How to Be a Good Creature Page 9
Though I had learned much from my time with Clarabelle and her eight-legged kin in French Guiana, never before had I truly become close friends with an invertebrate—much less a marine invertebrate. Even imagining that I could befriend an octopus would be dismissed among many circles as anthropomorphism—projecting human emotions onto an animal.
It’s true that it’s easy to project one’s own feelings onto another. We do this with our fellow humans all the time. Who hasn’t carefully selected a gift for a friend that failed to delight, or asked someone for a date only to be coldly refused? But emotions aren’t confined to humans. A far worse mistake than misreading an animal’s emotions is to assume the animal hasn’t any emotions at all.
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A week later, I was back at the aquarium. This time I had company. The producers of Living on Earth, the national environmental radio show, had read my magazine story and were sending the show’s host, a producer, and a sound crew to record a segment on octopus intelligence. None of us—Wilson or Scott or even Bill Murphy, the head Cold Marine Gallery aquarist, who cared for Octavia every day—had any idea what Octavia would do.
As I peered into the water, Wilson selected a silvery capelin from the small bucket of fish perched on the lip of her tank. Octavia came over immediately, grabbing Wilson’s hand with some of her larger suckers. I plunged my hands in and she instantly grabbed me, too. More arms curled up from the water. “Go ahead—you can touch her,” Bill suggested to Steve Curwood, the host of the show. As a single sucker grasped his index finger, Steve gave a little shout. “Oh! She’s grabbing ahold here!” He was enchanted.
Soon, all six of us—Bill, Wilson, Steve and I with our hands in the water, and the producer and sound recorder, watching from the edge of the tank—were overwhelmed with sensation: the sucking grasp of her tasting us, the colors playing over her electric skin, the acrobatics of her suckers and arms and eyes. We stroked her, feeling her soft, silky slime as she tasted our skin, creating red hickeys with her suction. We watched her reshape the surface of her skin, making bumps called papillae that sometimes looked like a covering of thorns and other times looked like fat goose bumps. Sometimes the papillae formed little horns over her eyes.
We decided to feed her another capelin. But when we looked at the edge of the tank, the bucket was gone.
With six humans watching, she had stolen it out from under us.
We didn’t try to get the bucket back. She had let the fish fall out of it and was holding it beneath her, exploring it. But while playing with the bucket, Octavia was still also playing with us. Multitasking for an octopus is easy, because three-fifths of their neurons are not even in their brains, but in their arms. It’s almost as if each arm has its own separate brain—a brain that craves, and enjoys, stimulation.
I noticed that patches of Octavia’s skin had started to turn from red to white—the color of a relaxed octopus.
“She’s happy!” I cried to Wilson.
“Oh, yes,” he agreed. “Very happy.”
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The world’s seas are blessed with more than 250 species of octopus. We know little about most of them. But the majority of the species that have been studied—the giant Pacific among them—are thought to be largely solitary. Even mating is a fraught affair, apt to turn into the kind of dinner date when one octopus eats the other. So why would an octopus want to be friends with a person?
The answer, I think, is to play with us.
In the wild, octopuses are constantly exploring. They eat a huge variety of foods, from clams with shells that need to be opened, to fish that must be chased, to crabs that hide in coral crevices. But in addition to food, octopuses like to find stuff and take it home. Some species are known to collect two halves of a coconut shell and lug them quite some distance so they can pull the two halves back together around them and create their own private Quonset hut. Others bring stones back to the den and build a wall in front of the entrance. They famously steal GoPros and cameras from divers. Sometimes they’ll tug on divers’ face masks or regulators.
In captivity, octopuses enjoy toys, often the same ones with which children play. Octopuses like to take apart and put together Mr. Potato Head. They play with Legos. They’ll unscrew the lids to jars to get a tasty crab inside—but they enjoy manipulating objects so much, they’ll often screw the lid back on when they’re through. To keep the many octopuses he’s known occupied, Wilson, an engineer and inventor, created a series of nesting Plexiglas boxes with different locks. Octopuses enjoyed unlocking box after box to retrieve a treat inside.
