The Soul of an Octopus Read online

  “So if an octopus is this smart,” Steve asked Bill, “what other animals are out there that could be this smart—that we don’t think of as being sentient and having personality and memories and all these things?”

  “It’s a very good question,” Bill answered. “Who knows what else is actually out there in the ocean?”

  For an invertebrate, the octopus brain is enormous. Octavia’s was about the size of a walnut—the same size as that of an African gray parrot. Alex, an African gray trained by Dr. Irene Pepperberg, learned to use a hundred spoken English words meaningfully; demonstrated an understanding of concepts of shape, size, and material; could do math; and asked questions. He could also purposely deceive his trainers—as well as apologize when he was found out.

  Brain size, of course, isn’t everything. After all, anything can be miniaturized, as computer technology plainly shows. Another measure scientists use to assess brain power is to count neurons, the mainstay of the brain’s processing capabilities. By this measure, the octopus is again impressive. An octopus has 300 million neurons. A rat, 200 million. A frog, perhaps 16 million. A pond snail, a fellow mollusk, at most, 11,000.

  A human, on the other hand, has 100 billion neurons in the brain. But our brain is not really comparable to that of an octopus. “Short of Martians showing up and offering themselves up to science,” says neuroscientist Cliff Ragsdale of the University of Chicago, “cephalopods are the only example outside of vertebrates of how to build a complex, clever brain.” Ragsdale is investigating the neural circuitry of the octopus brain, to see if it works at all like ours.

  The human brain, for instance, is organized into four different lobes, each associated with different functions. An octopus brain, depending on the species and how you count them, has as many as 50 to 75 different lobes. And most of an octopus’s neurons aren’t even in the brain but are in the arms. These may be adaptations for the sort of extreme multitasking an octopus must undertake: to coordinate all those arms; to change color and shape; to learn, think, decide, and remember—while at the same time processing the flood of taste and touch information pouring in from every inch of skin, as well as making sense of the cacophony of visual images offered by the well-developed, almost humanlike eyes.

  But like our eyes, our brain and the octopus brain arrived at their complexity by different routes. The common ancestor of humans and octopuses—a primitive, tube-shaped creature—lies so deeply embedded in the prehistoric past that neither brains nor eyes had yet evolved. Still, the octopus eye and our own are strikingly similar. Both have lens-based focusing, with transparent corneas, irises that regulate light, and retinas in the back of the eye to convert light to neural signals that can be processed in the brain. Yet there are also differences. The octopus eye, unlike our own, can detect polarized light. It has no blind spot. (Our optic nerve attaches to the back of the eye at the retina, creating the blind spot. The octopus’s optic nerve circles around the outside of the retina.) Our eyes are binocular, directed forward for seeing what’s ahead of us, our usual direction of travel. The octopus’s wide-angle eyes are adapted to panoramic vision. And each eye can swivel independently, like a chameleon’s. Our visual acuity can extend beyond the horizon; an octopus can see only about eight feet away.

  There is another important difference as well. Human eyes have three visual pigments, allowing us to see color. Octopuses have only one—which would make these masters of camouflage, commanding a glittering rainbow of colors, technically color-blind.

  How, then, does the octopus decide what colors to turn? New evidence suggests cephalopods might be able to see with their skin. Woods Hole and University of Washington researchers found the skin of the octopus’s close relative, the cuttlefish Sepia officinalis, contains gene sequences usually expressed only in the retina of the eye.

  Assessing the mind of a creature this alien demands that we be extraordinary flexible in our own thinking. Marine biologist James Wood suggests our hubris gets in our way. He likes to imagine the way someone like Octavia might attempt to measure our brainpower: “How many color patterns,” he suggests an octopus might wonder, “can your severed arm produce in one second?” On the basis of that answer, Octavia could reasonably conclude we humans were stupid indeed—so dumb that she could steal a bucket of fish from us in full view. The thought was humbling. But so was a possible alternative. Roman natural historian Claudius Aelianus observed of the octopus in his writing at the turn of the third century that “mischief and craft are plainly seen to be the characteristics of this creature.” Perhaps Octavia had recognized our intelligence, and enjoyed her bucket all the more for having outwitted us.

