The Soul of an Octopus

by Sy Montgomery

  In all these cases, a piece of these individuals’ minds had gone missing. Had their selves gone missing with it? Who were they now? And what does an aging octopus like Octavia experience in this phase in the life of her multifaceted mind?

  “I hope she’ll lay eggs,” Bill said to me as we headed to Octavia’s tank. “That’s a sign she could live six more months.” Even in a diminished mental state, we wanted Octavia to stay with us, just as I had wished for my friends and our dog, even after pieces of their souls seemed to be falling away. “And after we see Octavia,” Bill promised, to cheer us both up, “I have a surprise.”

  Bill opened the tank and offered Octavia a shrimp on the long tongs. She sent forth an arm, suckers up—and then another arm came over, followed by the rest of her body. I could see she was paler than usual. I reached out to some of her larger suckers, and she attached them to me, but weakly. Next Bill gave her a capelin. The sea star leaned in, sensing the food. I gave Octavia both my arms and she tasted me with four of hers, while conveying the capelin toward her mouth. Bill pointed out a three-quarter-inch crescent of white, ragged flesh between the webbing of her second and third arms. It wasn’t just pale; it looked necrotic. Rather than moist, healthy octopus skin that belonged in the water, it looked like a piece of sodden Kleenex that had somehow ended up here by mistake and was coming apart. It looked like she was disintegrating, leaving this world piece by piece.

  I looked up and saw Wilson coming down the wet hallway of the Cold Marine Gallery. I was so glad, as I hadn’t seen him since December—five months ago—and that period had been a very trying time for both Wilson and Scott.

  In December, Scott had lost one of his favorite animals, an arowana he had raised from a baby and known for years, and one of his electric eels had been at fault. Behind the scenes, moved to a temporary tank so his regular tank could be cleaned, the big fish had leapt into an adjacent tank and electrocuted both Scott’s beloved arowana and another valuable animal, an Australian lungfish. That same month, Wilson had a major operation on his back.

  Meanwhile, as Wilson recovered from his operation, his wife, an accomplished social worker with a wry sense of humor, had been stricken by a neurological disease that was eroding both her muscles and her mind, a disorder that doctors could neither explain nor stop.

  Wilson hadn’t been to the aquarium but twice since December. On this May day, he made a special trip in from his home in Lexington, Massachusetts, to see me. He gave me a big smile and a hug.

  I thought Wilson’s presence was Bill’s surprise for me. But it was not.

  “So,” Wilson said to me, “have you seen the new baby octopus?”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Kali

  The Fellowship of the Fishes

  Octopuses are famous for showing up in places that surprise you. One giant Pacific octopus took up temporary residence in a pair of overalls in a shipwreck (and scared a diver half to death when the overalls rose up before him, writhing). Octopuses have turned up inside large conch shells and in scientists’ tiny oceanic measuring instruments. Red octopuses particularly like to den in stubby brown beer bottles.

  But I never expected to find Bill’s new octopus in a pickle barrel in the sump.

  On my way to visit Octavia, I had walked right past the sump, normally filled only with recirculating seawater, without noticing the barrel. The 55-gallon container’s screw top was fitted with a lid of fine mesh. Its sides had been drilled with hundreds of three-eighth-inch-diameter holes, through which the water of the sump could freely flow.

  This is the only container in the aquarium Bill deemed sufficiently octopus-proof for a giant Pacific this small; her head and mantle combined are about the size of a small grapefruit.

  Looking into the water of the sump, I can see the dark tips of the new octopus’s arms, fine as dental instruments, questing out from the barrel’s holes. She can extrude her arms almost like toothpaste. Already some six inches of arms are poking through three holes. That’s why the holes are three eighths of an inch. “Three quarters of an inch,” says Wilson, who had drilled them, “and she’d be out.”

  Bill determined her sex only two days ago. You can tell by looking at the tip of the third right arm. If the arm has suckers all the way to the tip, you have a female. If not, the appendage is referred to as the hectocotylized arm, and the animal is male. The reason it takes a while to tell is that octopuses won’t always let you examine this arm, especially the males. They tend to keep the tip—the ligula—balled up and protected, and for good reason: This is the specialized organ for placing the spermatophore inside the female. (But he doesn’t put it between her “legs,” or arms, because that’s where her beak is. He puts it in her mantle opening—or, as Aristotle explained it, he “has a sort of penis on one of his tentacles . . . which it admits into the nostril of a female.”)

  At first, Bill admitted, he was a little disappointed about the new octopus’s sex. He was hoping for a boy. “Females can be feisty,” he explains. “Males are more easygoing.” They’re also, he says, easier to name: “Frank, Stewy, Steve—any name for a male octopus is funny. Naming females is more challenging.” He came up with the name Guinevere for his first octopus because he had been watching the movie King Arthur.

  This little female, though, has already won Bill over. She was wild a week ago, and yet, by the time he unscrews the top and lifts the lid, she’s already at the surface, looking at the three of us curiously with limpid, slit-pupil eyes.

  “What a darling little thing!” I cry.

