The Soul of an Octopus Page 8

  Sea creatures in general evoke an irrational fear in many people, he has noticed. It’s true that many of the creatures Bill cares for are venomous or have sharp teeth or poisonous spines. Yet all of the many scars on his long arms, he tells us, are from tubes, glass, and tools. “A screwdriver is more likely to draw blood from me than any of my animals,” he says, laughing. “Yes, octopuses can bite. Yes, they can do damage. But people have a big fear of them, way out of proportion.”

  It’s only relatively recently in the New England Aquarium’s forty-year history that anyone dared interact with the octopus. Wilson tells me, “Fifteen years ago, nobody would go near the octopus.”

  Boston’s aquarium was one of the first in the nation to offer naturalistic settings for its animals. It was a visionary change—one that not only made its exhibits more educational for the public, but also made them far more interesting for its animal inmates. With the exception of seals and sea lions (and of course the green sea turtle, Myrtle, who wouldn’t stand for a brush-off), the policy of mirroring nature seemed to preclude much human interaction with the fish, reptiles, and invertebrates.

  At lunch, Wilson and Scott tell me about the transformation that took place—one that was part of a quiet revolution throughout zoos and aquariums and profoundly changed the relationships between people and the exotic animals in their care.

  “It began with Marion,” Wilson remembers. “Marion was magnificent.”

  “Do you mean Marion anaconda or Marion Fish?” asks Scott.

  Marion Fish—that really was her last name—had come first. After retiring following twenty-six years working as a surgical trauma nurse, in 1998 she started volunteering on Wednesdays and got to know every animal she cared for personally. She named each fish. And with remarkable accuracy, she could read their moods.

  “She and I were sitting here with the octopus one day,” Wilson remembers, “and Marion said, ‘You know, that octopus needs something to do.’ ” The idea of “enrichment”—of providing physical and mental stimulation for zoo animals—was relatively new at the time, even for chimps and tigers. It was unknown for fish and invertebrates. Direct contact with keepers was not part of the aquarium’s plan. “Back then, the others were afraid of touching the octopus, afraid that touching the octopus would hurt it,” Wilson tells me. “But we said to hell with it. The octopus is bored! Then we started playing with it.” Soon Marion and Wilson were regularly opening the tank to stroke the octopus and let the octopus suck on their arms. It was clear the animal enjoyed the interaction, and maybe even looked forward to the next encounter. “Then we gave it things to play with—whatever was at hand. Tubes, things like that. That was the start of everything,” Wilson says. “Then I built the locking cubes.”

  Marion Fish left the aquarium in 2003, after a heart attack, and Scott and Wilson lost track of her. But in 2007, another Marion appeared at the aquarium—a young woman whose influence was equally profound. Marion Britt further demonstrated the positive power of interesting, gentle, loving interaction between keepers and the animals in their care. And she did it by directly handling the most fearsome animals in the aquarium—the 13-foot-long, 300-pound anacondas.

  “Before Marion,” says Wilson, “nobody would go into the tank with the anacondas.” That sounded pretty reasonable to me. South America’s top predators, anacondas readily hunt and kill adult deer, as well as 130-pound capybaras, and have been known to eat jaguars. I happen to have met one of the best-known biologists studying anacondas, Jesus Rivas, who has documented two predatory attacks by these powerful constricting snakes on his assistants in the field. Humans “are well within the predator-to-prey ratio” of anacondas, who can grow to 30 feet, he said. The only reason anacondas don’t attack humans more often is that, other than Rivas and his field team, people don’t venture where they know anacondas are found.

  But Marion did. When she started at the aquarium as a twenty-four-year-old intern in Scott’s gallery in 2007, there were three anacondas—whom nobody could safely touch. “We had to restrain the snakes whenever we handled them,” Scott tells me. “We grabbed them behind the head. They hated it.” By the time Marion stopped working at the aquarium, the two larger anacondas, Kathleen and Ashley, would slither up to her and curl up with their heads in her lap.

  And now, thanks to Marion, no more are snakes traumatized by head restraint whenever they need to be moved from their tank for their yearly veterinary checkup, or to treat an illness, or when the tank needs to be drained. The staff no longer dreads interacting with them.

