The Soul of an Octopus Read online

  I was looking forward to meeting Bill and Wilson, and was hungry to hear what they had to tell me. But even more, I longed to see Athena again and to learn how she behaved among people she knew. And I wondered: Would she recognize me?

  Bill meets me in the aquarium lobby. He’s thirty-two years old, six foot five, slender, and strong, with short brown hair and a smile that takes over his whole face, crinkling the edges of his eyes. Tentacles creep down from under the right sleeve of his green aquarium shirt—the tattoo of a Portuguese man-of-war, a stinging jellyfish, with an azure sail. We walk up the staircase to the aquarium café, and then take the Employees Only stairway to the Cold Marine Gallery, which Bill runs. He’s in charge of 15,000 animals here, from invertebrates like Athena and the sea stars and anemones, to giant lobsters and endangered turtles and the strange, ancient chimera, or ghost shark—a deepwater species with grinding, instead of sharp, teeth, whose cartilaginous kind branched off from the shark lineage 400 million years ago. Bill knows each of his charges personally; he has known many of them since they were born (or hatched, or budded) under his care; many others, he collected on expeditions to the chilly waters of Maine and the Pacific Northwest.

  Wilson is already here. He’s a much smaller man than Bill, trim and quiet, with a dark moustache, the hairline of a grandfather of nearly grown grandchildren, and a Middle Eastern accent I can’t quite place. He looks much younger than his seventy-eight years.

  It’s nearly 11 a.m., Athena’s feeding time. A dish of silvery, five-inch capelin awaits her, sitting on the lid of an adjoining tank. We don’t want to keep her waiting.

  The men heave the heavy tank top up and attach it to an overhead hook to keep it propped open. The lid is covered in fine mesh and precisely contoured to fit the elaborate curves of the tank’s outlines, a precaution perfected over the course of many octopuses, to prevent escape. Bill leaves me with Wilson to attend to other chores in his gallery. Wilson mounts the short movable stair and leans over the tank.

  Athena rises up from her lair like steam from a pot. She’s coming to Wilson so quickly it takes my breath away—much faster than she had come to see me earlier.

  “She knows me,” Wilson states simply. He reaches into the cold water to greet her.

  Athena’s white suckers arch from the water to grasp Wilson’s hands and forearms. She looks at him with her silvery eye, then surprises me: She flips over, like a puppy showing its belly. Wilson hands a fish to the center suckers on one of her front arms. The food heads toward her mouth like on a conveyor belt as she passes it from sucker to sucker. I’m eager to see inside her mouth, glimpse her beak. But I am disappointed. The fish disappears like the stairs at the end of an escalator. Wilson says he’s never known an octopus to show its beak.

  Only now do I notice that a large orange sunflower sea star is moving toward Wilson’s hand. With more than twenty limbs, called “rays,” befitting a star, and an arm span of more than two feet, it’s edging toward us on 15,000 tube feet. Like all sea stars, this largest of all the species has no eyes, no face, and no brain. (As an embryo, the sea star starts to grow one, but apparently thinks better of it and instead forms a neural net around the mouth.)

  “He wants a fish too,” Wilson says. (This sea star is, in fact, male, as became evident when he released his sperm one day, clouding the tank.) Wilson hands him a capelin with the same easy motion with which one might pass the butter dish to a guest at the dinner table.

  How can a brainless animal “want” anything—much less communicate its desires to another species? Perhaps Athena knows. To her, the sea star may be a distinct individual, a neighbor whose habits and quirks she recognizes and anticipates. At the Hatfield Marine Science Center’s Visitor Center, when the octopus was done playing with Mr. Potato Head, the sea star would take the eyes and carry them around between two of his arms. (“He looked really cute,” Kristen Simmons, who invented the painting apparatus for the octopus, told me.) She described their sea star as “inquisitive” and told me that whenever the octopus gets a new toy, the sea star “tries to take it away from him—which I find amazing.” If a staffer moved a toy away from this sea star, the animal would hurry to retrieve it.

