Kraken

by Wendy Williams

  Cousteau’s point was that the octopus, completely free of the restrictions caused by a skeleton, was in the water a totally different animal than on land. “One must be able to see them slip, slide, and actually ‘flow’ like water to understand that the absence of a skeleton in a marine life form constitutes a form of perfection,” he once wrote. In one film, he pleads the animal’s cause, asking, “Octopus, octopus, are you really so unappealing?”

  Cousteau’s film narrator—The Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling, of all people, complete with his trademark cadences—begins the story by telling the audience that until recently “man could only speculate about the legendary monsters lurking beneath the sea” but that this episode would “seek the truth about this enigmatic cave-dweller … one of man’s most curious contemporaries.” For the first time ever, the public at large could watch and learn about the natural history of the octopus “beneath the concealing skin of the sea.” (True to form, Serling spits out the “p” in “speculate,” and the “k” in “skin,” creating an aura of ominousness despite Cousteau’s intentions.)

  In reality, in the wild, a giant Pacific octopus is a creature unto itself. Julie’s Dosidicus and neuroscience’s Loligo spend their lives as members of groups, but the octopus is usually a solitary being, an animal that lives by its own wits, and one that is clearly capable of learning. Cousteau and his crew found that they could seek out the animals and habituate them, and that once the octopuses had learned to accept the presence of humans, the divers could film, for the first time, some of the routine undersea behaviors of the animals.

  And when they showed these films to the world, it turned out that the octopus wasn’t the malevolent being we humans had always imagined. In fact, much of the giant Pacific octopus’s life in the sea is filled with what we humans would call pathos. Said to be the world’s largest octopus, the animal stays very much alone throughout its life span, save for the few hours of mating which mark the beginning of the end of its time on earth.

  The GPO does not establish firm territories, but instead lives in a series of temporary dens, which it may find among the rocks of the seafloor or build itself. Or a GPO might discover a suitable undersea cave, then shore it up with rocks and various debris it carries home from elsewhere. One Cousteau film showed a Mediterranean octopus that had found and carried home a live hand grenade, presumably left over from World War II.

  The octopus is a hunter, but shares only a few of its habits with mammalian predators like lions. From its temporary home, the octopus ventures short distances to forage for prey, including its favorite, crab. When it captures something, it injects its live captive with toxin that paralyzes the victim (some scientists say it also renders the victim unconscious), which it then carries home to consume. When available prey in a denning area becomes hard to find, the octopus moves on to a new home and new hunting grounds. After a period of time, if the prey has replenished, the octopus may return.

  With no skeleton of any kind, the octopus is entirely vulnerable. Hundreds of millions of years ago, it gave up the protective shell that keeps its distant cousins, clams and mussels, somewhat safe. In return for that sacrifice, the octopus received the convenience of free-form movement. But unlike squid and most cuttlefish, many octopus species crawl across the seafloor on their arms probably as frequently as they swim.

  Of course, as with most creatures in the world of cephalopods, there are exceptions to this general rule: Researchers recently discovered a group of octopuses that spend their entire lives swimming and may never touch the ocean floor. This group, called ctenoglossans, includes species with common names like the glass octopus and the telescope octopus.

  Among most species of octopus, the first pair of arms is used less often for crawling. Instead, they seem to be aids to navigation, used somewhat the way people walking through a dark room might hold out their arms and hands to “feel” their way past obstacles. Some scientists think that this first pair of arms, stretched out, can sense the presence of prey and predators in the surrounding water. Its chemoreceptors do not need to be touching an object in order to do this. It can sense another animal through the water itself. The second pair is used for scrambling, moving over the seafloor and objects like rocks. The third and fourth pairs tend to be used for what is sometimes called “walking,” although an octopus would rarely stand upright in the way that we do.

