The Soul of an Octopus Read online

  I was too. As I drove home to New Hampshire, my happiness swelled to elation. Now that I have fed her, I thought, surely she will remember me next time, if she doesn’t already.

  A week later, I was shocked to receive this e-mail from Scott:

  “Sorry to write with some sad news. Athena appears to be in her final days, or even hours.” Less than an hour later he wrote again that she was gone.

  To my surprise, I broke down in tears.

  Why such sorrow? I don’t cry often. I would have been sad, but probably would not have wept, over a person I had met only thrice, with whom I had spent, in total, less than two hours. I had no idea whether I meant anything at all to Athena, and even if I had, it was surely little. I was not, like Wilson and Bill, Athena’s special friend. But she meant a great deal to me. She was, like Bill’s Guinevere, “my first.” We had hardly known each other, but she had given me a glimpse into a kind of mind I had never known before.

  And that was part of the tragedy: I had just started to know her. I was mourning the relationship that could have blossomed but didn’t have a chance to grow.

  “What is it like to be a bat?” the American philosopher Thomas Nagel famously asked in his 1974 essay on the subjective nature of consciousness. Many philosophers might argue that to be a bat is not “like” anything—for, according to some, animals do not experience consciousness. A sense of self is an important component of consciousness, one that a number of philosophers and researchers claim humans have but animals don’t. If animals were conscious, according to one book, written by a Tufts University professor, dogs would untangle their leashes from poles and dolphins would leap out of tuna nets. (That author clearly doesn’t read Dear Abby. Why don’t those women leave their abusive husbands? Why won’t that couple just stop visiting the rude in-laws?)

  Nagel concluded, like Wittgenstein before him, that it is impossible to know what it is like to be a bat. After all, a bat sees much of its world using echolocation, a sense we do not possess and can hardly imagine. How much further from our reach is the mind of an octopus?

  Yet still I wondered: What is it like to be an octopus?

  Isn’t this what we want to know about those whom we care about? What is it like, we wonder at each meeting, in shared meals and secrets and silences, with each touch and glance, to be you?

  “There is a young pup octopus headed to Boston from the Pacific Northwest,” Scott wrote me days after Athena had died. “Come shake hands (x8) when you can.”

  At Scott’s invitation, I set out to cross a chasm of half a billion years of evolution. I set out to make an octopus my friend.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Octavia

  This Shouldn’t Be Happening: Tasting Pain, Seeing Dreams

  Hello, beauty!” I greeted the new octopus as I perched next to Wilson on the step stool, leaning over the top of her tank. Even though I couldn’t see her now, I knew she was beautiful, because I had seen her moments before from the public side. I couldn’t wait to meet her. She was much smaller and more delicate than Athena, with a head the size of a large clementine. All of her skin was dark brown and thorny, and she’d been plastered by her white suckers to the front of the glass. Her largest suckers were less than an inch in diameter; the smallest, tinier than pencil points. Her silvery eye had peeked out from behind the hedge of her arms.

  “What’s her name?” I called out to Bill, behind us, who was adjusting the filter on a tank temporarily housing a grunt sculpin, a bug-eyed fish with a face like a Boston terrier.

  “Octavia,” he called back, over the din of the pumps and filters. A little girl visiting the aquarium had come up with the name and Bill thought it was a good one.

  Octavia had come from British Columbia, where she had been caught wild and shipped to the aquarium at greater expense than she cost to buy, via Federal Express. I had waited impatiently for several weeks before coming to meet her, to give her a chance to settle in. With me today was my friend Liz Thomas, the author and anthropologist, who is as drawn to those whom Canadian author Farley Mowat calls “the Others” as I am. As a teenager in the 1950s, she had lived with her parents among the Bushmen in Namibia, which she wrote about in her first best seller, The Harmless People; she spent the next six decades researching and writing nonfiction books about lions, elephants, tigers, deer, wolves, and dogs, as well as two Paleolithic novels. She wanted to touch an octopus too.

  Wilson tried to entice Octavia to us with food. At the end of a pair of long tongs, he offered her a squid, an octopus relative. She didn’t even extend an arm.