Octavia enjoyed me, I think, because we liked to play with each other. Our games weren’t like baseball or dolls. They were more like versions of patty cake, but with suckers. Of course, staff and volunteers at the aquarium surely loved playing with her too—but they had other duties. I was willing to play endlessly, or at least until my hands froze or her blue copper-powered blood, which affords less endurance than our iron-based blood does, ran out of energy.
Sometimes I brought her new friends to play with. I brought my friend, Liz, a pack-a-day smoker whose taste Octavia did not seem to relish. I brought another friend who studied gorillas in Africa, with whom she played happily.
A high school senior who was job-shadowing me came along another day. Octavia doused her with salt water from her funnel, right in the face!
At one point that first year with Octavia, I had to skip my weekly visit to Boston in order to attend an octopus symposium in Seattle. When I returned to the New England Aquarium and Wilson opened her tank, Octavia jetted to my side and extended her arms to me with enthusiasm as unmistakable as Sally’s puffy smile. The octopus immobilized both my arms, sucking them so hard, I would have hickeys that lasted for days. We stayed together for an hour and fifteen minutes.
But it wasn’t long before Octavia wanted to play no more.
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“Octavia is being temperamental,” Bill emailed me.
Abruptly, her behavior had changed. Usually she liked to rest in the upper corner of her tank; now she sat on the bottom, or near the window facing the public, near the brightest lights. Octavia had always been a particularly colorful, often red octopus. Now she was much paler. And importantly, he told me, “She’s less interested in interacting with people.” These are all, he told me, signs of old age. The end of her life could be near.
I came in to see her, and she floated over to see me. But her grip was weak. Our interaction was over in fifteen minutes. I was heartbroken. Soon I’d be leaving on an expedition to Namibia for a book on cheetahs. Would she even be alive when I returned?
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I returned from Namibia to find that Octavia’s life, as well as my relationship with her, was profoundly different.
Her skin was as smooth as a blown-up balloon. Her face, her funnel, and her gill openings were turned to the wall. All her suckers faced inward too, holding fast to the sides of the tank and to the rock wall of her lair—all except those on one long arm that hung languidly down like a string from the balloon of her big body. Her color was pink veined with maroon except for the webbing between her arms, which was gray.
While I’d been away, Octavia had laid eggs—eventually, perhaps 100,000 of them. Pearl white, the size of rice grains, they hung in chains by the dozens, or by the hundreds. Each egg had a little black tail-like thread, which, using her dexterous suckers, she had braided together like onions. She then glued each chain to the ceiling or wall of her rocky lair. Because Octavia had not mated, her eggs were infertile. But Octavia could not know they would never hatch. The eggs were now Octavia’s sole focus, just as would be the case for a mother octopus in the wild.
A mother octopus never leaves her eggs, even to eat. In the wild, that means octopuses on eggs starve themselves for the rest of their lives. At least we could offer Octavia food. On the end of long tongs, Wilson extended a fish toward our friend in her lair. Octavia sent one arm, like an emissary, over to accept it. Then, as if remem
bering something, a second arm followed the first, and then a third reached out to taste mine. But she released me almost instantly. “She’s not friendly anymore,” Wilson told me. She was busy guarding her eggs and didn’t want a visit. “Let her do her job,” Wilson said, closing the lid to the tank.
In those days, I mainly watched Octavia from the public viewing area. I would arrive early, before the aquarium opened, to get a clear view.
Before the crowds arrive, much of the aquarium is dark, mysterious, and intimate. Watching Octavia was like a meditation. I emptied out my mind, sweeping a space clean to let her in. To prepare to see her, I courted stillness. I let my eyes adjust, tuned my brain to switch from seeing nothing to seeing a great deal—often more than I could process at once.