  Most of the GPO’s arms have about two hundred suckers, divided into two rows. The suckers are comparatively small at the arm tips and become progressively larger along the length of the arm. Near where the arms encircle the beak, the suckers can sometimes be quite large. Often described as “suction cups,” the suckers are in fact much more versatile. In a certain sense, they’re somewhat like fingers: Muscles attached to the inner section of each sucker allow it to operate independently of the others and to grasp or release an object. Thus, one sucker might clasp your flesh while the immediately adjacent one does not. The uppermost suckers on the arm of a very large octopus might be nearly an inch in diameter. The clasp is something you definitely notice. Unlike many squid, the GPO’s suckers do not have sharp teeth or hooks. A few species of octopus have bioluminescent suckers, which some scientists think may be used as lures to draw prey near.

  In regards to their arms, octopuses are capable of two behaviors that humans are likely to find rather shocking: autotomy and autophagy. In autotomy the animal separates itself from an arm, either by biting the arm off, or via a biological process that begins internally, below the skin of the arm, ending in the arm seemingly severing itself. Autophagy is even stranger. Several days before the event occurs, an arm begins to develop a kind of tremor. Eventually, the animal begins to eat its own arm. Scientists do not know why this occurs, although some suspect it may have to do with an infection, as many of the animals seen doing this have been well-fed and are not hungry.

  A giant Pacific octopus may hunt as many as six times in a 24-hour period on a round-the-clock basis, but seems to prefer nighttime excursions, which scientists believe tend to be longer than daytime hunting trips. A web, a not-very-thick film of flesh that spreads between the eight arms somewhat like a skirt, extends perhaps as much as a quarter of the length of an arm and is used to envelop the prey and help bring it to the beak.

  Instead of having a multichambered heart like we do, the octopus has three different hearts. There is a small heart at the base of each gill, as well as a main heart. The blood, which is blue when carrying oxygen rather than red (owing to the presence of copper rather than iron), circulates through all three hearts as the amount of oxygen is raised and lowered. When the blood is depleted of oxygen, it is almost translucent. Oxygen is a major problem for a big guy like a GPO. The air we breathe has plenty of oxygen, but the water in which a GPO “breathes” may carry much less than 1 percent oxygen. This is why the GPO seeks colder water—warmer water carries even less oxygen. And perhaps because its system relies on copper rather than iron, it seems to have less stamina. This may be why Truman eventually tired of being held in Wilson’s arms.

  Few animals have as heart-wrenching an end as the female giant Pacific octopus. Biologist and GPO expert Jim Cosgrove entitles his public talks “No Mother Could Give More.” The female has one chance, and one chance only, to send her genes into the next generation. When she becomes sexually ready, she begins to attract males. No one is quite sure how she does this, but the suspicion is that she sends out pheromones through the water that the male “smells” via his suckers’ chemoreceptors. The male mates with the female by using a special tip, called a ligula, attached to his third right arm. After receiving the male’s sperm, encased in spermatophores that sometimes may be almost three feet long, the female will nurture the eggs inside her body for five months, or perhaps a bit longer, depending on how cold the water is.

  When the time comes, in the cave she has chosen, she expels each egg, one by one, then—using her suckers—painstakingly braids them together into long chains that look l
ike plaits of a woman’s hair. These plaited chains of eggs she will then attach to the roof of her den. The whole process, which may involve exuding and braiding not quite 100,000 eggs in all, will take her perhaps as long as a month.

  Even then, her work is not done. Over the next period of perhaps more than half a year (depending on the water temperature), she must make sure the eggs survive until the offspring emerge. She constantly waves her arms gently over the plaits of eggs, making sure that nothing harmful settles on them. With her siphon, she blows water gently over them to keep them aerated. She has probably already built up a defensive wall of rocks outside her den, so that it’s difficult for humans to see what’s going on inside, but she also uses her arms to keep potential predators away from the eggs, and as far away from the den as possible. This is difficult, though, since she normally does not leave the den at any time.