  Clearly, the snakes are happier and healthier for it. The proof: Both females (the third, smaller snake, named Orange, turned out to be male) gave birth—the first time any anaconda in a Boston zoo or aquarium had done so. The soft eggs hatch inside the mother’s body, and Marion was actually in the exhibit in her wet suit while Kathleen’s seventeen babies were born. Since Marion handled all the baby snakes from both mothers since infancy, the offspring now on display, named Marion and Wilson (both female), don’t need head restraint, either. With a little urging, they voluntarily submit to handling. The rest of the staff has also learned to recognize when the snakes are not in the mood to be handled, and back off at these times to try another day.

  Marion had to leave the aquarium in February 2011 to have surgery, and because of surgical complications, hadn’t returned. But the impact of her work has lasted. The sight of a slender young woman sitting in the anaconda exhibit with a 13-foot-long, predatory reptile snuggling in her lap, the tip of a tail coiled lovingly around one leg, provided dramatic evidence of what Scott and Wilson already knew: “Just about every animal,” Scott says—not just mammals and birds—“can learn, recognize individuals, and respond to empathy.” Once you find the right way to work with an animal, be it an octopus or an anaconda, together, you can accomplish what even Saint Francis might have considered a miracle.

  Like Scott’s latest project: training the Suriname toads.

  Not only are these animals amphibians—with much less brain to work with than the anacondas—but they are also blind. Their blindness has sculpted their unique appearance: At the head of the toad’s six-inch, flattened brown body are two nostrils, each set at the end of a long, narrow tube. The front limbs have star-shaped tactile organs on the fingertips to help the animals detect food.

  Male Suriname toads call to their mates by clicking underwater, and the couple swim together in a series of circular loops while the female lays her eggs on the male’s belly; the male fertilizes them and then rolls the eggs into pouches on the female’s back. There the female’s skin actually encloses the fertilized eggs to protect them. When the female sheds her skin, the babies burst out from her back, pointy heads first. They are born not as tadpoles, but as perfect little toadlets.

  Alas, the public seldom gets to see these exotic toads because the animals hide in the vegetation in their pretty, naturalistic exhibit. As he did with the electric eels, Scott is trying to figure out a way to induce the toads to show themselves.

  How? “You need to get within the mind of the toad,” he says. “We’re engaged in toad psy-ops.” How does a blind toad decide what is a safe, good place to stay—and how does he find it? “You get to learn very fast,” Scott says. “You learn to project empathy. Remember the movie E.T.? It’s kind of like that. You reach out with an invisible hand and read the organism. You have to meet them halfway. You have to be willing to listen.”

  Many of us respond without thinking to the angle of a horse’s ears, or the position of a dog’s tail, or the expression in a cat’s eyes. Aquarists learn the silent language of fishes. Once, walking into a hallway behind the scenes where some cichlids had just been moved from one tank to another, Scott had announced to me with concern, “I smell fish stress.” The scent is subtle—I cannot smell it at all—but the low-tide odor Scott detects, he explained at the time, is that of heat-shock proteins. These are intracellular proteins that were first discovered to be released, in both p
lants and animals, in response to heat, and are now known to be associated with other stresses as well. The scent makes Scott feel sick to his stomach—not because the smell is nauseating, but because the thought that fish in his care are stressed fills him with the same urgency and dread he used to feel when his newborn sons would cry.

  Scott reads other fish cues just as fluently. When we visited the cichlids in their new home, he compared those who had just been moved to those who had been living there for weeks or months. The stripes on the new immigrants were paler. “And look at this one,” he said, pointing to a fish who was already at home in the tank. “See the sparkle in the eye? Now look at this other one. You don’t see the sparkle.” Scott can read the faces of fishes as easily as you or I read a person’s.

  “The problem with reading octopuses,” I say as we walk back to the aquarium, “is that they are too expressive”—much more than any species I’d ever known. “We have our poetry and dance and music and literature. But even with our voices and costumes and paintbrushes and clay and technologies, can we ever come close to expressing what an octopus can say with its skin alone?”

  “You’re right,” says Scott. “Imagine the road rage if cephalopods could drive on the Southeast Expressway!”