Her body might be brownish, mottled with white. She might look pink. Her skin could be thorny or smooth; her eyes, coppery or silver. She might be glued to the top of her den, or plastered to its sides. But she was always, always on her eggs. One morning, her arm was under her mantle—the part that looks like a head but is really the octopus’s abdomen—another arm attached by twenty-eight suckers to the ceiling of the lair. The skin between her arms hung as still as drapery. And suddenly, after twenty-five minutes of stillness, two other arms began to vigorously sweep through chains of eggs, like a person vacuuming the curtains.
At other times, she would fluff them, a different, softer motion, like you might use to plump a pillow. She also used her funnel to shoot jets of water at them, the way you might use a nozzle on a hose. Through her gill slits, she’d inhale a great breath of water, making her mantle expand like a blooming pink lady slipper orchid—and then she’d let loose with a typhoonic blast.
Egg-cleaning sometimes looked like a caress, Octavia using only the thin tips of her arms to stroke her eggs with the tenderness any mother would show to her baby. But even when she was motionless, Octavia was caring for her eggs. Much of the time, most of the eggs were hidden because she plastered her body over them, protecting them from all comers. Even though there were no predators in her tank, she would not leave her eggs.
I could not help but wish that her eggs were fertile and that her offspring would hatch. I wished that her end, which would be coming all too soon, might be vindicated, as Charlotte the spider’s was, with abundant new life resulting from her careful nurturing. But eggs fertile or no, Octavia’s devotion to them was profoundly beautiful. In each caress, each cleaning, each hour of steadfast protection of this mother’s eggs, I could see the ancient shape of life’s first love.
Thousands of billions of mothers—from the gelatinous ancestors of Octavia, to my own mother—have taught their kind to love, and to know that love is the highest and best use of a life. Love alone matters, and makes its object worthy. And love is a living thing, even if Octavia’s eggs were not. Molly. Christopher. Tess . . . all were no longer living, yet I loved them no less. And, I realized, too soon, Octavia herself would be no more. But love never dies, and love always matters. And so it still fills me with gratitude that Octavia tended her eggs with such diligence and grace. For I could face the inevitable fact of her dying with the knowledge that she would do so in the act of loving, as only a mature female octopus at the end of her short, strange life can love.
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In those days, to cheer up, I used to watch a video of giant Pacific octopus eggs hatching. The mother, having guarded and cleaned the eggs for six months, uses her funnel to blow the tiny babies, who look like exact miniatures of herself, out of the lair and into the open ocean, where they will live as plankton until they grow heavy enough to crawl. The mother octopus uses some of her last breaths to boost her newborns out to the sea. Within days, the divers who filmed this will return to find her dead.
But six months after Octavia laid her eggs, she was still strong. Seven months passed. Eight. Some of the eggs, despite her diligent cleaning, were disintegrating and falling to the floor of her exhibit. But still she would not leave them. Nine months passed. Then ten. It seemed some sort of miracle, but Octavia remained steadfastly plastered to her eggs, still hanging on.
Then one day I came in and noticed one of her eyes was horribly swollen. There was no treating the infection; she, like her decomposing eggs, was now simply falling apart. To make her more comfortable, Bill decided to remove her from the big tank and its potentially dangerous rocks, lights, and noisy public. But would she leave her eggs?
To everyone’s surprise, when Octavia tasted the touch of Bill’s hand, she agreed to move into a net and from there was transferred to a quiet, dark barrel behind the scenes.
Because she had been holed up in her rocky lair, she had not looked up at our faces through the water for ten long months. I had not touched or played with her all that time. But still, after her transfer from the main display tank, I wanted to see her at least one last time.
Wilson and I unscrewed the lid to her barrel and peered in. We held a squid for her in case she wanted to eat. She floated to the top and took the squid from our hands. But she dropped it. Hunger was not what brought her to the top of the tank.
She was old. She was sick. She was weak and near death. She hadn’t had any contact with us for ten months—given an octopus’s life span, that’s like not seeing someone for twenty-five years. But she not only remembered us, but made the effort to greet us one last time.