  Throughout this whole period of more than half a year, she never eats. Some scientists believe that her optic glands, behind her optic lobes, have secreted molecules that keep her from feeding. All of the energy in her body is slowly consumed by her work until, by the time the offspring emerge, she has nearly starved to death.

  Some divers have experimented with this behavior by bringing food to the female octopus while she is protecting her eggs. She will not eat. Even females accustomed to receiving food from human hands will refuse the food. Researchers speculate that this starvation occurs because food in the den could lure other predators, or because the debris from eating could bring parasites or other kinds of infection that might harm the eggs.

  At the end of brooding, when the offspring emerge from their eggs, the mother urges them out of the den and on their way out into the open sea by gently blowing water over them with her siphon. It is likely that only one or two or three of all those carefully nurtured tens of thousands of eggs will survive to adulthood and to reproductive age. Nevertheless, the mother keeps gently siphoning them off into their future in the wide-open sea.

  Then she dies, having starved herself to death.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ONE LUCKY SUCKER

  Nerve cells firing is what gives us consciousness.

  —VINCENT PIERIBONE, YALE UNIVERSITY NEUROBIOLOGIST

  he first giant Pacific octopus I personally encountered was Greg, a young female weighing a mere eight pounds. Greg was not a bit shy. As soon as I mounted the few steps up to her tank at the Aquarium of the Pacific, she came right over and began exploring my arm. Her arms were small, although they didn’t seem so to me at the time, since I had nothing to compare them to. At first, she explored my arm, then drew back down into the water, perhaps to process whatever information she had gained.

  I turned to talk to James Wood, a marine biologist and passionate sea life enthusiast who devotes his time to the job of chief educator at Southern California’s Aquarium of the Pacific, and who was at that moment telling me that we know surprisingly little about the natural history of the giant Pacific octopus.

  “The world is filled with big, obvious, huge things that are still mysterious,” he said, also mentioning the giant squid and the colossal squid. Wood is an octopus man, and I thought I detected from him a small note of jealousy at all the media attention gained by the dangerously glamorous squid.

  The Aquarium of the Pacific, he told me, once had a small two-spot octopus named Lucky Sucker. This octopus was found several miles away from the ocean, walking along a sidewalk in Long Beach, California. The “Lucky” in Lucky Sucker is due to the fact that the right person found her. Lucky was scooped up with a notebook by a concerned student, who then boarded a local bus and carried the octopus all the way to the aquarium, where she was eagerly greeted by staff who knew just how to care for her.

  I asked how Lucky could have journeyed so far from the ocean.

  “Not sure,” Wood answered. “Maybe someone caught it and it escaped.” Maybe she was dropped out of a refrigeration truck. Maybe she was bycatch.

  Lucky Sucker became one of the aquarium’s star performers and, having died years ago, now holds an exalted place in the institution’s mythology. Most octopuses are notoriously shy, but Lucky was the Greta Garbo, the great and inscrutable star, of the cephalopod world. If there were an InStyle for invertebrates, Lucky would certainly have had her picture on the cover many times. Whenever the education staff had a group of children visiting, they knew they could depend on Lucky to come out and strut her stuff. She would frequently walk around in front of the children like an actress in her screen debut.

  I said I was sorry not to have met Lucky.

  Wood said that most humans will never meet any octopus at all, even if they spend a lot of time at sea. They’re just plain hard to see. When he was a kid, he used to go octopus hunting at 3 a.m., the most likely time for an octopus to be out and about.

  Once while he was hunting in the Florida Keys, a lobsterman thought Wood was stealing from his traps. What other reason would the kid have to be out diving at that hour?

  When the guy yelled at him, Wood answered that he wasn’t after lobster—he was after octopus.

  “There’s no octopus here,” the fisherman said.

  “I’ve seen twenty-one in the past hour,” Wood answered. You gotta know where to look.

  As we talked, Greg (so named because aquarium staff at first mistook her for a male) decided to renew her acquaintance with my arm.