  Each time I visited her thereafter that fall and winter, Octavia rose to the top of the tank and flowed over to meet me, eager to taste me with her suckers and look me in the face. Sometimes I brought a friend. Not only was I eager to share this experience, I also wanted to see how Octavia reacted to other people. She met my friend Joel Glick, a nonsmoker, who had studied mountain gorillas in Rwanda and would soon be leaving to study a colony of imported macaque monkeys in Puerto Rico. Octavia embraced Joel wholeheartedly.

  One December day I brought a high school senior, Kelly Rittenhouse, an aspiring writer. We had never met before, but she had read some of my books and asked to job-shadow me for a school project. On our drive to Boston, I told Kelly I was a little worried about my hair. I had gotten a perm earlier in the week. I feared Octavia might taste any chemicals that might have seeped into my skin and blood and not want to interact with me.

  But Octavia came to me right away and quickly immobilized both my arms with her suckers. Scott had to keep pulling them off my skin. After a few minutes, when she seemed to calm down, we invited Kelly to touch her. Octavia began to tentatively taste Kelly with the suckers of one arm. And then—

  Explosion! The rolled-up sleeves of my shirt and the top of my pants were suddenly wet. I looked up at Kelly to see water dripping off her dark brown bangs and glasses and down her nose. Octavia had blasted her squarely in the face.

  Kelly was doused. Her sweater was drenched. And even though her hosing made the three-block walk back to my car freezing cold, Kelly couldn’t stop smiling. Later she e-mailed to tell me that her day had been “crazy awesome.”

  Why had Octavia hosed Kelly? It’s well known that octopuses use their funnels to repel what they don’t like. They’ll shoot jets of water at food detritus in front of their dens. They also blast water to express dissatisfaction. One common octopus who was part of a learning experiment in the 1950s so despised the lever that he was supposed to pull to get food, that he soaked his experimenter each time he was presented with it. (He eventually pulled the hated lever out of the tank wall.) But they also squirt for another reason: to play.

  My first indication of this came after I wrote about the New England Aquarium volunteer whom Truman constantly squirted. She read the article and contacted me to say that she had enjoyed the article, but wanted me to know that Truman had not disliked her. The two of them had been friends. She so treasured the memory of her time with Truman that it was important to her that I understood.

  Maybe, I thought, the octopus had squirted her in the same spirit of little boys who pull girls’ pigtails, or the way kids might splash each other in the pool. Maybe the octopus was just teasing.

  And then I met Jennifer Mather and Roland Anderson.

  Jennifer, a psychologist at the University of Lethbridge in Canada, is one of the world’s leading researchers on octopus intelligence; Roland, a biologist at the Seattle Aquarium, is another. Together and separately, they have scientifically investigated the octopus mind, exploring problem-solving and personality—even developing a personality test, using nineteen different, distinctive behaviors, to rank octopuses from shy to bold.

  Roland made one of the team’s most important discoveries one day while he was conducting an experiment on octopus preferences. Eight octopuses in separate three-by-two-by-two-foot tanks at the
Seattle Aquarium’s holding area were presented with empty Extra Strength Tylenol pill bottles. (Roland found octopuses can open the childproof caps, an achievement that eludes many PhDs.) “Some of the bottles had been painted white and others black; on some, the epoxy paint had been sprinkled with sand, to see if they preferred dark or light, smooth or rough,” Roland, a dapper, slender man with a trim silver moustache, told me. “The bottles were weighted with rocks so they barely floated. We’d feed them one day and test them the next. How long does the animal hold on to different colors and textures? I watched what they did.”

  Some grabbed the bottle, explored it, and cast it off. Others grasped the bottle with one or two suckers and held it at arm’s length, as if examining the object with suspicion. But two did something very different. They squirted it with their jets—but in a way Roland had not seen before. “This was not a strong, forceful jet,” like you would use to squirt an irritating researcher, Roland explained, “but one carefully modulated so that the pill bottle was caused to circle around the tank over and over. She repeated the action sixteen times!” By the eighteenth time, he was already on the phone with Jennifer with the news: “She’s bouncing the ball!”

