my friends back in the States; I pray for the Giant Ocean Tank—please, God, don’t let it leak!—and for my friends at the aquarium. And I pray for the souls of the octopuses I have known; those who are alive, and those who have died, but whom I will never forget.

  After I had left the aquarium, Octavia’s left eye got worse, and her right eye was cloudy. Especially if she were senescent, and not in her right mind, in a tank full of other animals and rough surfaces, the chances she might further injure herself were great. And by Thursday morning, another factor had arisen that Bill was forced to consider.

  At about 10 a.m., his glance was drawn to movement in Karma’s barrel. Without opening the top, he looked down on a sight he had never before seen: an octopus hanging upside down at the surface, her black beak clearly visible, persistently chewing on the mesh-like plastic conweb across the top of the lid.

  Karma had already severed some of the brand-new cable ties that held the mesh onto the screw top. When Bill saw this, he understood why he’d had to replace some of the ties after Kali died. Now he realized that the damage to the ties had not just been the result of normal wear and tear: Kali, like Karma, had been systematically gnawing through them in an effort to escape.

  “I was nervous,” Bill told me. “I still didn’t want to move Octavia.” He was afraid he might injure her; he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to catch her at all. He had never moved a live octopus out of the exhibit before. “But Karma gave me no choice. Octavia gave me no choice.”

  Bill spent the rest of that Thursday moving around fish: he transferred some redfish from Eastport to the Boulder Reef tank to make room for some rainbow smelt to move from behind the scenes to the Eastport tank, so that some new sea stars from Japan could occupy their vacated tank. He moved two small redfish, two snailfish, and one radiated shanny from behind the scenes to the Eastport tank, freeing their tank for a new, small red octopus, the size of my hand, who had just arrived. Bill chose to try to move Octavia and Karma after the public had left, because he wasn’t sure how it would go.

  Luckily, Bill’s Thursday volunteer, Darshan Patel, twenty-nine, was there to help. Together they lifted Karma’s 50-gallon barrel out of the sump and placed it on the floor. Bill propped open the lid to Octavia’s exhibit. While Darshan watched from the public side, Bill used a soft, deep-bodied mesh net with a metal handle to try to scoop Octavia up from her corner. At the touch of the net, Octavia tucked up deeper into her corner; Bill couldn’t reach her from that angle. So the two men switched positions, and Darshan went upstairs to make sure Octavia didn’t try to escape the open tank while Bill went downstairs to assess the situation.

  To give them more room to maneuver, they needed to remove an additional portion of the cover, which was bolted to the tank. Darshan donned waders so he could stand in the tank while Bill worked from above. Octavia’s cloudy eyes swiveled to follow him as he worked.

  Darshan is five foot ten; the water came up to his waist, but when he bent over, cold water poured inside his waders. When the lid came off, Octavia began to move toward the back glass that separates her tank from the wolf eels. Bill worked a net above; Darshan used a net, plus his free hand, while in the water. “We were being gentle, trying to guide her into the net,” Bill told me. But Octavia evaded them again and again. Even with four of her arms in the net, she was holding on to the rocks with four others. As Darshan pursued her, she poured two of her arms and half her body into a crevice and refused to let go. “For an old octopus, she was still super-strong,” Darshan said. “You have to have respect for her suckers. It’s crazy how strong they are.”

  It was obvious this wasn’t going to work. So while Darshan, soaked and freezing, stayed in the tank, with Octavia just inches from the top, Bill changed quickly into his wet suit. They prayed Octavia wouldn’t try t
o come out.

  Darshan moved back as Bill got into the cramped tank, both men careful to step around the two leather stars and the anemones on the bottom. And then, as the sea star observed the proceedings eyelessly from his usual position across from Octavia’s lair, Bill bent his six-foot-five frame in half so that, although he couldn’t see her tucked up under the rocks, he could feel Octavia’s suckers. With his fingers, he gently urged her into his waiting net.

  To Darshan’s astonishment, at the touch of Bill’s hand, Octavia entered Bill’s net on the first try. She had not tasted Bill’s skin for ten months. All that time, because she was under the ceiling of her lair, she could not see it was him handing her food on the grabber. And yet, Octavia’s response to Bill’s touch showed two remarkable aspects of her relationship with her keeper. She not only remembered him; she trusted him, too.

  It’s really no wonder the wild octopuses don’t come out when we find them in Mooréa. Even the bolder ones—several have grabbed our pencils when prodded gently—seem to know the world is dangerous for an invertebrate without a protective shell. We’ve come face-to-face with a number of moray eels at our study sites, as well as sharks, and worse: We investigated one promising site and couldn’t figure out why there weren’t any octopuses there—until we discovered fishermen had been there before us.

  So, just three days before my planned departure, most of the octopuses have done nothing but hide. When we return to one of our previous study sites to check a marked den, the octopus who lives here again shows us nothing but her suckers.