Kraken

by Wendy Williams

  On this particular chilly June day in Boston, however, Wilson Menashi didn’t appear a bit fearful. The rhythmic embraces of the giant Pacific octopus seemed almost to soothe him. Wilson could have been playing quietly with his pet dog. The puddle he was standing in was getting wider by the minute. But as it was only an inch deep, death by drowning did not seem imminent. On the other hand, who knew what this kind of intimacy could lead to? That was my way of thinking, anyway.

  “You have to keep playing with them,” Wilson said, casually peeling suckers off his neck and shoulder and throwing an arm gently back into the octopus tank. “They get bored very easily. They simply enjoy doing things. They’ll work on a puzzle for a long time. They do lots of things just because they want to.”

  Or they won’t want to. Wilson, wearing his creative engineering hat, has devised all kinds of puzzle boxes for his various giant Pacific octopus clients, and he’s found over the years that some of the animals will stick to the task of solving a problem and some will give up and go into a corner or behind a rock. Others are simply not interested at all.

  Mark Rehling, an aquarist with Cleveland Metroparks, believes that the ability to persevere is partly a factor of age. Older octopuses seem to be able to focus better. But he also believes that this ability has something to do with individual personality in each animal. This concept that an octopus would have a personality is fairly new in the field. Rehling created all kinds of complicated objects, which he calls “prey puzzles,” objects containing food that require problem solving. In general, the older animals were more successful, indicating that some kind of learning process, some change in neural connections, occurs. Hebrew University’s Binyamin Hochner also maintains that there indeed are changes in an octopus brain in regards to learning and memory that are, in some ways, quite like the changes that occur in our brains when we learn and remember things.

  Rehling has found that a few adult octopuses even refused to give back the puzzle pieces once they’d eaten the food hidden inside. Some animals had more difficulty than others, which implies some level of personality, intelligence, and problem solving. One thing was clear, Rehling writes: Prey puzzles originally designed for primates were just too “simplistic … if the octopus was interested, a solution was sure to follow.”

  Truman is one of the dedicated puzzlers. Only weeks before I met him, he had achieved international fame and quite a bit of glory because of this interest. Bill Murphy, the aquarium’s head aquarist in the octopus division, had put a live crab into one of Wilson’s box-within-a-box puzzles and given it to Truman. Since giant Pacific octopuses tend to hunt at night and lie low for the day, Murphy expected Truman to do what he usually did: envelop the box with his whole body and carry it away into hiding, to work on at night when the lights were low.

  Not this time. In full view of an astounded public—at least one of whom had a video camera—standing on the other side of the thick tank glass, Truman began the same testing process he would later use on Wilson’s arms. First, the tiniest tip of an arm entered the large outer box through an extremely small opening of only a few square inches. Soon, the whole animal, all 30 pounds and eight arms and innards-filled mantle, had oozed its way into the 15″-by-15″ clear plastic outer box.

  Now Truman was almost flattened pancakelike as he squeezed inside the outer box, but outside the inner box. How did he make the decision to behave this way? It’s a mystery to us vertebrates, because we have a central nervous system mainly housed in a cranium. This is the part of us that we believe is mostly in charge. Whether that’s true or not is a subject of intense scientific and philosophical debate, but at the very least, we have the illusion that our head is in charge of our body’s behavior.

  If a doctor taps our kneecap with a little rubber hammer, we usually respond reflexively. That’s because there are some neural cell bodies that reside not in the brain, but in the spine. Since the message doesn’t have to travel all the way to the brain, the axons are not as long and the knee jerk happens quite quickly. But we don’t have to jerk our knee. Most of us can develop the ability to feel that knock but decide mentally to override the immediate physical response. It takes time to learn, though, since the brain must practice overriding neurons with cell bodies located so far away from our cranium.