  That afternoon, when Wilson opens her barrel, Kali bobs to the surface. Her eyes swivel, seeking our faces. We give her our arms and she embraces them. She’s a dark reddish brown now, except for the webbing between her arms, which is flecked with lichen-like green. Wilson gives her two more fish, which she eagerly accepts. She holds us gently with her suckers as she lets us stroke her head between her eyes. “Nothing else I have ever touched is this soft,” I say to Wilson. “Not a kitten’s fur, not a chick’s down. Nothing is more lovely than this. I could do this all day.”

  “Yes,” Wilson replies, without a trace of sarcasm, “I think you could.”

  The bliss of stroking an octopus’s head is difficult to convey to most people, even to animal lovers. When, back home in New Hampshire, during our walks with our dogs in the woods, I rhapsodized to my friend Jody, I could tell she was trying hard not to conclude I had gone insane.

  “But,” she asked, “aren’t they slimy? I mean, what about the slime?”

  It might be more appealing to describe octopuses as slippery. But a banana peel is slippery; slime is a very specialized and essential substance, and there’s no denying that octopuses have slime in spades. Almost everyone who lives in the water does. “More of the ocean’s residents use, deploy, or are made up of slime than I ever expected,” marine scientist Ellen Prager observes. “The undersea world is a seriously slimy place.” Slime helps sea animals reduce drag while moving through the water, capture and eat food, keep their skin healthy, escape predators, protect their eggs. Tube worms like Bill’s feather dusters secrete slime to build a leathery tube, like a flower stalk, to protect their bodies and keep them attached to a rock or coral. For some fishes—Scott’s Amazon discus and cichlids among them—slime is the piscine equivalent of mother’s milk. The babies actually feed off the parents’ nutritious slime coat, an activity called “glancing.” The brightly colored mandarin fish exudes bad-tasting slime to deflect its enemies; the deep-sea vampire squid, an octopus relative, produces glowing slime to startle predators. Bermuda fire worms signal with luminous slime to attract mates like fireflies flashing on a summer night. The female fire worms glow to attract the males; the males then flash, after which the two release eggs and sperm in tandem.

  “Kali’s and Octavia’s slime isn’t bad,” I told Jody. “Anyway, they’re way less slimy than a hagfish.”

  A creature of the ocean bottom, a hagfish grows to about 17 inches long, and yet, in mere minutes, it can fill seven buckets with slime—so much slime it can slip from almost any predator’s grip. The hagfish would be in danger of suffocating on its own mucous, except it has learned, like a person with a cold, to blow it out its nose. But sometimes it produces too much slime for even a hagfish to tolerate, and for this occasion, it has devised a nifty trick: the animal wraps its tail around its body like a knot and slides the knot forward, clearing the slime.

  “Gross!” Jody cried. “That’s so disgusting!” But then she asked me to tell her more about Kali and Octavia’s now modest-seeming slime.

  Octopus slime is sort of a cross between drool and snot. But in a nice way. And it’s very useful. It helps to be slippery if you’re squeezing your body in and out of tight places. Slime keeps the octopus moist if it wants to emerge from the water, which some species of octopus do with surprisingly frequency in the wild. Though the infamous “tree octopus” “discovered” in 1998 by researcher Lyle Zapato was a hoax (perpetrated to prove, which it did, that too many young people believe everything they read on the Internet), wild octopuses who live in tidal areas often haul themselves out on land in order to visit different tide pools for better hunting. They may also do this to escape predators in the water, such as another octopus. I had read that in areas blessed by constant ocean spray, an octopus might be able to survive out of water for thirty minutes or more.

  “Slime doesn’t wreck anything,” I explained to Jody. “After all,” I reminded her, “slime is part of the two greatest pleasurable experiences known to humankind.”

  She thought for a moment.

  “What’s the other one?” she asked.

  “Eating,” I replied.

  “CEPHALOPARTY!” Brendan Walsh’s deep voice booms over the hum of the pumps and the heavy metal music playing on the radio. Brendan, thirty-four, tall and burly, works at the aquarium’s IMAX theater. Then he goes home to tend to his fish tanks. Right now, he says he has “only” five; he used to have twenty.

  He’s part of a growing crowd standing around Kali’s barrel, waiting for Wilson to open the top so we can play with her. At the aquarium I have joined a cadre of colleagues for whom octopus slime serves as a social lubricant.

