The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration Into the Wonder of Consciousness
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ISBN-13: 9781451697728
Media Type: Paperback
Publisher: Washington Square Press
Publication Date: 04-05-2016
Pages: 272
Product Dimensions: 8.10(w) x 5.50(h) x 0.90(d)
Sy Montgomery is a naturalist, adventurer, and author of more than thirty acclaimed books of nonfiction for adults and children, including The Hummingbirds’ Gift, The Hawk’s Way, the National Book Award finalist The Soul of an Octopus, and most recently, Of Time and Turtles, which was a New York Times bestseller. The recipient of numerous honors, including lifetime achievement awards from the Humane Society and the New England Booksellers Association, she lives in New Hampshire with her husband, writer Howard Mansfield, and a border collie.
The Soul of an Octopus Read an Excerpt
On a rare, warm day in mid-March, when the snow was melting into mud in New Hampshire, I traveled to Boston, where everyone was strolling along the harbor or sitting on benches licking ice cream cones. But I quit the blessed sunlight for the moist, dim sanctuary of the New England Aquarium. I had a date with a giant Pacific octopus.
I knew little about octopuses—not even that the scientifically correct plural is not octopi, as I had always believed (it turns out you can’t put a Latin ending—i—on a word derived from Greek, such as octopus). But what I did know intrigued me. Here is an animal with venom like a snake, a beak like a parrot, and ink like an old-fashioned pen. It can weigh as much as a man and stretch as long as a car, yet it can pour its baggy, boneless body through an opening the size of an orange. It can change color and shape. It can taste with its skin. Most fascinating of all, I had read that octopuses are smart. This bore out what scant experience I had already had; like many who visit octopuses in public aquariums, I’ve often had the feeling that the octopus I was watching was watching me back, with an interest as keen as my own.
How could that be? It’s hard to find an animal more unlike a human than an octopus. Their bodies aren’t organized like ours. We go: head, body, limbs. They go: body, head, limbs. Their mouths are in their armpits—or, if you prefer to liken their arms to our lower, instead of upper, extremities, between their legs. They breathe water. Their appendages are covered with dexterous, grasping suckers, a structure for which no mammal has an equivalent.
And not only are octopuses on the opposite side of the great vertebral divide that separates the backboned creatures such as mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish from everything else; they are classed within the invertebrates as mollusks, as are slugs and snails and clams, animals that are not particularly renowned for their intellect. Clams don’t even have brains.
More than half a billion years ago, the lineage that would lead to octopuses and the one leading to humans separated. Was it possible, I wondered, to reach another mind on the other side of that divide?
Octopuses represent the great mystery of the Other. They seem completely alien, and yet their world—the ocean—comprises far more of the Earth (70 percent of its surface area; more than 90 percent of its habitable space) than does land. Most animals on this planet live in the ocean. And most of them are invertebrates.
I wanted to meet the octopus. I wanted to touch an alternate reality. I wanted to explore a different kind of consciousness, if such a thing exists. What is it like to be an octopus? Is it anything like being a human? Is it even possible to know?
So when the aquarium’s director of public relations met me in the lobby and offered to introduce me to Athena, the octopus, I felt like a privileged visitor to another world. But what I began to discover that day was my own sweet blue planet—a world breathtakingly alien, startling, and wondrous; a place where, after half a century of life on this earth, much of it as a naturalist, I would at last feel fully at home.
Athena’s lead keeper isn’t in. My heart sinks; not just anyone can open up the octopus tank, and for good reason. A giant Pacific octopus—the largest of the world’s 250 or so octopus species—can easily overpower a person. Just one of a big male’s three-inch-diameter suckers can lift 30 pounds, and a giant Pacific octopus has 1,600 of them. An octopus bite can inject a neurotoxic venom as well as saliva that has the ability to dissolve flesh. Worst of all, an octopus can take the opportunity to escape from an open tank, and an escaped octopus is a big problem for both the octopus and the aquarium.
