But scientists have found that mammals exhibit a strong frustration effect. If their experience tells them that a food reward appears after striking an object, and they don’t receive that reward, mammals will continue trying to receive what they expect to receive. The general consensus in the field has been that this frustration drive is mediated by the mammalian limbic system.
But Purdy thinks he may have seen a frustration response in cuttlefish. Purdy began by experiencing his own frustration when he tried to train cuttlefish to swim mazes using the same techniques by which rats are trained. He could not get a consistent response. Every once in a while, he could get one of his subjects to navigate the maze, but never routinely. Without being able to achieve that goal, Purdy was unable to try the long series of research experiments used by scientists to understand some of the basic aspects of an animal’s intelligence.
When I asked him if the lack of trainability implied that cuttlefish were not intelligent, his response was quick: “Not at all. Not all animals are set up to solve a maze. A maze isn’t something that cuttlefish do for a living. It’s going to ambush its food.”
But because the cuttlefish don’t follow through on behaviors that we know how to study, Purdy was at a loss as to how to proceed. Recently, though, he unearthed a clue that might help. Sometimes a cuttlefish raises its two top arms high above its body and the arms turn a bit red. Purdy believes this behavior is a sign of annoyance or frustration. He had trained a cuttlefish to expect that food would be dropped in its tank when a light in the tank went on and then off. Once when he dropped the food into the tank, it fell behind an object and was out of sight and out of reach of the cuttlefish. The cuttlefish searched for the expected reward, and when it was unable to find it, it raised its two arms above its head.
“The arms turned a deep, dark, blood-red color. If that’s a sign of primary frustration, then we might be well on our way to understanding something more about these animals.”
The problem, he said, is that we don’t know enough about the basic natural history and behavior of cephalopods to be able to formulate the right research questions. Without that understanding, we might be asking the wrong questions, or misinterpreting what we see. Early in his research career, Purdy studied shrimp. His research subjects very quickly learned to strike an object and get a food reward. Within a day or so, the shrimp had learned the task so well that they received at least thirty food rewards in one training session. But the following day, something strange happened. The shrimp refused to strike the object. No matter what Purdy did, the research subjects ignored the object and did not receive the food reward.
Then he did some reading. It turned out that the shrimp he was training only ate once every thirty days. They didn’t strike the object because they were no longer hungry.
“You have to look at things that matter to the animal,” Purdy told me. “It all comes back to knowing something about the life history of the animal.”
EPILOGUE
CURIOUS, EXCITING–YET SLIGHTLY DISTURBING
The world was coming of age, and the oceans led the way.
—DORRIK STOW
he cherry blossoms were already in bloom in late February in Portland, Oregon, when Julie arrived to present the final results of her November research cruise in Monterey Bay. It had been an exceptionally short winter on the West Coast. The early burst of color predicted, correctly as it turned out, an unusually warm spring and summer across the continent all the way to the Atlantic. By September, the temperature in Los Angeles would reach 113 degrees.
Julie was speaking at her first major scientific conference, Ocean Sciences 2010. She was anxious but very well prepared. I’d listened to her present at a small conference when I’d met her in Monterey in November. Since then, she’d been coached and drilled by her colleagues until she’d become more confident of both her data and her ability to speak in front of a crowd.
At the Portland conference she spoke to an overflow audience. Scientists crowded around the doorway and in the hall beyond. The work of a graduate student rarely engenders this kind of excitement, but Humboldt behavior was hot science. The audience hoped Julie would provide another clue to the mystery of the squid’s sudden proliferation.
She didn’t disappoint. She told her listeners about the tagged Humboldt that she had cradled in her arms that November evening and that had turned up seventeen days later west of Ensenada, Mexico. All of the animals she and her team had tagged over several years had been headed in a southerly direction, but that particular animal best demonstrated the speed and perseverance with which these powerful squid were able to travel when so inclined.
Julie also provided her audience with other less obvious but equally important facts. Humboldts have been consistently present in Monterey Bay since 1997, she explained, although their population levels have fluctuated from season to season and from year to year. Small numbers of the animals had been seen in the bay from time to time over many decades, but their presence in fairly large numbers seemed to be something new. Of course, no one knows for sure since accurate fishery records don’t exist prior to the twentieth century.