  A second octopus in the study later used her jet in a similar way, only sending the bottle back and forth across the water’s surface instead of around the tank. They were both using their funnels—organs originally evolved for respiration and locomotion—to play.

  The study was published in the Journal of Comparative Psychology. “It fit all the criteria for play behavior,” Roland told me. “Only intelligent animals play,” he stressed. “Birds like crows and parrots; primates like monkeys and chimps; dogs and humans.”

  Perhaps this was what Octavia was doing with Kelly; perhaps this was what Truman was doing with the young volunteer he always squirted. Jennifer once saw a Pacific day octopus squirt at a butterfly flying over it in Hawaii; the butterfly, alarmed, had hurried away. Perhaps the octopus was annoyed at the shadow the butterfly had cast; or perhaps, in the manner of children who like to run at pigeons strutting in a public square to watch them scatter, the octopus had done it just for fun.

  I met Jennifer and Roland at the Octopus Symposium and Workshop at the Seattle Aquarium, to which both Bill and I had traveled to attend. The symposium—so successful that by its end, the organizers were already planning a second—was a revelation. In a large meeting room of an upper floor of the Seattle Aquarium, sixty-five octopus lovers, from internationally respected researchers to home hobbyists, gathered from at least five countries for ten presentations from experts on their favorite animal. “How many of you keep octopuses?” Jennifer asked the crowd during her keynote speech, the first after Roland’s introduction. About fifty hands went up. “And do they have personalities?” Like a unanimous vote at a town meeting came the emphatic answer: “Yes!”

  The first night in Seattle, Bill and I had dinner with Jennifer, a silver-haired éminence grise with rosy cheeks, a professor’s thick glasses, and a quick smile. Joining us were other experts: David Scheel, an Alaska Pacific University professor and researcher; Gary Galbreath, an evolutionary biologist from Northwestern University; and David’s student, Rebecca Toussaint. Rebecca would announce a stunning discovery the next day: Genetic testing shows that at least two distinct species of giant Pacific octopus exist in Alaskan waters, and perhaps elsewhere as well. The giant Pacific octopus, as Jennifer would point out, may be the Octopus Archetype, the ur-octopus, the ultra-octopus, the octopus every kid who’s ever visited a public aquarium knows. Yet there are actually two distinct species, which dramatically underscores just how little science knows about these charismatic but mysterious animals.

  Octopus experts like to discuss matter-of-factly some horrible things you find in the ocean. Jennifer told us about a transparent, stinging hydroid she’d encountered in Bonaire: “You can’t see or predict where it’s going to be,” she said. Rebecca remembered the time a fire coral had brushed her elbow on a dive. “At first it didn’t hurt,” she said. “Then I got out, and I thought I would die!”

  They also told us about Paul, the octopus from Sea Life Oberhausen, in Germany, who correctly predicted the outcomes of the 2010 FIFA World Cup soccer matches seven times in a row. Before a match, Paul would be offered two boxes, each containing a mussel. Each was adorned with a different flag representing the two nations whose teams would face one another in the upcoming game. How did Paul make his selection? And how did he do so with such success? We considered the possibilities—including that the octopus was drawn to the aesthetic qualities of one flag over the other, and that he really did know which team would win.

  That night Jennifer and David also discussed a possible field expedition to investigate food preferences and personality in Pacific day octopus. Maybe, they said, I could go along.

  After the Octopus Symposium, when I saw Octavia again, she held on to me, gently but firmly, for an hour and fifteen minutes. I stroked her head, her arms, her webbing, absorbed in her presence. She seemed equally attentive to me. Clearly, each of us wanted the other’s company, just as human friends are excited to reunite with each other. With each touch and each taste, we seemed to reiterate, almost like a mantra: “It’s you! It’s you! It’s you!” Finally Bill and Scott asked me to stop so they could close the lid and we could go to lunch. Though my hands had frozen, I hated to leave, especially since I was soon due to go on a book tour and wouldn’t get to see Octavia again for two months.

  And though I travel extensively and often, this time I found being on the road exceptionally difficult. This time, my usual homesickness was compounded by being away from the octopus.

  When I returned, I e-mailed Bill to see when I could visit. Bill wrote me back warmly, but with alarming news:

  “Octavia is being temperamental because she’s getting old, so hopefully she will come out to say hi. . . .”

