Kraken

by Wendy Williams

  I asked Julie if she minded all the tedious work. With her usual ebullience, she said no: “It’s like mindless work, poking around, but it’s nice to have an afternoon like that, sitting and being engaged the whole time….”

  “Zenlike,” I commented. She agreed.

  When Julie turned up in Field’s lab that day, she was particularly excited about a result from the research cruise. The tracking tag on the Dosidicus she had so gently slipped back into Monterey Bay had finally turned up. It had come off the animal in seventeen days, just as it had been programmed to do. The tag’s satellite system showed it to be about 100 miles offshore of Ensenada, Mexico.

  “Cool,” was her response. After she figured in both horizontal and vertical migration distance (the squid goes up and down each day, making about a mile round-trip), she averaged this specimen’s travel to about 35 kilometers or 22 miles a day—almost marathon distance.

  The finding was important, providing the factual information to back up a scientific theory about Humboldt squid migration. Gilly had seen similar migration patterns, but only over the course of a few days at any one time. Julie’s tagged Dosidicus confirmed for the first time that these squid were capable of sustainable perseverance; that they could travel considerable distances over a fairly long period of time.

  “That they could do that over seventeen days is pretty impressive,” she said.

  Field said: “We kind of thought that they might have moved up and gone back, but now we have proof.”

  Field has been paying attention to the migration patterns and feeding behavior of Dosidicus for the better part of a decade. There are records of Dosidicus being present in Monterey Bay in the 1930s, but apparently the population didn’t stick around very long. “The 1997–98 El Niño resulted in an unusual persistence of the new population,” he wrote in an important overview paper on the mystery of the animals’ sudden proliferation.

  Over the first decade of the new century, Dosidicus populations seem to be spreading along the west coast of both North and South America. The upside is that this area is now one of the world’s largest cephalopod fisheries. The downside could be that the explosive populations are gobbling up everything they can find to eat, including commercially valuable rockfish and hake. Their large populations may not be a good sign, as far as the ocean’s ecological health is concerned.

  Dosidicus is very “opportunistic,” Field said. “They seem to do well under disturbances. There are some studies that suggest that in heavily fished ecosystems, cephalopods seem to do very well. They’re well-suited to take advantage of changing conditions, since they have short life spans, high growth rates, and very high potential fecundity.”

  His description reminded me of a study I’d read years earlier about coyotes. It turned out that the more ranchers and farmers tried to get rid of the animals, the more fecund the coyotes became. If a female coyote had a territory that was fairly open, she had more pups. If her territory was rather full, her litter would be much smaller. With their very flexible behavior, coyotes are happy on exclusive golf courses and in wilderness areas, and on Cape Cod they are well known to enjoy a good meal of mice or of watermelon gleaned from Dumpsters after the Fourth of July.

  I wondered if cephalopods were generalists, like coyotes. Could that be one reason for their existence over hundreds of millions of years?

  Field and I chatted a bit about the paleological record. Cephalopods made it through several major extinctions, including the 250-million-year-old Permian or “Great Dying” extinction in which about 95 percent of living species disappeared.

  Is it any wonder, I asked him, that Dosidicus seems to be thriving right now? After all, jellyfish—very ancient and primitive animals lacking brains—are also suddenly spreading worldwide.

  He said he wasn’t surprised.

  “Squid outbreaks like this can persist for a while,” he answered, “or they can disappear, or they can stay around for a very long time. They’re probably going to be around in this ecosystem now for quite a long time. If the ocean is changing as much as we think it is, they’re probably going to be around along the California Current for the long term.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  PLAYDATE

  In their brief time together, Slothrop formed the opinion that this

  octopus was not in good mental health.

  —THOMAS PYNCHON

  an an animal with its brains wrapped around its throat really be smart? It’s an intriguing question, isn’t it? Thousands of years ago, Aristotle pronounced the octopus “stupid.” That view prevailed throughout much of Western civilization. Until very recently.