  I wonder: Can a brainless animal feel curiosity? Does it want to play? Or does it only “want” toys or food the way a plant “wants” the sun? Does a sea star experience consciousness? If it does, what does consciousness feel like to a sea star?

  Clearly, I have entered a world I cannot judge by the rules I have learned on land among vertebrates. The sea star begins to dissolve the fish before our eyes, the capelin melting away as though viewed via time-lapse photography. The sea star can extrude its stomach outside the mouth to digest prey, which is usually sea urchins, snails, sea cucumbers, and other sea stars.

  The sea star sated, Wilson turns back to Athena and feeds her the rest of the fish. He hands her one fish after another, three more in all. He deposits each in the suckers of a different arm. I watch in astonishment as the octopus conveys each fish along her suckers, toward her mouth. It seems to take a long time before each fish reaches its destination. Why doesn’t she just flex the arm and place the fish directly in her mouth? Then it occurs to me: Perhaps it’s for the same reason we lick an ice cream cone instead of shoving it past the tongue down the throat. Taste is pleasurable, and it’s pleasurable because it’s useful: this is how we know what is good and safe to eat and what is inedible. An octopus does the same with its suckers.

  Once Athena finishes eating her fish, she plays gently with Wilson’s hands and forearms. Occasionally the tendril-like tip of an arm curls up to his elbow, but almost lazily; mostly her arms twist weightlessly in the water, her suckers gently kissing his skin. With me, before, her suction had felt exploratory, insistent. But with Wilson she is completely relaxed. As I look at the man and the octopus touching each other, they remind me of a happy older couple, many years into a loving marriage, tenderly holding hands.

  I put my hands in the water with Wilson’s and touch one of Athena’s unoccupied arms. I slowly stroke some of her suckers. They fold to fit the contours of my skin and latch on. I can’t tell if she recognizes me. Though I am sure she can taste I am a different person, Athena seems to consider me a part of Wilson, the way a person might behave toward a companion that a trusted friend has brought along. Athena latches onto my skin slowly, languidly, the same way she did greeting Wilson. I lean over to glimpse her pearly eye, and she pulls her head to the surface to look me in the face.

  “She has eyelids like a person does,” says Wilson. He gently passes his hand over her eyes, causing her to slowly wink. She doesn’t recoil or move away. The fish are gone; she is staying near the surface for the company.

  “She’s a very gentle octopus,” Wilson says, almost dreamily, “very gentle. . . .”

  Has working with octopuses made him gentler or more compassionate? Wilson pauses. “I don’t have the language to answer that question,” he says. Wilson was born along the Caspian Sea, in Iran, near Russia, and spoke Arabic before he learned English as a small child because his parents were from Iraq. He doesn’t mean that he lacks the English skills to answer. He means that he hasn’t thought of this before. “I’ve always liked toddlers and kids,” he says. “I can relate to them. This is . . . similar.”

  As with a child, to commune with Athena demands a level of openness and intuition greater than that used in the usual discourse between adult humans of a common culture. But Wilson doesn’t equate this strong, smart, wild-caught adult octopus to a baby human—unfinished, incomplete, not quite fully developed. Athena is, in the words of the late, great Canadian storyteller Farley Mowat, “more-than-human,” a being who doesn’t need us to bring her to completion. The wonder is that she will allow us to be part of her world.

  “Don’t you feel honored?” I ask Wilson.

  “Yes,” he says emphatically. “Yes.”

  Bill, rejoining us from his errands, leans his tall frame over the tank and rea
ches in to stroke Athena’s head.

  “It’s a rare pleasure,” Bill says. “Not everyone can do this.”

  How long did we stay with Athena? It’s impossible to say. Of course, we had removed our watches before plunging our arms into the water. Once we did, we entered what we called Octopus Time. Feelings of awe are known to expand the human experience of time availability. So does “flow,” the state of being fully immersed in focus, involvement, and enjoyment. Meditation and prayer, too, alter time perception.