  Getting old? I felt sick. Could her life end so soon and so suddenly, like Athena’s?

  Jennifer had warned me: “If an octopus lives long enough, it becomes senescent. I’m reluctant to use the word dementia—it’s so human-specific and associated with mental illness, and it’s not normal or natural or inevitable for every person who lives long enough. But senescence happens to every octopus who does.”

  Alexa had witnessed this decline in the octopuses at Middlebury when they aged. “They swim loop-the-loop in the tank, they look all googly-eyed,” she said. “They won’t look you in the eye or attack prey.” One senile octopus at the lab crawled out of the tank, squeezed into a crack in the wall, dried out, and died.

  When senescence strikes the larger species, like the giant Pacific, the results can be even more dramatic. One day when James Cosgrove was working as a display diver for the Pacific Undersea Gardens in Victoria, British Columbia, he was attacked by a huge male—in full view of the delighted public. The facility is a floating aquarium where guests descend 11 feet below sea level and divers bring interesting animals up to the windows to show the visitors. The diver checked a cave-like entrance near the entry ladder and discovered what he thought were two octopuses inside—but as the arms slithered past his mask, showing enormous suckers, he realized he had instead found one monster octopus, who then seized him. “All I could do was keep both hands on my regulator [the mouthpiece that delivers the diver’s air supply] while the octopus dragged me around like a sack of potatoes,” he wrote in Super Suckers. “At one point I could see that the octopus could reach from the display windows to the outside screen, which was a distance of 22 feet.” A few weeks later the octopus died. He had weighed 156 pounds. Cosgrove concluded the octopus was out of his mind.

  Neither Scott nor Bill could remember a senescent octopus at the aquarium becoming aggressive. They usually just turn unresponsive and vacant, which, Bill told me when he met me in the aquarium lobby the next day, was happening now to Octavia. “Three weeks ago her behavior changed,” he said. “Usually, you know, she’s in the top corner of her
tank. Now she sits on the bottom or in the window by the brighter light. She eats, but she takes the food and runs it back to her corner. Sometimes she won’t come over at all. She just sends out an arm. In the mornings, she seems really white. She was always an exceptionally red octopus. But she’s now faded. She’s pale.”

  This surely must have pained Bill. “She turned out to be a really friendly, interactive octopus,” he said, as if mourning her passing already. Shortly before her senescence kicked in, some federal agents had come by to deliver an illegally imported arowana—a long, thick, silvery ribbon of a fish kept in aquariums throughout Asia for good luck—they had confiscated. Scott had invited the agents to interact with Octavia as a thank-you. Octavia had seemed particularly interested in one agent, and her arms were all over him. Then she started to pull. “And I saw this look on his face,” Scott said, “on the threshold of panic.” Then it occurred to Scott: “Most of these guys have sidearms.” Octavia might have been reaching for his gun, curious about this new object. “Now,” he said, “that’s enrichment!”

  “Are you sure your safety’s on?” Scott asked the officer. He quickly disentangled the agent from Octavia’s grip. “That’s not a story we want to be told,” he said: “ ‘Agent Shot in Foot by Octopus.’ ”

  Not long after that, Octavia seemed to lose her zest for interaction. As much as I longed to see her, I dreaded seeing her decline. I had, of course, seen humans I loved in similar straits: A friend, a former trapper turned naturalist, had a stroke and babbled incoherently, not realizing that nobody could understand him as he held up his end of the conversation with great animation. Oddly, at one point when my husband and I visited him in the hospital, he suddenly spoke one sentence in clear English and said, “The deer—a buck—I dropped him on the run.” My friend Liz’s mother, Lorna, a ballerina turned anthropologist, lived to nearly 104; two years after Harvard published her first book, at age 102, she began to forget people’s names. She forgot mine shortly after she turned 103, but she clearly remembered I was important to her and greeted me with genuine warmth. I had seen this in our first border collie, when she was sixteen. She’d wake my husband and me in the night, crying and frightened, as if she couldn’t remember where she was or who we were. I’d lie on the floor with her and stroke her and kiss her till the light came back into her intense brown eyes, as if her soul had returned from a journey.