Happily, another aquarist, Scott Dowd, will help me. A big guy in his early forties with a silvery beard and twinkling blue eyes, Scott is the senior aquarist for the Freshwater Gallery, which is down the hall from Cold Marine, where Athena lives. Scott first came to the aquarium as a baby in diapers on its opening day, June 20, 1969, and basically never left. He knows almost every animal in the aquarium personally.
Athena is about two and a half years old and weighs roughly 40 pounds, Scott explains, as he lifts the heavy lid covering her tank. I mount the three short steps of a small movable stair and lean over to see. She stretches about five feet long. Her head—by “head,” I mean both the actual head and the mantle, or body, because that’s where we mammals expect an animal’s head to be—is about the size of a small watermelon. “Or at least a honeydew,” says Scott. “When she first came, it was the size of a grapefruit.” The giant Pacific octopus is one of the fastest-growing animals on the planet. Hatching from an egg the size of a grain of rice, one can grow both longer and heavier than a man in three years.
By the time Scott has propped open the tank cover, Athena has already oozed from the far corner of her 560-gallon tank to investigate us. Holding to the corner with two arms, she unfurls the others, her whole body red with excitement, and reaches to the surface. Her white suckers face up, like the palm of a person reaching out for a handshake.
“May I touch her?” I ask Scott.
“Sure,” he says. I take off my wristwatch, remove my scarf, roll up my sleeves, and plunge both arms elbow-deep into the shockingly cold 47°F water.
Twisting, gelatinous, her arms boil up from the water, reaching for mine. Instantly both my hands and forearms are engulfed by dozens of soft, questing suckers.
Not everyone would like this. The naturalist and explorer William Beebe found the touch of the octopus repulsive. “I have always a struggle before I can make my hands do their duty and seize a tentacle,” he confessed. Victor Hugo imagined such an event as an unmitigated horror leading to certain doom. “The spectre lies upon you; the tiger can only devour you; the devil-fish, horrible, sucks your life-blood away,” Hugo wrote in Toilers of the Sea. “The muscles swell, the fibres of the body are contorted, the skin cracks under the loathsome oppression, the blood spurts out and mingles horribly with the lymph of the monster, which clings to the victim with innumerable hideous mouths. . . .” Fear of the octopus lies deep in the human psyche. “No animal is more savage in causing the death of man in the water,” Pliny the Elder wrote in Naturalis Historia, circa AD 79, “for it struggles with him by coiling round him and it swallows him with sucker-cups and drags him asunder. . . .”
But Athena’s suction is gentle, though insistent. It pulls me like an alien’s kiss. Her melon-size head bobs to the surface, and her left eye—octopuses have a dominant eye, as people have dominant hands—swivels in its socket to meet mine. Her black pupil is a fat hyphen in a pearly globe. Its expression reminds me of the look in the eyes of paintings of Hindu gods and goddesses: serene, all-knowing, heavy with wisdom stretching back beyond time.
“She’s looking right at you,” Scott says.
As I hold her glittering gaze, I instinctively reach to touch her head. “As supple as leather, as tough as steel, as cold as night,” Hugo wrote of the octopus’s flesh; but to my surprise, her head is silky and softer than custard. Her skin is flecked with ruby and silver, a night sky reflected on the wine-dark sea. As I stroke her with my fingertips, her skin goes white beneath my touch. White is the color of a relaxed octopus; in cuttlefish, close relatives of octopus, females turn white when they encounter a fellow female, someone whom they need not fight or flee.
It is possible that Athena, in fact, knows I am female. Female octopuses, like female humans, possess estrogen; she could be tasting and recognizing mine. Octopuses can taste with their entire bodies, but this sense is most exquisitely developed in their suckers. Athena’s is an exceptionally intimate embrace. She is at once touching and tasting my skin, and possibly the muscle, bone, and blood beneath. Though we have only just met, Athena already knows me in a way no being has known me before.
And she seems as curious about me as I am about her. Slowly, she transfers her grip on me from the smaller, outer suckers at the tips of her arms to the larger, stronger ones nearer her head. I am now bent at a 90-degree angle, folded like a half-open book, as I stand on the little step stool. I realize what is happening: She is pulling me steadily into her tank.