  “She is beautiful,” Wilson agrees.

  “We like her,” Bill says, his smile crinkling the edge of his eyes.

  Compared with Octavia and Athena, this octopus is an exquisite miniature. She is half the size Octavia was when she first arrived; though it is impossible to pinpoint the age of an octopus (growth rates depend on many variables, including water temperature), Bill estimates she may be younger than nine months. Her arms are less than a foot and a half long. She is a size, perhaps, I can finally get my mind around.

  At first, she is a deep, rich chocolate color, except for a light spot on her head. As she looks at us, she turns a lighter brown, mottled with beige. Light stripes now curve down from her eyes toward where her nose would be, if she had a nose, like the “tear streaks” on a cheetah.

  The reasons for an octopus’s color change are myriad. Of course, an octopus might change to match or blend with its surroundings and become invisible; it may also change to look like something other than an octopus (presumably something less tasty or more threatening). But other changes certainly reflect mood. Nobody has figured out what all the color changes mean. A few are known: A giant Pacific octopus who turns red is generally excited; a white one is relaxed. An octopus presented with a difficult puzzle for the first time often undergoes several rapid changes in color, like a person who frowns, bites his lip, and furrows his brow when trying to solve a problem. A nervous octopus takes special care to disguise its head and especially its eyes, and can create a variety of spots, bars, and squiggles to confuse a predator. The small, deadly poisonous, blue ring octopus of Australia flashes dozens of electric-blue namesake rings all over its body when threatened. Another disguise is known as the eyebar display, in which an octopus makes a thick, dark line extend at the outer edge of the eye from either end of each slit pupil, masking the roundness that is typical of an eye. In Jennifer and Roland’s studies showing that octopuses recognize individual humans, they found that after only a few trials, when the octopuses saw one of the staff members who always touched them with a bristly stick, they would make the eyebar as soon as they saw that person approach. When approached by people who always fed them, they did not.

  But the white spot on the new octopus’s head remains constant, even as our new octopus turns a deeper and more uniform brown again. Bill confirms that he has never seen her without this mark. Finally! A feature that stays the same on an octopus!

  The spot reminds B
ill of the bindi, the dot with which a lady decorates her forehead in India. So he named her Kali, after the dark-skinned, many-armed Hindu goddess of creative destruction. Like octopuses, the Hindu gods and goddesses are always changing form. When Kali takes the form of Prakriti, or Mother Nature, she dances upon the field of Consciousness (pictured as the supine body of her husband, Lord Shiva) with wild abandon. In other depictions, she wears a garland of skulls. Kali is a great name for this outgoing youngster, with her astonishing octopus powers and potentially destructive bent.

  Wilson and I each offer her a finger, then a hand. She grips us gently with suckers of her two front arms.

  “She’s going to be friendly,” says Wilson.

  “Yes,” says Bill, “she’s going to be a good one.”

  Kali arrived just in time. In my quest to get to know an octopus better, I had been looking into acquiring one of my own.

  Haunting cephalopod forums like TONMO.com (The Octopus News Magazine Online) and surfing the web, I was enchanted with videos posted by doting octopus owners. Some pet octopuses were wonderfully interactive. One person posted a video of a California two-spot hopping, on rear arms, back and forth across the sandy bottom of the tank, wildly waving its front arms at the front of the tank—looking for all the world like an eager student desperate for the teacher to call on him. The owner wrote that the octopus often did this to entice him to play. Later I read of a pet octopus who developed another way to signal that she wanted the owner’s attention. If the person was out of the room, the octopus would pull off the magnet on the inside of the tank which, with another magnet on the outside of the tank, held a glass-cleaning tool in place. The outside magnet would then crash loudly to the ground, summoning the human much as one might call a butler by ringing a servant’s bell.

  Ceph keeper Nancy King discovered that her two-spot, Ollie, didn’t always see where the live crabs she dropped in to feed her had landed. So she took to helping her, using her index finger on the outside of the aquarium to show her where the prey was hiding. Ollie soon figured out the meaning of the pointing finger. (This is a very specialized skill. Dogs—but not their direct ancestors, wolves—are among the tiny handful of species other than humans who can do this.) “In this way,” she charmingly wrote, “Ollie and Nancy hunted crabs together.”

  Many home aquarists report that their octopuses appear to enjoy watching television with them. They particularly like sports and cartoons, with lots of movement and color. In their authoritative Cephalopods: Octopuses and Cuttlefishes for the Home Aquarium, King and her coauthor, Colin Dunlop, even suggest placing the tank in the same room as the TV, so owner and octopus can enjoy programs together.

  But my husband was not enthused at the thought of an octopus in our house. In our nearly thirty years of marriage, he has successfully managed (so far) to fend off my getting snakes, iguanas, and tarantulas—as well as prevent me from keeping a red-tailed hawk for a falconry apprenticeship. He failed, however, to deflect a procession of other people’s unwanted parrots from moving in with us, and once bought me a baby cockatiel, whom we both adored. We also adopted our landlord’s cat, rescued two border collies, and raised baby chicks—in my home office, where they perched on my head and slept in my sweater. We even brought home a sick runt baby pig (who lived for fourteen years and grew to 750 pounds). My husband has loved them all, but his patience is often tested when I disappear into some jungle for weeks or months to research a book, and he’s left with animals who invariably choose that moment to run away, try to kill each other, destroy their pens, roll in something, or throw up on the bed. Now an octopus?