During 2008 and 2009, Julie and the Gilly team had tagged nine of these animals. Julie told her listeners that the team had confirmed, as expected, that Humboldts, like so many other sea species, make a daily migration up to the surface at sunset and back down at dawn. She said that the team found evidence of mated Humboldts during the November cruise but that there was no evidence that the mating had occurred in Monterey Bay. Nor had anyone found newly hatched Humboldts in U.S. waters. The team suspected, but could not prove, that the mating may have occurred in warmer southerly waters. Only one cluster of spawned Humboldt eggs had ever been found—and that was in a warm region near the equator.
Julie also confirmed that the voracious squid were eating fish species that Pacific Coast fishermen catch commercially. Her stomach dissections at John Field’s lab had determined that the Humboldts eat hake, rockfish, and smaller squid, sometimes in large quantities.
Julie eventually produced two impressive scientific posters that summed up the research to date. Posters are an important part of the scientific process. During poster sessions at conferences, scientists stand beside their posters and wait for others to walk by and stop to read and discuss the information presented. Presenting information in public talks is very important, but in poster sessions scientists can defend their ideas in one-on-one conversations with other experts. These conversations often yield important connections among the work of various labs that might otherwise have gone unnoticed.
In her Portland presentation, Julie developed a well-grounded theory about the Humboldts’ arrival in Monterey Bay: Largescale changes in the earth’s ecosystems, including salt water ecosystems, are changing the behavior of the squid.
As the temperature of the planet rises, the chemistry of the ocean is shifting. That shifting chemistry means that life itself will change. We’ve seen this happen again and again over the planet’s four billion years of evolution. No one knows what effect the coming changes will have on life in the ocean. But what is certain is that ocean life will change in response to habitat changes. Edinburgh oceanographer Dorrik Stow believes that cephalopods may have lost their outer protective shells and become more mobile in a direct response to one such change in ocean chemistry.
The patterns of ocean currents are also shifting as the oceans warm. This has happened many times over the past four billion years and will likely continue to happen as long as our planet’s surface is mostly water. It’s inevitable that with those shifts, some sea species will disappear and that other species, perhaps including the predatory Humboldt, will thrive.
Julie predicts that as the oceans warm and land temperatures change surface wind patterns, Humboldts will, at least for a while, become increasingly common along the western coast of North America. Of course, only time will prove her correct. Over the coming years, as she earns her doctorate and begi
ns running a lab of her own, she and a host of other young scientists will continue to gather data and monitor the ocean’s ongoing changes.
Life began in the ocean, perhaps as long ago as four billion years. Only recently did complex life forms colonize the planet’s continents. Mollusks may have appeared more than 550 million years ago. Cephalopods definitely appeared by the end of the Cambrian Explosion. Scientists recently recovered a 150-million-year-old squid fossil with an ink sac intact.
We humans appeared only 200,000 years ago, at the tail end of this remarkable saga. On this geologic time scale, other species have appeared and disappeared, sometimes in the blink of an eye. How long we homo sapiens will reign is anyone’s guess.
There’s no guarantee that we’ll have the kind of longevity enjoyed by some cephalopod species. I find this slightly disturbing, but at the same time, in an eerie sort of way, rather soothing. Species come and go, but the basic patterns of existence continue.
There’s something bigger than ourselves, something barely fathomable to us, given the limitations of our peculiar brains. What is it? Cephalopods, with their vastly different brains and strange neural wiring, may help us find answers to the enigma of our own existence. I find this both curious and exciting.
I began writing this book because I found it marvelous that the same neuron that makes it possible for me to read and write also exists in animals as weird as the octopus, the cuttlefish, and the squid.
As I learned in my research, over the past hundred years we have discovered much about our own minds by studying the brains of cephalopods. Some people find this simple fact of life frightening, or even repugnant. I understand their feelings to a point. That we share so much of our own basic biology with seemingly alien life-forms is a pretty big truth—disconcerting and possibly too large for us to firmly grasp.
But I like the idea. The code of DNA that created the eye that allows me to see has existed, with many variations, for hundreds of millions of years and has given countless species the ability to perceive the world around them. In fact, that very same code allows some cephalopod species to see much more clearly than I do, and it allows some bird and fish species to see many more colors than we humans do. Thus, in some ways, these animals enjoy perceptive abilities that are far greater than our own. I wish I could, for just a moment, enjoy the many colors that the common pigeon or the goldfish sees.
There are some ultimate truths, like the glorious colors that exist in our universe, that my human mind simply cannot grasp.
“What is it like to be a bat?” asked philosopher Thomas Nagel in a famous essay written years after my friend Don Griffin established that most bat species experience the world primarily via sound waves rather than light waves. Nagel concluded that we humans will never be able to fully grasp the mind of a bat. The bat knows things about our planet that we can never know.