How happily I would go with her, but alas, I would not fit. Her lair is beneath a rocky overhang, into which she can flow like water, but I cannot, constrained as I am by bones and joints. The water in her tank would come to chest height on me, if I were standing up; but the way she is pulling me, I would be upside down, headfirst in the water, and soon facing the limitations of my air-hungry lungs. I ask Scott if I should try to detach from her grip and he gently pulls us apart, her suckers making popping sounds like small plungers as my skin is released.
“Octopus?! Aren’t they monsters?” my friend Jody Simpson asked me in alarm, as we hiked with our dogs the next day. “Weren’t you scared?” Her question reflected less an ignorance of the natural world than a wide knowledge of Western culture.
A horror of giant octopuses and their kin, giant squid, has animated Western art forms from thirteenth-century Icelandic legends to twentieth-century American films. The massive “hafgufa” who “swallows men and ships and whales and everything it can reach” in the Old Icelandic saga Orvar-Odds is surely based on some kind of tentacled mollusk, and gave rise to the myth of the kraken. French sailors’ reports of giant octopuses attacking their ship off the coast of Angola inspired one of the most lasting images of octopus in modern memory, one that is still tattooed on sailors’ arms: Mollusk expert Pierre Denys de Montfort’s iconic pen-and-wash drawing of 1801 shows a giant octopus rising from the ocean, its arms twisting in great loops all the way to the top of a schooner’s three masts. He claimed the existence of at least two kinds of giant octopus, one of which, he concluded, was surely responsible for the disappearance of no fewer than ten British warships that mysteriously vanished one night in 1782. (To Montfort’s public embarrassment, a survivor later revealed that they were really lost in a hurricane.)
In 1830, Alfred Tennyson published a sonnet about a monstrous octopus whose “Unnumber’d and enormous polypi / Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.” And of course an octopus was the nemesis-star of Jules Verne’s 1870 French science-fiction novel, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Though the octopus becomes a giant squid in the 1954 film of the same name, the man who shot the underwater sequences for the original film in 1916, John Williamson, said this about the novel’s original villain: “A man-eating shark, a giant poison-fanged moray, a murderous barracuda, appear harmless, innocent, friendly and even attractive when compared to the octopus. No words can adequately describe the sickening horror one feels when from some dark mysterious lair, the great lidless eyes of the octopus stare at one. . . . One’s very soul seems to shrink beneath their gaze, and cold perspiration beads the brow.”
Eager to defend the octopus against centuries of character assassination, I replied to my friend, “Monsters? Not at all!” Dictionary definitions of monster always mention the words large, ugly, and frightening. To me, Athena was as beautiful and benign as an angel. Even “large” is up for debate where octopuses are concerned. The largest species, the giant Pacific, isn’t as big as it used to be. An octopus with an arm span of more than 150 feet may have once existed. But the largest octopus listed by The Guinness Book of Records weighed 300 pounds and boasted an arm span stretching 32 feet. In 1945, a much heavier octopus captured off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, was reported to weigh 402 pounds; disappointingly, a photo of this animal displayed with a man for size comparison suggests a radial span of only 20 to 22 feet. But even these modern giants hardly measure up to their close molluscan relative, the colossal squid. A recent specimen of this species, captured by a New Zealand boat fishing off Antarctica, weighed more than 1,000 pounds and stretched more than 30 feet long. These days, lovers of monsters lament that the biggest octopuses seem to have been captured more than half a century ago.
As I described Athena’s grace, her gentleness, her apparent friendliness, Jody was skeptical. A huge, slimy cephalopod covered with suckers qualified as a monster in her book. “Well,” I conceded, changing tacks, “being a monster is not necessarily a bad thing.”
I’ve always harbored a fondness for monsters. Even as a child, I had rooted for Godzilla and King Kong instead of for the people trying to kill them. It had seemed to me that these monsters’ irritation was perfectly reasonable. Nobody likes to be awakened from slumber by a nuclear explosion, so it was no wonder to me Godzilla was crabby; as for King Kong, few men would blame him for his attraction to pretty Fay Wray. (Though her screaming would have eventually put off anyone less patient than a gorilla.)
