The Soul of an Octopus

by Sy Montgomery

  He has managed to make this day a good one—a miracle of sorts. And who better to preside over such a miracle than an octopus, wielder of otherworldly powers—an octopus named after Kali, the goddess of creative destruction, the deity embodying the opposites of kindness and cruelty, sorrow and joy?

  A bright summer afternoon in Boston: Outside, park rangers in hats answer questions about the whale watch and harbor view cruises, happy children and parents spin and shout on the merry-go-round on the Common, while grownups crowd Faneuil Hall eating soft pretzels and ice cream. Inside the aquarium, Anna is assisting Scott, Christa is distributing black worms, and Bill is feeding the endangered freshwater turtles, red-bellied cooters whom he is raising for the state of Massachusetts for release. Wilson and I are with Kali, who has finished eating her squid. Still upside down, she lingers at the surface. She holds one of my fingertips in one of her suckers and squeezes it periodically, like you’d squeeze a hand you were already holding. One of her arms encircles Wilson’s wrist; another holds his other hand and forearm. I reach with my free hand to her head and begin to stroke her.

  From all appearances, the three of us are as languid as the summer day, as if time has eddied in its flow and we have escaped the confines of clock and calendar, and perhaps even species. “If someone came upon us now,” I say to Wilson, “they might think we’re members of some strange religious cult.”

  “Cult of the octopus?” Wilson chuckles softly.

  “The route to peace and ecstasy,” I answer.

  “Yes,” says Wilson, his voice soft as a lullaby. “This is very peaceful.”

  While stroking an octopus, it is easy to fall into reverie. To share such a moment of deep tranquility with another being, especially one as different from us as the octopus, is a humbling privilege. It’s a shared sweetness, a gentle miracle, an uplink to universal consciousness—the notion, first advanced by pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Anaxagoras in 480 BC, of sharing an intelligence that animates and organizes all life. The idea of universal consciousness suffuses both Western and Eastern thought and philosophy, from the “collective unconscious” of psychologist Carl Jung, to unified field theory, to the investigations of the Institute of Noetic Sciences founded by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell in 1973. Though some of the Methodist ministers of my youth might be appalled, I feel blessed by the thought of sharing with an octopus what one website (loveandabove.com) calls “an infinite, eternal ocean of intelligent energy.” Who would know more about the infinite, eternal ocean than an octopus? And what could be more deeply calming than being cradled in its arms, surrounded by the water from which life itself arose? As Wilson and I pet Kali’s soft head on this summer afternoon, I think of Paul the Apostle’s letter to the Philippians about the power of the “peace that passeth understanding . . .”

  And then—SPLASH!—we’re hosed.

  Kali’s funnel, less than an inch in diameter, manages to hit us both at once, soaking our faces, our hair, our shirts, and our pants with 47°F salt water.

  “Why . . . ?!” I sputter. “Is she mad at us?”

  “That was not aggression,” says Wilson. We both lean over the barrel and see she has sunk to the bottom, from where she looks up at us innocently. “That was playful,” he says. “Remember, they are all individuals.” We put our hands right back in. But she doesn’t attach her suckers right away. Instead, she points her funnel at us, like a kid aiming a squirt gun. I’m not fast enough to dodge it, but I can’t help watching to see what she does next. She rises so that her head now lies just beneath the surface, and I see the water swelling from the pressure of her siphon. Clearly, she can modulate the flow with great precision.

  She can also move the funnel with astounding flexibility. I had assumed the organ, though supple, was firmly attached to just one side of her head. But Kali shows us that clearly it is not. At one moment, her funnel is on the left side; the next, she’s swung it 180 degrees, to her right. It’s as surprising as if you saw a person stick his tongue out his mouth, and next out his ear—and then out his other ear.

  Then Kali fluffs up the suckers on her arms like the frills on a petticoat and waves her arms at us. If she were a person, we could reach no other conclusion than that she is teasing us, coyly daring us to try again.