It’s the same, I suspect, with the octopus, cuttlefish, and squid. But science is managing to provide us with titillating glimpses. The whole picture will always be denied to us because we are, after all, only a tiny part of the ultimate creation (whatever that might be). Curious scientists like Julie and Gilly and the rest of the crew will help us discover more and more of the pieces to the puzzle.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Kraken relied very much on the kindness of strangers, on people willing to give their time to help create a book in which they themselves had no particular stake.
The book is in part a product of the Ocean Foundation, a D.C.-based community foundation that supports the health of the world’s oceans. The Ocean Foundation helped provide $10,000 in travel money without which the West Coast portion of this book would not have been possible. Many thanks to Mark Spalding for helping this happen, and to the always supportive and very thoughtful Diane Davidson.
I thank also the patient staff of the Cotuit Library in Cotuit, Massachusetts, who were, as usual, gracious and pleasant about helping me find the sometimes quite strange books I wished to look at.
And I thank Barbara Legg for her helpful suggestions in shaping the book, most particularly for her patience in sticking with this project from beginning to end and for being willing to read endless versions of the manuscript.
And there’s of course my husband, Greg Auger, to thank, both for providing many of the photographs in the book and for providing a great deal of logistics support. My cousins (and close friends) Susan Williams and Shirley Smith were also uniquely helpful in their own very special ways.
Marine Biological Laboratory neuroscientist Joe DeGiorgis, a man of great forbearance, spent many days helping me flesh out some of the scientific details in the book. Without him this would have been a very different project.
Other scientists also provided a considerable amount of help, including, of course, the West Coast team in the Gilly lab. Julie Stewart, while earning her doctorate, answered all e-mails and phone calls in a prompt and courteous manner. It can’t have been easy for her. Danna Staaf, also earning her doctorate, was helpful as well. Lou Zeidberg was extremely supportive.
And then, of course, there’s Gilly himself, a man with a wonderful sense of humor, a finely tuned sensitivity to the power of words, and a depth of knowledge as deep as the Monterey Canyon.
I also want to mention John Field of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who is not officially part of the Gilly team but who works closely with those scientists and was more than gracious in helping with the book, including providing a visit to his facilities.
Many other scientists also contributed, including the always cheerful James Wood of the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, California, who kindly introduced me to my first giant Pacific octopus; UCLA neuroscientist David Glanzman; teuthologist Clyde Roper; Bruce Carlson of the Georgia Aquarium; Amy Rollinson, also of the Georgia Aquarium; UCLA scientist Barney Schlinger; Yale University neuroscientist Vincent Pieribone; the brilliant biologist Margaret McFall-Ngai; neurosurgeon Bruce Andersen, who tried valiantly to teach me how to dissect a squid axon; Scott Brady, a scientific marvel and a very contemplative man; Jesse Purdy, who took the time to explain why humans kick vending machines; James Cosgrove, lifelong giant Pacific octopus observer; Nina Strömgren Allen, who spoke to me from her hospital bed; neuroethologist Paul Patton; Eric Hochberg of the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History; Roger Hanlon; Todd Oakley; Jennifer Mather; Mike Vecchione; Ofer Tchernichovsky, who showed me one of the most amazing animal learning videos I’ve ever seen; Marc Bekoff, who has thought so much about the meaning of intelligence in the animal world and who was willing to share some of his ideas with me; and most particularly my friend the late Don Griffin, bat echolocation expert and among the most encouraging and kindest of scientists.
Others who deserve mention include the intrepid Tom Mattusch, who introduced me to Humboldt fishing on the Huli Cat; fisherman and high school marine biologist Rob Yeomans, who became a good friend; Wilson Menashi, who continues faithfully to volunteer at the New England Aquarium; the Pelagic Shark Research Foundation’s Sean Van Sommeran; Steve Atherton of Newburyport; Bill Papoulias of Newburyport; Greg Early, formerly of the New England Aquarium; Jack Pearce, who kindly shared a lunch and many of his books; and so many others.
Abrams editor David Cashion, who understood the lure of squid from the very beginning, deserves credit for both his patience and his unfailing good humor. He’s a great guy to work with. Judy Heiblum of Sterling Lord realized from the outset that although squid are indeed very—very—weird, they’re also strangely alluring.
And finally, special thanks to William Breisky, the best editor a young reporter could ever have had.
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