  On an early June day, 2009, while the sad citizens of Boston were still wrapped in coats and huddled against the depressingly endless cold rain of that particular year, Wilson P. Menashi, in shirtsleeves, was in a back room at the New England Aquarium. He was standing in a rather large puddle of water, mulling over this and other questions of identity and intelligence and the ultimate meaning of life.

  Menashi was seventy-five. His companion in meditation, Truman, was about two. Both were drawing on their individual life experiences, both having long passed the halfway point of their individual life cycles, which in Truman’s case would probably be just a bit more than three years.

  Menashi had decades earlier helped invent cubic zirconia. Having retired early, he had for the past fifteen years volunteered one day a week at the aquarium, acquiring in the process the status of a sort-of staff member, albeit an unpaid one. His daughter had pushed him into it, to keep him from hanging around the house when he stopped working at Arthur D. Little. But no one had needed to make him keep coming back. He loved the place.

  Truman, on the other hand, had come here not of his own free will—if, that is, a giant Pacific octopus (Octopus dofleini) can be said to have “free will.” Or any will at all, for that matter. Whether Truman loved the place or not, no one could say. He certainly seemed to “love” Wilson, though. Or, to make some scientists more comfortable, we can with certainty say that the animal was undeniably drawn to the man. Wilson suspects, with a degree of modesty, that he and Truman have a special relationship, a thing going on.

  “My feeling is that he’ll let me do things with him that he might not allow others to do. Of course, I don’t know that that’s true. It’s just my feeling,” Wilson told me.

  As I walked through the widening puddle over to the pair to introduce myself, Truman and Wilson were quietly engaged in an intimate dance, a kind of pas de dix—a dance of ten arms. Wilson’s two arms gracefully clasped, as well as they could, whichever of Truman’s fluid, boneless eight arms “decided” to wind around Wilson’s.

  Is “decided” the correct word here? Who knows? Scientists know so little about these creatures of the cold Northern Pacific that we cannot say for sure. But we do know that roughly three-fifths of an octopus’s neurons reside not in the brain but in the arms. The octopus’s distributed intelligence would seem to imply that the arms have “minds” of their own. (Or, at least, it would imply that, if we could say with any certainty what a “mind” is….)

  Wilson Menashi and Truman

  One thing is certain: Experiments have shown that a blindfolded octopus can use its arms and suckers to tell the difference between various objects, leading scientists to believe that the arm’s ability to perceive by touch and by scent is as important as the animal’s ability to perceive by sight. The finding isn’t that surprising, since the octopus generally hunts at night, but how the various neurons interact with each other remains a mystery.

  The organization of the octopus brain is strange, at least from our human point of view. The animal has a central brain with roughly 45 million or so neurons. There are two large optic lobes with about 120 million to 180 million neurons. The arms contain the rest of the roughly 500 million neurons that comprise the animal’s whole nervous system. Some of the groups of neurons correspond very roughly to some of the groups that we humans have in our br
ains, like the hippocampus (involved in human learning and memory), for example. Some do not. We do not yet know which neurons are in control at any one time, if, indeed, a system of oversight exists at all. We do know that the suckers of a giant Pacific octopus are capable of behaving with the kind of fine-tuned dexterity with which our fingers and thumbs behave. In fact, giant Pacific octopuses may in some ways be even more dexterous. Aquarium staff who look after the octopuses have learned that they have to surround the animals’ tanks with a synthetic material like Astroturf, one of the few materials the suckers cannot grip.

  A few scientists have taken the first steps in trying to unravel the mystery. Hebrew University’s Binyamin Hochner and his colleagues studied the movements and nerves of an octopus arm. They learned that the arm moves and reaches out using a stereotypical flow that begins near the octopus’s head and body and flows out in a kind of hook that eventually reaches its tip. A flow of energy ripples down the arm. “Despite the fact that an octopus arm has virtually infinite degrees of freedom, arm movements are executed in a stereotyped manner,” the authors wrote in one paper. These stereotyped movements persisted even when scientists severed the neural connections between the animal’s main brain and the neural system in its arm.