  And there is another way we alter our experience of time. We as well as other animals can mimic another’s emotional state. This involves mirror neurons—a type of brain cell that responds equally whether we’re watching another perform an action, or whether we’re performing that action ourselves. If you are with, for example, a calm, deliberate person, your own perception of time may begin to match his. Perhaps, as we stroked her in the water, we entered into Athena’s experience of time—liquid, slippery, and ancient, flowing at a different pace than any clock. I could stay here forever, filling my senses with Athena’s strangeness and beauty, talking with my new friends.

  Except our hands froze—so red and stiff that we could not move our fingers. Taking our hands out of Athena’s tank felt like breaking a spell. I was suddenly desperately uncomfortable, awkward, and incompetent. Even after rinsing my red skin with hot water for nearly a minute, I was so cold I still couldn’t pick up the pen in my purse, much less write in my notebook. It was as if I had trouble returning to the person, the writer, I was before.

  “Guinevere was my first,” Bill tells us, “so she’s my favorite.” Bill, Scott, Wilson, and I have gone to a nearby sushi place for lunch. I think it an odd choice, but perhaps not; we have just been watching Athena eat raw fish, after all. No one orders octopus. I get California rolls.

  “The first two minutes you interacted with her, Guinevere was all over you,” Bill continued. But then she’d calm down, staying close by and exploring Bill’s arms gently with her suckers.

  Guinevere was also the first and only octopus who ever bit Bill. She didn’t envenomate him, and the bite didn’t leave a scar. Still, he admitted, “I don’t want it to happen again.” It was like a bite from a parrot, he said. A parrot can exert 600 pounds of pressure per square inch with its beak, so this was not a small thing, but Bill shrugged it off. As if to clear Guinevere’s reputation, he added, “It was not a huge bite.”

  It had happened early in their relationship. And besides, he added gallantly, it had been his fault. He had let his hand get too close to her mouth. “She was curious: ‘Can I eat you?’ ”

  The guys tell me about the other octopuses they’ve known.

  “George was really good,” Bill said. “He was pretty calm. He was a pretty good octopus—not feisty. The feisty ones are the ones that the first ten minutes you spend pulling arms off you. They’re constantly grabbing at you. George would come over, crawl on your arm, eat, then move on. Sometimes we’d hang out for an hour together.

  “George died while I was on vacation,” he continued. Octopuses live fast and die young: Giant Pacific octopuses are probably among the longest-lived of the species, and they usually live only about three or four years. And by the time they arrive at the aquarium, they are usually at least a year old, sometimes more. “I had no idea George was about to die,” Bill said. “Usually they change in body and behavior and coloration. They don’t stay as red. They’re whitish all the time. The intensity isn’t there. They’re less playful. It’s like old age in people. Sometimes they get age spots, white patches on their skin that seem to be sloughing off.”

  “That must be so hard,” I said to Bill. He shrugged. This is, after all, part of the job. But on my first visit, Scott had said, about Bill and his octopuses: “They’re like his babies. When one passes away, it’s a loss. That’s an animal he’s loved and cared about every day for years.”

  George’s successor, Truman, arrived while Bill was away. “He was one of the most active octopuses from the start. Truman,” he said, “was an opportunist.”

  Different octopuses had different approaches to opening Wilson’s boxes. Each learned fairly quickly how to open the locks. Bill would start with the smallest box and present it to the octopus once a week for about a month. At two months they’d try the second box. They mastered it in two to three weekly tries. The third box, with its two different locks, might take five or six tries. But even though everyone mastered the locks, on occasion each octopus, depending on personality, might employ a different strategy.

  Calm George always opened the locks methodically. But Guinevere was impetuous. One day, the live crab inside so excited her that she squeezed the second-largest box hard enough to crack it. Later, when Truman was introduced to the boxes, he seemed to enjoy opening them. But one day Bill gave him a special treat, putting two live crabs inside the smallest box. When the two crabs started fighting, Truman became too excited to bother with the locks. He poured his seven-foot-long body through the two-by-six-inch crack Guinevere had made. Visitors to his exhibit found the giant octopus, suckers flattened and facing out, squeezed into the tiny space between the walls of the fourteen-cubic-inch middle box and the six-cubic-inch one inside it. Truman never did open the small box. Probably he was too cramped. But when he finally emerged from his cube, Bill fed him both crabs anyway.