  Truman’s brain is much less centralized. An octopus may have perhaps 500 million, or half a billion, neurons, as compared to a human’s estimated 100 billion. The number of octopus nerve cells is just a bit less than the number of nerve cells in a dog, about 600 million, but only about half those of a cat, about 1,000 million. But sheer numbers don’t necessarily correlate with intelligence. Organization of the neurons is also important. The neurons involved in our reflex actions are important, but we certainly wouldn’t call the resulting knee jerk “intelligent.”

  Truman does have a central brain, wrapped around his esophagus. But it contains only a third of the nerve cells that process his decisions and actions. This fact greatly interests people who work on robotics and who want to know more about distributed intelligence. Where are Truman’s decisions made? Does he have an apical decision making structure, with one neural region in charge and capable of overriding the others? Or does one arm “argue” with the other about how to respond in a crisis?

  In deciphering Wilson’s puzzle box, after he’d managed to flatten himself like a pancake, Truman’s next task was to figure out how to unlock the inner box to get the crab. Although he eventually gave up and retreated without his dinner—possibly he just couldn’t maneuver well in his pancakelike state—news of his exploit flashed its way across the United States, from Boston to Florida to Texas and Los Angeles. By the next day, Truman’s picture was in newspapers from Britain to Singapore.

  None of this fame and glory surprised Wilson in the least.

  “Is Truman your favorite animal?” I asked.

  Wilson nodded.

  “Your favorite of all the animals in the aquarium, or of all animals, period?”

  He took a while to think that one over.

  “My favorite, period,” he finally answered.

  As Wilson and I chatted about the vagaries of fame, Truman began to get to know me better. The same kind of tentative, ticklish tentacular attachment began. First, the smallest suckers sought out my wrist. I began to feel explored and manipulated. It was a rather odd but nevertheless intriguingly benign sensation. Next came larger suckers, and then, some very large suckers. Very large, as in almost as large as my wrist. Or so it seemed.

  My eyes must have widened.

  When the smaller suckers reached the level of my biceps, Wilson kindly detached Truman’s arms, laying them gently back in the tank. Apparently, if you start at the top with the smallest suckers and peel the octopus arm down like a banana peel, the detaching is rather simple.

  Wilson warned me about getting soaked with water from Truman’s siphon.

  “It’s OK,” I said, surprised. “It’s pointing the other way.”

  “That can change,” he warned. Then he winked and pointed to the siphon, which was indeed changing angles as we spoke.

  I stepped back.

  Eventually Truman lay back in the water. He floated upside down.

  “He’s tired now,” Wilson said. “He wants to be alone.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  FAN CLUBS AND FILM STARS

  The octopus looks like a silken scarf,

  floating, swirling, and settling gently

  as a leaf on a rock.

  —JACQUES-YVES COUSTEAU

  ruman is not the only giant Pacific octopus (GPO) to have a fan club. At Mystic Aquarium in Connecticut, Sammy arrived from the Canadian West Coast when he was about one year old, just a little before the time when Truman became famous. Electra, the aquarium’s senior GPO, was nearing retirement age and a new star was needed to take her place. Even before he went on exhibit, Sammy’s moods ran hot and cold. It was never clear whether being a star was the right thing for him.


  Aquarist Monique Glazier and Sammy

  Sometimes he would come across the tank to interact with Monique Glazier, his young aquarist, chief provider of his daily sustenance, and all-around protector. And sometimes, he just wouldn’t. Monique could never figure any rhyme or reason to his actions. “He’s not always interested in new things,” she told me.

  “But when he is, he’s really interested.” When Sammy was moved from a behind-the-scenes role onto exhibit, the first thing he did was hide in a bunch of plastic kelp fronds. His camouflage skills were so well-honed that he just disappeared. Aquarium staff put their fingers in the water, trying to lure him out. “As soon as I put my hand in the water, Sammy came over to see me,” Monique said. “It appeared as though he came over specifically to see me. That’s probably not what he was doing, but that’s what it looked like to me.”