  And indeed, if an arm breaks off an octopus head and body, the arm often continues along its way, doing whatever it was doing before it became severed. This happens even if the octopus itself “decides” to break off one of its arms and abandon the appendage, in the midst of battle, perhaps. The arm might continue to live for several hours before finally dying.

  Nor does the octopus appear to miss its appendage that much. While the severed arm goes its own way, the remains of the arm still attached to the octopus might bleed a little bit of blue blood, then regenerate a new arm, complete with nerves, flesh, and suckers. Octopuses are thus real-world, real-life versions of the virtual Namekians in Dragon Ball.

  As I watched, Truman’s arms began their journey upward, toward Wilson’s face, by initially attaching themselves to Wilson’s hands. Interspecies contact was tentative at first. Only the tiniest suckers at the end of the octopus arm contacted the man. Those suckers, with their strong muscles and high-powered chemoreceptors that act like taste buds, apparently enjoyed what they experienced, because they continued their journey of exploration, feeling their way up Wilson’s arm, past the elbow joint, and over the biceps toward the man’s shoulders. Meanwhile, larger and larger suckers, closer to the base of the octopus’s arm, attached themselves to the man’s hands and wrists.

  Our cultural history is filled with horrific tales of humans being captured this way by octopuses and drowned in the depths of the deep dark sea, many of which I had read by the time I made this visit. “For it struggles with him by coiling round him and it swallows him with sucker-cups and drags him asunder,” the Roman Pliny the Elder wrote rather dramatically, nearly two thousand years ago.

  Pliny’s point of view has been held by Homo sapiens for much of the last two millennia. Octopuses as symbols of dangerous envelopment turn up surprisingly often in Western literature and art. In 1802, the French naturalist Pierre Denys de Montfort presented to a chapel a woodcut of a truly monstrous eight-armed, bug-eyed octopus as large as the three-masted ship it was seizing. Three octopus arms entwined the ship’s masts like snakes. Two other arms grasped each end of the ship, as though to pull the ship closer to its beak. The other three arms hung there, unoccupied, as though perhaps waiting for sailors to fall into the sea and be eaten.

  de Montfort’s woodcut

  Although scientists generally agree that, for reasons unknown, many species of sea life grow to much smaller sizes today than in the past, the likelihood of an octopus (or any invertebrate) growing to such a size appears doubtful. Not to everyone, though. Shedd Aquarium biologist Roger Klocek has written that de Montfort’s woodcut and other evidence have led him “to believe an octopus with an arm span of more than 150 feet did exist” at one time.

  Maybe. But I think it’s more a symptom of our own special fears. Evolutionary theory speculates that life first emerged from the salt water onto the land as a defensive measure because it was just too darned dangerous in the world’s oceans. That’s a strategy that makes sense to me, but still, I’m doubtful that octopuses were ever large enough to attack ships. It’s also quite possible that early observers confused the octopus with the squid. A giant squid swimming in the water or floating on the sea surface can look quite like an octopus and, if you’re not prepared, be a frightening sight. But even giant or colossal squid are unlikely ever to have been that large.

  After de Montfort’s woodcut was presented, French culture continued to be obsessed with dangerous cephalopods. In the nineteenth century, an octopus—and not a very nice one, either—became one of the main characters in Victor Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea. “Suddenly he felt something seizing hold of his arm. He was struck with indescribable horror,” wrote Hugo about his protagonist swimming off the French coast. Ultimately, Hugo’s octopus tries but fails to drown the novel’s hero. The animal does, however, ultimately succeed in dragging the novel’s villain into its lair, where only his skeleton will later be found.

  Paris loved the malevolence of Hugo’s octopus. Soon after the novel’s publication, Parisian women began wearing hats with octopus arms hanging from the brims. “Everything is octopusied,” exclaimed one contemporary French letter-writer, commenting on the new fashion.