  “Come over and see us, you pretty little thing!” Pleading with an invertebrate (let alone one without ears) might seem a crazy thing to do, but I couldn’t help but speak to her, as I would to a dog or a person. Wilson waved the squid so that its eight arms and two feeding tentacles floated in an almost lifelike fashion, spreading its taste through the water. Octavia surely sensed it with her skin and suckers. She surely saw it too. But she wanted nothing to do with it—or with us.

  “Let’s try again later,” said Wilson. “She might change her mind.”

  While Wilson attended to chores with Bill, Liz and I visited the spiraling walkway that wraps around the Giant Ocean Tank. At the lower levels, electric-blue chromis and flamboyant yellowtail damselfish darted in and out of fiberglass corals; yellowtail snapper swam by in packs, like groups of teens at a mall. Higher up, rays flew by on cartilaginous wings, while their relatives the sharks cruised sinuously and purposefully, as if on urgent errands. Huge turtles oared the water with scaly flippers. Everyone’s favorite, Myrtle, a green sea turtle who weighs 550 pounds, is known as the Queen of the Giant Ocean Tank. Myrtle has been here since the aquarium was a year old, and she dominates even the sharks, stealing squid right out of their toothy mouths. Generations of children have grown up knowing this personable and fearless turtle, who swims right up to the glass to look you in the face, who loves it when divers scratch her back (turtles have nerve endings in the carapace), and who has been known to fall asleep in the lap of one of her favorite aquarists, Sherrie Floyd Cutter, as Sherrie pats her head. Myrtle even has her own Facebook page, which on any given day may garner well over one thousand “likes.”

  Myrtle is thought to be about eighty (and if so, she could live long enough to see today’s toddlers bring their own children to the aquarium). But even at her advanced age, not long ago, Myrtle was part of a landmark study that proved that reptiles—even old reptiles—can learn new tricks. Myrtle was presented with three small platforms: Two had speakers, and the middle one had a light box. If the light in the light box went on, she was to touch the box with a flipper. But if the light went on with a tone, she had to decide which speaker was making the tone and touch that platform instead. This was more than a trick. It was a complex task, because it involved more than responding to one request or command. It demanded that Myrtle make a decision.

  “Think of all the things that turtle has seen and learned in eighty years,” Liz said as Myrtle winged her way past us. Most people think that turtles are slow, but green sea turtles can actually swim 20 miles an hour when they’re in a hurry, and Myrtle was heading to the top of the tank, where a diver had appeared with food. “Brussels sprouts are Myrtle’s favorite vegetable,” the diver was telling the crowd. (“Ew! Brussels sprouts!” a little girl said to her older brother.) But food isn’t all that’s on this turtle’s mind. “She seems genuinely interested in things we’re doing,” Sherrie says, “even when we don’t have food. Almost to the point of being nosy about everything that goes on in the tank. Whenever we’re at the platform, she’s hanging all over us, trying to see what’s on the platform, around the platform, and I’m constantly pushing her away.” During promotional and film shoots at night in the GOT, the aquarium has to deploy one diver for the express purpose of distracting Myrtle, so she won’t get into the shot. And even this ploy is only effective for about ninety seconds before the turtle swims to where the action is.
/>   When we went back upstairs to Cold Marine for another try with Octavia, she still wasn’t interested. I tried to fathom her shyness. Why wouldn’t she come over to see us?

  “Everyone is different,” Wilson reminded us. “They have different personalities. Even lobsters have different personalities. You stick around here long enough and you’ll see.”

  Already it was clear that Octavia was quite different from Athena. Octavia’s situation was unusual, Wilson explained. Athena had died suddenly and unexpectedly. Usually, octopuses show signs of aging—develop white spots, stop eating, grow thin—and the aquarium orders a new one. The young pup grows up behind the scenes, and so is acclimated to people by the time the old octopus dies and the exhibit tank is free. “Those who grow up at the aquarium are usually friendly,” Wilson said. “They are the most playful. They’re like puppies and kittens.”