  This time, I visibly flinched as my flesh was squeezed by some of the larger suckers.

  “Squeamish?” Wood said.

  He seemed genuinely surprised.

  Few people in the world are as passionate about cephalopods as Wood. Now in his mid-thirties, he grew up near the Florida coastline and remembers his childhood as that of a “geeky surfer.” For as long as he can remember, he caught things out of Florida’s polluted canals and brought them home to keep in his bedroom. His parents indulged him, but also found this a not-overly-attractive hobby. Octopuses in particular do not like to stay in tanks, in full view of people. One octopus disappeared almost as soon as Wood brought it home. Wood spent several days looking for it all over the house, worried about what his father would say when he learned that the animal was missing. Then Wood found the animal, still in the tank but hidden away in a tiny crevice where Wood hadn’t thought to look.

  “How the heck did it do that?” he thought to himself. This would be the first of many such enlightenments. With a childhood spent on the water and a continuing fascination with the octopus, Wood’s route to becoming a cephalopod scientist was not at all convoluted. It came as no surprise that he specialized in marine biology, or that he wrote his doctorate on the mysteries of deep-sea octopuses, or that his career focuses on teaching people about the marvels of the ocean. Wood is among a growing number of experts, in a surprisingly wide range of fields, who believe that the octopus, with its widely distributed net of nerves, may possess a level of intelligence on a par with that of some mammals. If that statement sounds hesitant and full of qualifiers—it is. Most scientists who think about this question say they believe an animal like the giant Pacific octopus is intelligent, but then almost always add: “Of course, we don’t really know.”

  That’s their point. Even the giant Pacific octopus, known to so many aquarium visitors around the world, is a mystery. Without knowing more about these animals in their natural habitat, we’ll probably not be able to truly evaluate their abilities. “Only those scientists who try to learn everything there is to know about a particular animal have any chance of unlocking its secrets,” writes primatologist Franz de Waal, whose lifelong study of chimps and bonobos has revealed remarkable facts about primate culture. Even more challenging would be discovering an appropriate method for measuring cephalopod intelligence. We don’t know much about how to evaluate intelligence in any other animal, in fact. Some researchers have begun to write that our failure to recognize “intelligence” in other animals is more a failure of our own intelligence than a failure of theirs.

&n
bsp; If he were alive today, essayist and octopus observer Gilbert Klingel would probably welcome this new point of view. “Like man, the modern cephalopods have been thrown upon the world naked and without the armor protection of their ancestors,” he wrote. In other words, cephalopods, like humans, therefore have to rely on braininess for defense.

  James Wood agrees. He said: “We associate intelligence with mammals, with animals that are like us and that are longer-lived. I don’t think evolution really cares whether you’re a mammal or not. If you have an advantage that helps you survive into the next generation, then that’s enough. We’re just very human-centric, and believe that what we have is better than anything else.”

  Wood imagined creating an IQ test—for humans, by an octopus: “So, the octopus thinks, ‘All right, I’m going to make an intelligence test for humans, because they show a little bit of promise in a very few ways.’ And the first question the octopus comes up with is this: ‘How many color patterns can your severed arm produce in one second?’”

  So whose rules do we play by?

  One of the reigning theories regarding intelligence is that the quality evolved as a response to social living. Briefly put, primates are smart because they have to learn how to get along with one another. The theory holds that they have to be socially intelligent to wield power over one another in order to get the best or the most food and other items of interest like sex.

  Dutch primatologist Carel van Schaik calls this theory “Machiavellian,” and postulates instead that intelligence is derived from “social learning.” He and many primatologists speculate that intelligence has cultural roots. Van Schaik made an international reputation when he discovered that orangutans can behave socially, something that had not been realized, since the animals usually live independently of one another. He also showed that primates were able to adapt their behavior to circumstances. He attributes their intelligence and ability to exercise social skills to the fact that infant orangutans spend thousands of hours learning from their mothers.