  When it’s time for me to tear myself away, I go down the hall to say goodbye to Scott in the Freshwater Gallery. Earlier that day, I had apologized for causing inconvenience, since he always has to send someone downstairs to the lobby to get me every time I show up at the aquarium, to take me behind the scenes. The few times I came up unaccompanied, I was stopped by staff worried about thieves. (The items most often stolen—before locks were installed on their tank tops—were small turtles like Bill’s red-bellied cooters.) So Scott has spoken on my behalf to Will Malan, one of the coordinators of the aquarium’s extensive volunteer program. Six hundred and sixty-two adult volunteers donate an estimated $2 million worth of time to the aquarium, performing tasks from cleaning up penguin poop, to giving educational talks, to feeding and moving animals to helping to design new exhibits. Another hundred young people help through internships and teen volunteer programs. All wear badges identifying them as volunteers, allowing them behind the scenes.

  I fit none of these categories, but Scott ushers me into Will’s office, where Will takes a photo that will be emblazoned on my new badge. Half my hair is still plastered to my head from Kali’s dousing, but I am overjoyed with the title Will and Scott have given me: I am now the aquarium’s official “Octopus Observer.”

  The badge is a talisman. It gives me access throughout the aquarium, even outside of public visiting hours. This will prove indispensible, for now I have yet another reason for visiting the aquarium:

  Octavia has laid eggs.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Eggs

  Beginning, Ending, and Shape-Shifting

  Because she has retreated to the far corner of her den, beneath a rocky overhang, I can see Octavia only from the public viewing area now. In the summertime, the New England Aquarium averages six thousand visitors a day, so in order to beat the Boston commuter traffic and arrive before the aquarium opens to the public, to watch Octavia in peace, I rise at 5 a.m. and start driving.

  I park in the aquarium garage in the coveted Crab section on the third floor. (If I arrived after 9, I would be consigned to Jellyfish on the fifth.) Entering the aquarium, I wave to the staff manning the information desk and begin my spiraling walk up the incline: past the penguin pools with its noisy little blues, Africans, and southern rockhoppers; past the Blue Hole exhibit with its Goliath groupers; past the Ancient Fishes, the long, silvery arowana with its bony tongue, and the primitive lungfish with its curious, lobe-like fins; and past the Mangrove Swamp. I tread beneath the hanging skeleton of the North Atlantic right whale, pause to greet the electric eel, briefly watch the trout, and head to the Gulf of Maine exhibit, the Isles of Shoals tank, and the three-foot-long, flat, lumpy, bottom-dwelling goosefish. Just past the Pacific Tidepool, right before the “staff only” stairway to the Cold Marine and Freshwater galleries and the elevator to the top of the Giant Ocean Tank, my step grows quicker, my heart beats faster—for next, I come to the tank where I will see my friend Octavia.

  She appears to be sleeping, plastered to the roof of her lair. Her skin texture and color are almost indistinguishable from the rock, her pendulous head and mantle hanging upside down. Her left eye is open but her pupil is a hair-thin slit. Her right eye is obscured by the thick part of one arm, its suckers facing me, until the arm curves backward, out of sight. The tips of five of her arms hang in curling tendrils from the roof and sides of her lair. I can’t see her gills or any sign of breathing. The movements of her body appear to be due only to the currents in the water.

  I stand transfixed before her tank, watching her with the red covering on my headlamp so as not to disturb her with the light. Visiting her at this early hour, before the dim bulb of her exhibit is turned on, is like a medi
tation for me. I must prepare my senses, let my eyes adjust to the dark. This demands patience. I must train my brain to switch from seeing nothing at all to seeing subtle changes, to recognizing that suddenly, a great deal might be happening, all at once.

  Now, Octavia is the picture of peace, an octopus Madonna. She seems to have grown larger since I last saw her. Her head and mantle are the size of a watermelon you’d bring to a family picnic. She cradles something in the webbing between some of her arms; I can see the weight of what she holds, but not the content. Like a sleeping person, she occasionally stretches some of her arms, but otherwise she is still.