  Because octopuses can squeeze into such small spaces, aquarists have had some frightening moments. George scared Bill nearly to death one day, when he’d hidden underneath a big rock, and Bill couldn’t find him even after a long, frantic search. “I thought he’d escaped,” Bill said.

  “Any hole, they’re going to go right through it,” Wilson agreed.

  More than a decade earlier, Scott had known a dwarf Caribbean octopus who lived in one of the smaller display tanks known as jewel cases at the aquarium. One day Scott came in to work to find the tank overflowing onto the floor, and the octopus nowhere in sight. He found that the animal had oozed behind the background of its exhibit and wedged itself into the half-inch-diameter pipe that recirculated the water. What to do?

  “I remembered having watched this National Geographic show as a kid,” he said. It had showed fishermen in Greece pulling up amphora pots they had set for octopuses. After hunting all night, the octopuses thought they had found safe dens there, only to be hauled up by fishermen who wanted to eat them. Naturally they didn’t want to come out of the pots, and the fishermen didn’t want to break their vessels, so they had poured fresh water into the pots, and the octopuses came rushing out. So Scott did the same with the dwarf Caribbean octopus—and it worked.

  He employed the same method years later with a misbehaving giant Pacific, so long ago Scott doesn’t remember the octopus’s name, but he vividly recalls the incident. When Scott lifted the lid to the tank to feed the animal, the octopus attached to his hands and arms. When he’d peel one arm off, he’d find two more stuck to him. “The octopus wouldn’t go back inside the tank, and I had to move on,” he said. “I had things to do.” So he reached to the sink across from the tank, filled a pitcher with fresh water, and poured it on the octopus. She instantly recoiled. “I’m thinking: I outwitted the octopus!” he said. Scott was rather proud of himself.

  But the octopus was incensed. “She got scarlet red and really thorny. It was a heated moment. What I didn’t notice,” he said, “was she was blowing herself up.” She siphoned up a massive load of water “and gushed a major surge of salt water onto my face!” As he stood there dripping, Scott noticed “the octopus had the same look on her face as I must have had on mine when I thought I’d outwitted her.”

  A few weeks later, I visited Athena for a third time. Bill and Wilson were both absent, so Scott opened the top of her tank for me. Athena had been resting in her usual lair, in a corner under a rock overhang, but she floated quickly to the top and hung before me, upside down.

  I was disappointed at first that she didn’t present her head or look at me. Was
she less curious about me now? Had she glimpsed me coyly, like a woman behind a veil, peeking over the webbing between her arms, when I hadn’t noticed? Did she rely on her suckers to tell her, even before she had touched me, who I was? If she did recognize me, though, why did she not approach me in the same way as before? Why was she hanging before me like an opened umbrella, upside down?

  And then I realized what she wanted. She was asking me for food.

  Scott asked around, and learned that Athena, who doesn’t need to eat daily, hadn’t been fed for a couple of days. And then he allowed me the privilege of handing her a capelin. I handed a fish to one of her large suckers. Athena began to convey the fish toward her mouth. But first she covered it with two of her other arms, enveloping it with many more suckers, as if she were licking her fingers, savoring the meal.

  Once she had eaten, I reached deeper into the water. Now she let me pet her. As I stroked her head and mantle, I marveled again at her softness and texture: Her skin had gathered into little bumps and ridges. I reached for the webbing between her arms, which was as delicate as gossamer, and so thin I could see bubbles beneath it, as sometimes happens with a swimsuit. And yet, this body, so unlike my own, was responding to my touch like a dog’s or a cat’s or a child’s. Even though her skin can change color and taste flavors, it, like mine, relaxes into a caress. And though her mouth is between her arms, and her saliva dissolves flesh, she, like me, clearly enjoys a good meal when she’s hungry. I felt as if I had understood something very basic about her at that moment. I don’t know what it’s like to change color or shoot ink, but I do know the joys of gentle touch and of eating food when hungry. I know what it feels like to be happy. Athena was happy.