  Sammy rides in a basket

  When Sammy made his public entrance and Electra left the stage, Mystic staff put up a sign that explained why the new GPO was so much smaller than the old one. Giant Pacific octopuses grow at an astounding rate. In the wild, they only live to the age of three or so. But despite this short life span, they grow quite large. In decades past, a few were caught that had grown to as much as 200, 300, or even, in one case, 400 pounds. These exceptionally large specimens would be two to three times the size of a six-foot human. (There’s a report from decades ago of a 600-pound GPO, but it’s never been confirmed and scientists are skeptical.) If you could watch these wild animals day by day, perhaps you would be able to literally see them grow.

  Senescent Electra ready to leave stage

  None as large as several hundred pounds has been found for decades. Scientists don’t know why, but some speculate that the size diminishment may be due to a concomitant decrease of available food in the ocean, to greater pollution in the ocean, or to temperature changes in the ocean that have shifted the sea’s various food layers. Or to all of the above. All these factors are probably swirling together to combine into an overall general degradation of the world’s ocean ecosystems. It’s not just the GPOs that are getting smaller. Lots of species suffer in this regard.

  In aquariums, GPOs generally reach only 30 or 40 pounds, although the Seattle Aquarium had one male, Mr. Big, who weighed almost 100 pounds. Since Mystic’s Sammy would start his new job as a comparatively small animal and grow quickly, some of Mystic’s most faithful human fans began visiting him regularly to watch the process. Kids were especially interested, having not been raised on octopus horror stories. “There’s your basic octopus,” sang one ten-year-old boy on seeing Sammy. “I love cephalopods,” said a young boy to his brother, adding, “There’s the anemone, over there.” The father was as surprised as I was by his son’s vocabulary.

  “How do you know those words?” I asked.

  “Nemo,” the boy explained. “And SpongeBob.”

  One family told me they came every week. The more faithful of Sammy’s fans were invited for a personal backroom rendezvous, although Monique had to be careful, since she never knew what kind of mood Sammy would be in. He had been known to ink strangers.

  Thinking that Sammy’s on-again, off-again mood might perk up if he had more entertainment and less free time, Monique began designing complicated prey puzzles, just as Wilson had done for Truman. But most of what Monique created to keep Sammy busy was just too easy. Eventually Monique realized her creative juices were being hampered by her own skeleton. She was thinking “inside the box” of her own humerus, ulna, and radius.

  Sammy, free of the restrictions imposed by rigid bones, could come up with all kinds of strategies for getting prey out of tight places, strategies that Monique realized she just couldn’t imagine. Sammy’s only limitation in changing shape was his beak. Monique hid food inside all kinds of toys, thinking Sammy would never solve the puzzle, but then there he was, back again, almost instantaneously, done with his meal and looking for something else to do. Once she put together an elaborate assemblage of pieces of colored plastic gerbil tubing, with lots of twists and turns, designed to mimic the underground tunnels that gerbils like running through. Monique imagined Sammy having to spend hours and hours of time exploring the tubing maze with his arms, looking for his meal. She imagined he’d have to elongate his arms and use his chemoreceptors to try to smell the food from a distance.

  She was wrong. She said: “Sammy was smarter than I was. He learned how to break the pieces apart and get his food. Then he would feed the plastic pieces to the anemone.” The first time this happened, Monique was stumped. When she fished the toy out of Sammy’s tank, she knew there was a piece of plastic tubing missing, but she couldn’t find it. It was too big to just disappear. And it wasn’t possible (she hoped) that Sammy had eaten it. A day later, the anemone spit out the missing plastic piece. Now she counts the pieces when she puts the puzzle together.

  One toy Monique created mystified her much more than it stumped Sammy. She had a baseball-size plastic ball that could be assembled or disassembled by screwing or unscrewing the two halves, kind of like a jar top. She placed a piece of food inside, screwed the two pieces together and gave Sammy the ball, which had only a few very small holes, much smaller than Sammy’s beak. The animal took the ball and went away to hide and eat. The next time Monique saw the ball, the food was gone. But the ball itself was intact. Somehow Sammy had managed to get at the food hidden inside the ball without unscrewing the two halves. Either that, or he was putting the ball back together when he was done eating, but Monique was pretty sure Sammy wasn’t that fastidious. This happened every time she gave Sammy the ball. “To this day, I have no idea what he does with that toy,” she told me.