  Then, at 9:05, seventy-eight minutes after my arrival, she starts moving. Her body begins beating like a heart. She fills her gills with deep breaths of salt water and shoots them out her funnel. She moves one arm across her body, almost absentmindedly, like a pregnant woman caressing her big belly. Two of her other arms rub each other, cleaning the suckers. And with these movements, Octavia reveals some of the treasures she is guarding. A two-inch chain of about forty eggs, each the size and color of a grain of rice, pops into view. It hangs from the ceiling of her lair and drapes over one of her arms like an errant lock of hair sweeping over a woman’s shoulder. These eggs are the hidden treasures resting earlier in the webbing of her arms.

  There are many more eggs here than I can see. Some clusters are as many as eight inches long. They are stacked five or six clusters deep toward the back recess of her den. But her body is now covering almost all of them.

  This is why Octavia no longer wants to interact with us. She has more important things to do. Caring for her eggs is the job that will last a female octopus to the end of her life.

  Octavia started laying eggs in June, while I was in Africa, but no one has seen her lay a single one. “You go in first thing in the morning, and there are more eggs,” Bill says. Giant Pacific octopuses are generally nocturnal, and certainly a process as delicate as egg laying is best undertaken beneath the dark’s safe shroud. Unseen, Octavia has been crawling to the roof of her den to pass each tiny, teardrop-shaped egg out her siphon. Each egg’s narrow end has a short cord attached. Using several of the smallest suckers nearest her mouth, she carefully weaves between thirty and two hundred eggs into a string, like one might braid onions. Using a secretion from glands inside her body, she glues the clusters to the roof and sides of her den, where they hang like bunches of grapes. And then she begins another chain, and another. In the wild, over the course of about three weeks, a female giant Pacific octopus might lay between 67,000 and 100,000 eggs.

  It is very unlikely that Octavia’s eggs are fertile. Female octopuses store inactivated sperm in their spermatophoric gland for months, then activate it when it’s time to fertilize their eggs; but Octavia would have had to have mated before her capture, more than a year ago. She was probably then too young to have accepted a spermatophore from a male.

  And yet, Bill is visibly proud of Octavia’s eggs. Even though egg laying signals the approach of the end of a female’s life, Bill is not sad. He seems increasingly content, satisfied with each new egg chain that appears. For him, the process represents completion.

  “With Athena, I felt gypped that she died so early,” he says. The proper end of any female octopus’s life should be laying eggs. Guarding them, aerating them, cleaning them, Octavia will be able to complete the same rituals her mother completed before her, and her mother before her, and her mother before her, back hundreds of millions of years.

  In her memoir of living among the Bushmen, The Old Way: A Story of the First People, my friend Liz lovingly invokes an image first coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins: “You are standing beside your mother, holding her hand. She is holding her mother’s hand, who is holding her mother’s hand. . . . ” Eventually the line stretches three hundred miles long and goes back five million years, and the clasping hand of the ancestor looks like that of a chimpanzee. I loved picturing one of Octavia’s arms stretching out to meet one of her mother’s arms, and one of her mother’s mother’s arms, and her mother’s mother’s mother’s. . . . Suckered, elastic arms, reaching back through time: an octopus chorus line stretching not just hundreds, but many thousands of miles long. Back past the Cenozoic, the time when our ancestors descended from the trees; back past the Mesozoic, when dinosaurs ruled the land; back past the Permian and the rise of the ancestors of the mammals; back, past the Carboniferous’s coal-forming swamp forests; back past the Devonian, when amphibians emerged from the water; back past the Silurian, when plants first took root on land—all the way to the Ordovician, to a time before the advent of wings or knees or lungs, before the fishes had bony jaws, before blood pumped from a multi-chambered heart. More than 500 million years ago, the tides would have been stronger, the days shorter, the year longer, and the air too high in carbon dioxide for mammals or birds to breathe. All the earth’s continents huddled in the Southern Hemisphere. And yet still, the arm of Octavia’s ancestor, sensitive, suckered, and supple, would have been recognizable as one of an octopus.

  In the wild, most female octopuses lay eggs only once, and then guard them so assiduously they won’t leave them even to hunt for food. The mother starves herself for the rest of her life. A deep-sea species holds the record for this feat, surviving four and a half years without feeding while brooding her eggs near the bottom of Monterey Canyon, nearly a mile below the surface of the ocean.