  Here, too, is Christa Carceo, twenty-five, pretty and petite, with dark hair falling in loose curls down her back, a tiny black jewel perched on its stud above her upper lip, and a smile that lights up the room. “Growing up,” she tells me, “other girls had dolls. I had fish.” She started with a one-gallon bowl with goldfish, then added bettas, then tetras, guppies, and snails, until she had ten tanks. “You’d go to my room,” she says, “all you’d hear is humming.” Christa just started volunteering one day a week with Scott in the Freshwater Gallery. She’s working as a bartender to pay off her college loans. But what she would really love to do is work at the aquarium.

  Marion Britt, the anaconda tamer, returning to the aquarium for the first time since her surgery, has joined our Wonderful Wednesdays, too. With hazel eyes and soft, brown, shoulder-length hair, she has a gentle manner that belies a razor-sharp intelligence, which she applies to her many endeavors, whether devising the first “spot maps” enabling the keepers to tell baby anacondas apart (she sketched their distinctive patterns on pre-drawn forms while holding the foot-long newborns as they bit her) or growing a new exotic yarn business, Purple Okapi, that she can run, despite persistent migraines caused by her surgery, from home.

  Today, I also meet Anna Magill-Dohan, who has just completed her sophomore year of high school. Short and small, her dark hair pulled back in a careless ponytail, she has been volunteering at the aquarium for the past two years. During the summer, she puts in four days a week. She has had fish tanks since she got her first as a present at age two. “After that,” she tells me, “I kept getting tanks. My parents said no more tanks, but I would just get them and not tell them.” Finally she got a pet flounder and her mother found out. As punishment—and here I feared a frying pan would enter the picture, but no—her mother, an elementary school teacher, decreed that she, not Anna, would name the fish. (She named him “Floundie.”)

  In addition to the usual crowd around Kali’s barrel, two aquarium educators have joined us, and Brendan has brought his girlfriend as well. “This is a record,” says Wilson. In al
l, Kali has nine visitors today—more than she has arms for. No other octopus he has known has had this big a backstage fan club.

  Though she’s never seen this many people before, Kali proves a perfect hostess. She tugs playfully at each arm, looks into our faces, and accepts fish and squid gracefully.

  “Wow!” the educators say when Kali’s suckers grip their fingers. “Awesome!” whispers Brendan’s girlfriend, as a slippery arm coils up to taste her hand.

  Around her barrel, we’re not only getting to know Kali, and getting her to know us; we are getting to know each other. And for most of us, there is no better way to get to know a person than while petting an octopus. While interacting with Kali, Christa told us about her twin, whose favorite animal is the octopus. Danny has pervasive developmental disorder—a broad diagnostic category for significant, sometimes disabling delay in acquiring basic skills. Christa is working to get legal custody of Danny. Not because her parents, living in nearby Methuen, don’t want custody, or because Danny is unhappy there. Vivacious, beautiful Christa wants custody of Danny because, she said, “I can’t imagine living without my brother. He wakes up happy every day!”

  Danny so loves octopuses that when they go to the aquarium together, he narrates to Christa with great excitement every move the animal makes. “Now she’s going up! Now she’s moving her arm!” Once Christa took Danny to a fish market in Boston, and he was upset to find octopus for sale for food. But the carcasses of the slain cephalopods so fascinated him that she eventually bought him one as a present. He keeps it in the freezer and periodically takes it out to look at it.

  Thanks to Octavia and Kali, I have begun to learn more about Wilson and his family, too. Born to Jewish Iraqi parents in Rasht, Iran, he grew up attending an American-style Presbyterian mission school in a Persian state, and, at an early age, learned to slip quietly between cultures. When he was sixteen, he went to boarding school in England, and then on to the University of London to study chemistry. He came to America (he remembers the date: January 3, 1957) to study chemical engineering at Columbia University in New York, and moved to Boston to join the Arthur D. Little Corp. There he met his wife, Debbie, a forward-thinking, independent-minded social worker, whose mother was born on the Russian/Polish border and whose dad was American. A year and a half later, Debbie announced that they were going to get married. Wilson instantly agreed. But his conservative, widowed mother was so mortified that Wilson had chosen a woman not of Iraqi Jewish ancestry that she flew to America to try to dissuade him.