Octavia looked us in the eyes and gently but firmly attached her suckers to our skin. She stayed, tasting us for a full five minutes, until she sank back to the bottom.
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Did Octavia finally realize her eggs were infertile? In her last days, was she comfortable? Could she know how much I cared about her? Did it matter to her?
I wish I knew, but I don’t. But now, thanks to Octavia, I know something perhaps deeper and more important, perhaps best expressed by Thales of Miletus, a Greek philosopher who lived more than 2,600 years ago. “The universe,” he’s reported to have said, “is alive, and has fire in it, and is full of gods.” Being friends with an octopus—whatever that friendship meant to her—has shown me that our world, and the worlds around and within it, is aflame with shades of brilliance we cannot fathom—and is far more vibrant, far more holy, than we could ever imagine.
Rick Simpson knew it was me from the caller ID, but I didn’t expect him to pick up. I’d expected to reach his wife, Jody.
“Rick?” I managed to say only his name before I started sobbing.
“Sy, are you all right? Are you hurt? Is Howard all right? Do you want me to come over?” I couldn’t answer. I was hyperventilating now, and mortified. I hadn’t expected to cry, and I certainly hadn’t expected to do so, uncontrollably, in Rick’s ear.
Jody’s ear—which I’d been anticipating—would have been different. Because she, Pearl, and May had hiked with me and Sally almost every day for the past nine years, she would instantly understand my dilemma and help me sort things out.
Finally I managed to compose myself enough to tell Rick what had happened. Nobody was hurt. Nobody was in danger. But I felt as if my life was about to turn upside down, and I didn’t think I was ready.
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The first sign of trouble began on a beautiful, snowy afternoon when we were out cross-country skiing.
Sally and I were out with Jody, Pearl, and May. Sally often strayed on our walks—after all, there were enticing feces to roll in and carcasses to eat. But when I called, she’d always notice, cocking her tall ears in my direction, and after carefully considering whether my request was worth changing her plans, she’d always come back to me. But on this snowy day, as she plowed into a thicket of burrs that would take me forever to extract from her dense fur, she didn’t even look up.
Sally had gone deaf.
We made accommodations. Howard and I got her a vibrating collar, and I showed her that if she looked at me when she felt its pulse, she’d get a treat. We continued our hikes in the woods with our friends. Now we avoided routes near roads, since Sally couldn’t he
ar approaching cars. There was one benefit to her deafness. Howard and I now enjoyed nights unbroken by Sally’s high-decibel conversations with foxes and distant dogs. But her hearing loss scared me. We had been together only nine years. Was Sally much older than we had thought?
I worried. Soon I was to leave on a research trip to Brazil. I’d accompany the man who had introduced me to my first octopus at New England Aquarium, Scott Dowd, on an expedition up the Río Negro, the black-water tributary that joins with the white-water Río Solimões to form the Amazon. I was working on a book for young readers about where home aquarium fish come from, and how these small, colorful fish may save the rainforest. But I hated to leave Sally. Once again, I’d be out of phone or Internet contact for weeks. If Sally’s health was precarious, I would drop out of the expedition and postpone the book a year.
The week before I left, we visited our beloved vet, Chuck. Earlier that week, Sally had seemed to slip on some ice and had a slight limp. But Chuck assured me she was fine. I was good to go.
On the flight back from Brazil, I tried phoning Howard, first from Miami and then from Boston. I couldn’t reach him either time. When I walked through our door, I confronted my worst fears: Sally was lying, collapsed, at the foot of the stairs, unable to stand. While I was gone, she had been stricken with what appeared to be canine peripheral vestibular disease.
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Sally rallied, as Tess had done before her. We practiced walking inside the house. Within two weeks we could walk up and down our street. Within a month we resumed our walks with the poodles—though now our walks were shorter and flatter. Jody, Pearl, and May were patient with us. It seemed the other dogs were looking out for Sally, who was now slow and wobbly. They’d wait for her on the trail, as Tess had done for me.