  But the aquarium didn’t have time for a younger octopus to grow up—they needed a display octopus immediately. “An aquarium without an octopus,” as the Victorian naturalist Henry Lee of Brighton, UK, wrote in 1875, “is like a plum pudding without plums.” So Bill had ordered from his supplier a new octopus big enough to impress the public.

  Octavia might be two and a half years old already. Because she had grown up in the wild (giant Pacific octopuses are not raised in captivity, Bill explained, and their ocean populations are thought to be healthy), she hadn’t yet warmed to human company.

  Wilson tried one last time. He held out the squid to Octavia on the grabber, and a single arm came floating tentatively over.

  “Liz! You touch her!” I cried, sensing that the opportunity for interaction might be fleeting. My friend mounted the three little stairs to the top of the tank and extended her index finger to the tendril-like tip of Octavia’s arm. The scene reminded me of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, showing Adam extending his hand to God in heaven.

  The encounter lasted just a moment. Liz felt the slender, slippery back of the tip of Octavia’s arm, and Octavia twisted it over to taste Liz gingerly with her elfin suckers.

  Both of them instantly withdrew in alarm.

  Liz is not frightened by animals, or by anything else, for that matter. The first day we met, nearly thirty years ago, I introduced her to one of our ferrets, who immediately sank his pointy teeth into her hand, drawing blood.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “I don’t mind at all,” Liz told me, and she meant it. She’s spent days alone with wolves in the Arctic and been stalked by a wild leopard in Uganda. In Namibia, when a hyena, a species that has been known to bite off the noses of sleeping people, thrust her head into Liz’s tent, my friend’s only response was to ask the bone-crushing carnivore, “What is it?” as if her mom had appeared at the door to her room. But Liz said that Octavia’s touch had been “viscerally surprising.” Her response was atavistic. Liz couldn’t help but spring backward.

  And what had alarmed Octavia about Liz? I couldn’t be sure, of course, but Liz is a pack-a-day smoker. I wondered whether Octavia’s exquisitely tuned senses, with 10,000 chemoreceptors on each sucker, had tasted the nicotine on Liz’s skin or even in her blood. Nicotine is a known insect repellent, and toxic to many other invertebrates. Liz’s finger may have tasted, to Octavia, just plain icky. I hoped this wouldn’t make her think we all tasted bad.

  On my second visit, I waved a dead squid back and forth in the cold water till my right hand cramped and I could no longer move it. I switched to my left hand till it froze, too. Octavia stayed way over on the opposite side of the tank. She didn’t even extend an arm.

  This was a Friday, and Wilson wasn’t there. I went downstairs to get a better view of Octavia. She was thorny and dark, and almost invisible in the dim light of her rocky lair. Because giant Pacific octopuses are, like most species of octopus, nocturnal, the tank isn’t brightly illuminated, and conveys quiet mystery. Her only tank mates, the sunflower sea star, about forty rose anemones, and two types of starfish, a bat star and a leather star, sat affixed to their stations. Anchored by his thousands of tube feet, the sea star had taken up what seemed to be his usual position, opposite the octopus. This is a good spot from which to snag a fish should an aquarist open the tank. Sunflower sea stars can move quickly for starfish, three feet per minute if in a hurry, but even with no brain, he seemed to know he wasn’t as fast as an octopus.

  The anemones’ tentacles swayed in the water like the petals of flowers in a breeze. In fact anemones look like plants but are actually predatory invertebrate animals, like Octavia and starfish—but more closely related to corals and jellyfish. They attach themselves to the substrate with sticky feet, harpooning small fish and shrimp with organs called nematocysts and injecting their prey with stinging venom.

  Octavia appears to be sharing her tank with two lugubrious-looking wolf eels and a number of species of big rockfish with spiny, often poisonous dorsal fins—though she’s really not. All of them would normally be found together in the wild in their native waters in the Pacific Northwest; but here the octopus is separated by a pane of glass from the eels and rockfish so they don’t eat each other. The wolf eels’ tank has brighter lighting, so the exhibit gives you the feeling that you’re peeking in on a wild octopus in her lair, and out from there into the open ocean.