  At the Octopus Symposium in Seattle, scuba diver Guy Becken had given a PowerPoint presentation about Olive, a wild giant Pacific octopus who lived only a mile across the water from the Seattle Aquarium, at a popular dive site known as Cove 2. As a member of the local Tuesday-night divers’ club, he and his friends would visit the area and often find octopus there, as well as six-gill sharks, wolf eels, and lingcod. In 2001, they regularly encountered a large male octopus they called Popeye just 100 feet from shore among the pier pilings. Then in February of 2002, another octopus appeared, who proved to be a female. They estimated she weighed about 60 pounds. They named her Olive.

  Olive grew so accustomed to the divers that she would accept herring they handed to the suckers on her outstretched arm. By late February, though, she would not leave her den. Under a cluster of sunken wooden pilings, she created a fence of eight-inch rocks in a semicircle in front of one the den’s two openings. But the divers could still see inside, and by the end of the month they confirmed that Olive had laid eggs.

  “Each trip to see her was different,” Becken said. “Sometimes she was receptive. Sometimes she clearly didn’t want the company.” During the first month after she laid her eggs, she would still take the herring the divers offered. But “then,” Becken said, “she’d start throwing the herring back.”

  Hundreds of divers came to see Olive on her eggs that summer. Rapt, they watched her caressing the eggs with her suckers and blowing water through them with her siphon; they saw her fend off sunflower sea stars who tried to investigate her brood chamber, hungry for her eggs. By mid-June, the divers could see the babies’ black eye spots developing inside the eggs. “There’s one! There’s one!” Becken said, his excitement still fresh years later as he pointed out the developing eyes of the unborn babies to us on the projection screen.

  On a night dive in late September, Becken and his friends witnessed some of the first of Olive’s offspring (called paralarvae) emerging from the eggs. Olive used her siphon to blow the newborn, tiny, perfect octopuses, each no bigger than a grain of rice, out of the eggs, out through the den opening. There, they would float away on the current like the spiderlings ballooning on air at the end of Charlotte’s Web. Until the survivors grew large enough to settle on the bottom, they would become part of the ocean’s wandering plankton, the floating mix of millions of tiny plants and animals that form the basis of the food chain, make most of the world’s oxygen, and keep the world alive.

  The development of octopus eggs is at least partially dependent upon temperature. Off California’s coast, t
he eggs of giant Pacific octopuses typically take four months to hatch; in Alaska’s colder waters, seven or eight. Olive’s took longer than the six months that is usual in Puget Sound, and the last of her babies hatched in early November. Just days later, divers found her corpse, milky and translucent as a ghost, just outside the den. Two sea stars were feeding on her body.

  “It was sad,” Becken said. “Some divers didn’t want to look. But since her life, since her death, this place has always been known as Olive’s Den. And very seldom do you go out there and not find an octopus. Whenever we see them,” he said, “we think of Olive’s legacy.”

  Here, in our aquarium on the other side of the continent, Octavia still accepts the fish Bill and Wilson hand her at the end of the grabber. “This means she might live for several more months,” Bill assures me.

  During these months, Octavia will give us a close-up and detailed view of her most intimate, ultimate task, far more than would be possible to see in the wild. Her attentions will not be able to transform her infertile eggs into living paralarvae. But other transformations will be revealed around her tank, sometimes thanks to Octavia herself—some of them sad, some of them strange, and some, like Octavia’s eggs, a whispered promise of new life.

  “She’s still strong,” Wilson says with relief, feeling the pull of Octavia’s arms on the tongs as he hands her a squid. “She’s got a while to go yet.”

  Kali, meanwhile, is growing larger, stronger, and bolder by the day. Anna already has both her hands in the sump and is communing with the tips of Kali’s arms as they protrude from the holes in the pickle barrel. When Wilson unscrews the top, Kali floats up to look at him immediately. We all plunge in our hands. Kali flips upside down to receive two capelin eagerly in separate arms, and starts passing them from sucker to sucker toward her mouth. Meanwhile her other arms are busy with ours. We feel like we’re taking a cold bath in suckers.