  When I brought up the subject, he replied, “Tell me this is a bad dream.”

  Expense aside—and it would cost thousands of dollars for the setup, food, and the octopus itself—there were logistical issues. Even for a small species like the Caribbean reef octopus, I would want a tank capable of holding 100 gallons of water. This would weigh at least 1,000 pounds—as much as a moose. And like a moose, its weight might collapse the floor of our 150-year-old farmhouse. Too, old houses like ours suffer from an insufficiency of electrical outlets, and a good saltwater aquarium tank needs several to run its complex life-support system: three kinds of filters, an aerator, and a heater to keep the water at the temperature that small tropical octopuses need, typically about 77° to 82°F.

  In our neck of the woods, electricity itself is sometimes in short supply. We have frequent power outages, which last from minutes to days (in December 2008, after an ice storm, we had no electricity for a week), and even a relatively short period without filtration and heat can doom a tank and its occupants—especially if your octopus inks in alarm, which can poison the water, including the octopus itself.

  Then there was the problem of proper water and food for an octopus. Natural seawater has more than seventy elements dissolved in it. The chemistry of the water must be exactly right for an octopus. Any trace of copper, for instance, will kill it. And while an adult octopus will eat dead, frozen food, a very young one—which is what I would want, since the smaller species’ life spans are even shorter than a giant Pacific’s—needs live food. Since the nearest ocean is a two-and-a-half-hour drive from our house, I would need to raise the baby octopus’s prey, amphipods and mysid shrimp, which would require their own separate aquarium setup.

  Finally, if I had to travel (and I already had a research trip to Namibia scheduled that summer), my husband would end up with the perilous responsibility for the delicate octopus. In fact, the moment I left for Namibia, his work schedule would be subsumed by our border collie’s struggle, after an operation on her tail, to defeat the Cone of Shame and chew out her stitches.

  In the end, I decided that, as great as a personal home octopus might be, it would be too risky for both the octopus and my marriage. Besides, despite the long drive, I loved going to the aquarium. There, too, I had the benefit of being surrounded by experts—people whose observations would enrich and inform my own, people whom I now increasingly missed between visits. My plan, once I returned from Namibia, was to make more frequent trips to Boston to regularly observe Kali’s growth and development. Wilson generously agreed to coordinate his schedule with mine. The week following my return from Africa, we inaugurated what we came to call our Wonderful Wednesdays, and dedicated this day each week to octopus observation. This provided an education both broader and deeper than I could have imagined, and sealed my connection not only with Kali but with the people who grew to love her just as much as I did—people who would become increasingly important in my life.

  The next time I visit Kali, a small gaggle of staff and volunteers is already hanging around the sump as if gathered round the office coffeemaker. Except instead of sipping a hot beverage, they are dangling their hands casually in the freezing salt water, in order to hold hands with an octopus.

  It’s hard to imagine that Kali does not extrude her arms from the holes hoping for exactly this. In just two weeks, she has grown bigger, stronger, and more curious.

  “She’s bored,” says Wilson as he unscrews the top of the barrel. She is already waiting for us at the top. “Correction,” says Wilson, as she reaches up to taste his arm, “she was bored—she’s not now!”

  We offer Kali our hands and arms, and she latches on with eager suckers. You can almost feel her interest in the strong grip of her suction, as if she is eagerly reading us by using an octopus Braille system. And she wants to see as well as taste us. As her arms snake up over ours into the air, she lifts her head and eyes out of the water to look at us.

  The slits of her pupils always remains horizontal, no matter what position she is in, cued by balance receptors called statocysts. These saclike structures are lined with sensory hairs and equipped with small, mineralized balls that shift inside the statocyst in response to motion and gravity. But the always-horizontal pupil can change dramatically in thickness. Under the bright light, you would think her pupils would be small, but now they are opened wide, l
ike a person’s when excited or in love.

  Wilson hands her a fish—but she passes it away from her mouth. I find this astonishing in a rapidly growing young animal. Apparently her appetite for food is exceeded by her appetite for interaction. Kali wants to climb up our arms. Her glistening, muscular arm tips curl up over my forearm and my elbow and touch the cotton fabric of my shirtsleeve. Gently we pry away her suckers and urge her back into the water, but she grips us anew.

  After a few minutes, Wilson breaks off the interaction. He doesn’t want to overstimulate her. “She’s still a baby,” he says. “Let her rest.”

  Bill, who has been tending the feather duster worms (which take their name from the beautiful clusters of branched tentacles on their heads), tells us Kali recently entertained international visitors. The aquarium had hosted some staff members from the Beijing Aquarium. They were astonished to get a chance to touch an octopus, and even more astonished to find Kali so friendly. “They believed octopuses were very dangerous,” said Bill.