  Monique is not the only aquarist who has trouble creating puzzles complicated enough to keep an octopus busy for any length of time. In order to help out colleagues, aquarists have created an “Octopus Enrichment Notebook,” hoping that by pooling their human brains, they might be able to keep one step ahead of the octopuses’ brains.

  Captive octopuses all over the world have fascinated the public by being able to unscrew jars, which they do by attaching their muscular suckers to the lid and twisting. But most aquarists seem to think that this kind of problem solving is just too simple, if the goal is to keep the animal occupied for a while. One aquarist, though, did wonder why octopuses did not learn to put the top back on the jar when done eating.

  The first feature film ever made of an octopus, a 13-minute black-and-white by Frenchman Jean Painlevé in 1928, did nothing to rehabilitate the animal’s frightening public image. The small specimen in the film, slithering over rocks on the French Atlantic coastline, looked only a little more than wormlike and was a far cry from the thrilling malevolence depicted in Victor Hugo’s novel. Parisians did not mark the octopus’s movie debut with hats or dresses of any kind. Its creepiness when out of the water was not overly alluring. Just watching it sent shivers up my spine.

  Painlevé’s second octopus film—Les Amours de la Pieuvre (The Loves of an Octopus)—in color this time, released in 1967, depicted the lugubrious, decidedly unexciting mating of a male and female. No titillation here: The happy couple came across as being weird without being wonderful at all. Paris, once again, yawned. The director’s 1934 film of a male seahorse giving birth had been the talk of Le Metro—a male giving birth! Mon Dieu!— but the French public seems to have been disappointed by octopus sex. The 1967 film passed almost unnoticed from the fickle Parisian limelight.

  It took Jacques-Yves Cousteau to elevate the giant Pacific octopus to the level of beloved charismatic megafauna, and to show that the octopus in the water was quite different from the octopus crawling over rocks. Just as Joy and George Adamson in Born Free showed there was a lot more to lions than predatory behavior, Cousteau almost single-handedly changed public opinion when he portrayed the giant Pacific octopus as a gentle colossus that fought only when unavoidably cornered with nowhere to hide. As a fairly young man, Cousteau had helped invent the Aqua-Lung and th
us freed divers from the confines of a heavy helmet and air hose connected to the surface.

  He liked to think of himself as a scientist, but there are those who would intensely disagree. Few, however, would contest the fact that his decades-long worldwide underwater filming of ocean life, most of which appeared on television around the globe, made Jacques Cousteau the best public relations agent the ocean has ever had. In fact, Cousteau has been compared to an octopus by at least one biographer, Axel Madsen: “He is tentacular, reaching out and sucking people and ideas to him.”

  By the time his film “Octopus, Octopus” (part of The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau series) appeared in 1971, the public was already familiar with Cousteau’s work and with the ocean ethic he was bestowing upon a postwar, newly open-minded, more scientifically aware world.

  “A lot of people attack the sea. I make love to it,” Cousteau, incomparably French, once said.

  That was certainly true of his octopus film. Only the hardest of hearts would not be moved by his passionate portrait of a strange, sometimes bloblike, much-maligned animal. The film opens with a several-second shot of an apparently nonchalant giant Pacific octopus swimming calmly along underwater. Right beside the animal, a man swims just as calmly. Animal and man are about the same size, but the octopus is grace personified. When it spreads out its eight arms to glide through the ocean, it seems almost to be soaring birdlike. Who knew? Television audiences were fascinated. The octopus on land or on the surface of the sea might be frightening, but the octopus in its own subsurface environment turned out to be spellbinding.