  Of course, it wasn’t only the French who were obsessed with the fearsomeness of octopuses. Gerald Durrell, the renowned British twentieth-century natural history writer, who was otherwise effusively in love with all things natural, compared an octopus sitting on a rock to a “Medusa head.” And American author Frank Norris chose Octopus for the main title of his muckraking book that described how, before Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency, railroad corporations entwined prairie farmers in an inescapable economic stranglehold. Even nature-oriented John Steinbeck, in Cannery Row, depicts the octopus as a “creeping murderer” that stalks its prey, “pretending now to be a bit of weed, now a rock, now a lump of decaying meat while its evil goat eyes watch coldly.” Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow features a huge octopus that wraps an arm around a woman and tries to drag her into the water. Pynchon’s hero, Slothrop, saves her by beating the octopus over the head with a wine bottle. Writes Pynchon: “In their brief time together, Slothrop formed the impression that this octopus was not in good mental health.”

  Perhaps in response to the belief that octopuses like to carry women into watery graves, twentieth-century American manliness was for a time expressed by willingness to wrestle an unsuspecting giant Pacific octopus out of its den and drag it up to the surface and onto land, where it would, eventually but inevitably, die. Octopus wrestling seemed to be a symbol of some kind of manly American bravery. “When the native lunged for the purplish eyes of the giant octopus, the monster caught him with one of its writhing tentacles,” wrote Wilmon Menard in “Octopus Wrestling Is My Hobby,” a 1949 story in Modern Mechanix.

  Modern Mechanix illustration of

  octopus drowning person

  In this story, Menard as Caucasian male hero saves the hapless native by wrestling the octopus into submission.

  In fact, oddly, octopus wrestling was a very big deal in other places as well. In Seattle, until the late 1960s, octopus-wrestling contests were thought to be the true measure of manliness among the Lloyd Bridges subset of scuba divers.

  William Beebe, of course, found octopuses repulsive. “I have always a struggle before I can make my hands do their duty and seize a tentacle.” But not all writers have felt this kind of distaste. In the most elegant paeon to the octopus I’ve ever read, the naturalist and journalist Gilbert Klingel wrote about a quite large specimen he encountered when marooned on the southern Bahamian island of Managua at just around the same time that William Beebe was descending to the ocean depths in Bermuda.

  “I feel about octopuses—as Mark T
wain did about the devil—that someone should undertake their rehabilitation,” Klingel began his graceful essay, “In Defense of Octopuses.” He complained about octopus wrestling, writing that “no one has ever told the octopuses’ side of the story.” He told his own tale of horror, of when he encountered a large octopus in Bahamian waters that he thought at first was an orange rock, which he intended to use as a handhold. “Before my gaze, the rock started to melt, began to ooze at the sides like a candle that had become too hot.” But he overcame his fear and began to observe octopuses in the water and research them in the literature.

  “I have found among them animals of unusual attainments and they should be ranked among the most remarkable denizens of the sea,” he continued. “Had they been able to pass the barrier of the edge of the ocean as the early fish-derived amphibians did there might have been no limit to the amazing forms which would have peopled the earth.”

  This kind of positive PR is rare. Most of our popular literature and art vilifies the animals. I must confess that I myself was not overly fond of the octopus when I started writing this book, although I couldn’t explain why. Then I found the answer, which dates back to my childhood. To begin researching this book, I collected a lot of old films and began watching them. Among those was It Came from Beneath the Sea, a 1955 B movie about a giant octopus that, fed up with humanity, began wrapping its anatomically incorrect six arms around women and children. The octopus, about as big as the Transamerica Pyramid, dragged victims—including little girls—off the streets of San Francisco into the waters underneath the Golden Gate Bridge. There, presumably, the victims died unhappy deaths. As I watched the film a second time, I realized that I had seen this movie as a child, and that it probably explained some of my fear of sea monsters.