  I waited for Octavia to move; for the tip of an arm to twitch, for her one visible eye to swivel and meet ours, for a change in her color. She remained immobile, her arms balled up, her head protected. I could not even see the white insides of her gills flashing as she breathed. She may have been watching us, but her slit-pupil eye betrayed nothing.

  Eager to show me something moving, Scott took me over to see a favorite tank in his Freshwater Gallery: the electric eel exhibit. He’s quite proud of it, and rightly so. Even though an electric eel is not colorful or cute or especially pretty (“You might find more attractive things in your toilet,” Scott admitted), this tank is one of the most popular in the aquarium, with a gorgeous, naturalistic display. Scott has traveled many times to the Amazon, where he cofounded the nonprofit Project Piaba, supporting sustainable fisheries for aquarium fish. He knows what electric eel habitat looks like, so the tank is lush with living, native Amazon water plants. The electric eel loves to hide among the leaves. But this posed a problem for the viewing public. “They could never find the animal in the eel tank,” he said. He realized what he had to do: train the electric eel.

  It only took Scott a matter of weeks to teach the eel a completely unnatural behavior: to emerge from his comfortable hiding place in the vegetation, out into the open where visitors could see him. For this purpose, Scott invented a device he named the Worm Deployer.

  Hanging above the eel’s tank is a rotating electric fan, to which, attached by a Barrel of Monkeys plastic monkey, hangs an ordinary kitchen funnel. Staff periodically drop live earthworms into the funnel, which fall slowly into the water along the fan’s arc, right in front of the public. “The eel never knows when manna might drop from heaven,” Scott explained, “so he learned to hang out there, just in case.” The only downside of his invention was that the exhibit used to have two electric eels, and the Worm Deployer caused them to fight. Now one of the eels has been exiled to a large tank near Scott’s desk.

  The Worm Deployer has many uses. Sometimes Scott uses it to manipulate the public. On busy days when visitors are jammed up in one particular area of the aquarium, Freshwater staff can usually break up the clot with a handful of worms, instantly drawing a crowd to the electric eel tank. The exhibit has another feature to keep the public riveted: A voltmeter picks up the fish’s electric pulse. A light, actually powered by the eel’s electricity, flashes across a panel built on top of the tank to show when the eel is hunting or stunning prey, and this quickly attracts attention.

  On this morning, Scott and I had the eel tank to ourselves. Even though Scott had just fed some worms into the Deployer, the three-foot, reddish-brown eel was immobile. I wondered if he was just watchfully waiting. �
�Look at his face,” Scott said. “No, that eel is catching some serious Zs.” A worm dropped right near his head, and still the fish didn’t move. The eel was fast asleep.

  Then suddenly, we saw the voltmeter flash.

  “What’s going on?” I asked Scott. “I thought the eel was asleep.”

  “He is asleep,” Scott answered. And then we both realized what was happening.

  The eel was dreaming.

  In our dreams, we humans experience our most isolated and mysterious existence: “All men,” wrote Plutarch, “while they are awake, are in one common world; but each of them, when he is asleep, is in a world of his own.” How much more inaccessible, then, are the dreams of animals?

  Humans have always exalted dreams. Pindar of Thebes, the Greek lyric poet, suggested that the soul is more active while dreaming than while awake. He believed that during a dream, the awakened soul may see the future, “an award of joy or sorrow drawing near.” So it’s no wonder that humans were quick to reserve dreams for people alone; researchers for many years claimed dreams were a property of “higher” minds. But any pet owner who has heard her dog woof or seen his cat twitch during sleep knows that is not true. MIT researchers now know not only that rats dream, but what they dream about. Neurons in the brain fire in distinctive patterns while a rat in a maze performs particular tasks. The researchers repeatedly saw the exact same patterns reproduced while the rats slept—so clearly that they could tell what point in the maze the rat was dreaming about, and whether the animal was running or walking in the dream. The rats’ dreams took place in an area of the brain known to be involved with memory, further supporting a notion that one function of dreams is to help an animal remember what it has learned.