If you took the monsters’ point of view, everything they did made perfect sense. The trick was learning to think like a monster.
After our embrace, Athena had floated back to her lair; I staggered down the three stairs of the step stool. I stood for a moment, almost dizzy, and caught my breath. The only word I could manage was “wow.”
“The way she presented her head to you was unusual,” said Scott. “I was surprised.” He told me that the last two octopuses who lived here, Truman and, before him, George, would only offer their arms to a visitor—not the head.
Athena’s behavior was particularly surprising given her personality. Truman and George were laid-back octopuses, but Athena had earned her name, that of the Greek goddess of war and strategy. She was a particularly feisty octopus: very active, and prone to excitement, which she showed by turning her skin bumpy and red.
Octopuses are highly individual. This is often reflected in the names keepers give them. At the Seattle Aquarium, one giant Pacific octopus was named Emily Dickinson because she was so shy that she spent her days hiding behind her tank’s backdrop; the public almost never saw her. Eventually she was released into Puget Sound, where she had originally been caught. Another was named Leisure Suit Larry—the minute a keeper peeled one of his questing arms off his or her body, two more would attach in its place. A third octopus earned the name Lucretia McEvil, because she constantly dismantled everything in her tank.
Octopuses realize that humans are individuals too. They like some people; they dislike others. And they behave differently toward those they know and trust. Though a bit leery of visitors, George had been relaxed and friendly with his keeper, senior aquarist Bill Murphy. Before I came, I had watched a video of the two of them together that the aquarium had posted on YouTube in 2007. George was floating at the top of the tank, gently tasting Bill with his suckers, as the tall, lanky aquarist bent down to pet and scratch him. “I consider him to be a friend,” Bill told the cameraman as he ran his fingers over George’s head, “because I’ve spent a lot of time interacting with him, taking care of him, and seeing him every day. Some people find them very creepy and slimy,” he said, “but I enjoy it a lot. In some ways they’re just like a dog. I actually pet his head or scratch his forehead. He loves it.”
It doesn’t take long for an octopus to figure out who his friends are. In one study, Seattle Aquarium biologist Roland Anderson exposed eight giant Pacific octopuses to two unfamiliar humans, dressed identically in blue aquarium uniforms. One person consistently fed a particular octopus, and another always touched it with a bristly stick. Within a week, at first sight of the people—looking up at them through the water, without even touching or tasting them—most of the octopuses moved toward the feeder and away from the irritator. Sometimes the octopus would aim its water-shooting funnel, the siphon near the side of the head with which an octopus jets through the sea, at the person who had touched it with the bristly stick.
Occasionally an octopus takes a dislike to a particular person. At the Seattle Aquarium, when one biologist would check on a normally friendly octopus each night, she would be greeted by a blast of painfully cold salt water shot from the funnel. The octopus hosed her and only her. Wild octopuses use their funnels not only for propulsion but also to repel things they don’t like, just as you might use a snowblower to clear a sidewalk. Possibly the octopus was irritated by the night biologist’s flashlight. One volunteer at the New England Aquarium always got this same treatment from Truman, who would shoot a soaking stream of salt water at her every time he saw her. Later, the volunteer left her position at the aquarium for college. Months later, she returned for a visit. Truman—who hadn’t squirted anyone in the meantime—instantly soaked her again.
The idea of octopuses with thoughts, feelings, and personalities disturbs some scientists and philosophers. Only recently have many researchers accorded even chimpanzees, so closely related to humans we can share blood transfusions, the dignity of a mind. The idea set forth by French philosopher René Descartes in 1637, that only people think (and therefore, only people exist in the moral universe—“Je pense, donc je suis”) is still so pervasive in modern science that even Jane Goodall, one of the most widely recognized scientists in the world, was too intimidated to publish some of her most intriguing observations of wild chimpanzees for twenty years. From her extensive studies at Gombe Stream Reserve in Tanzania, she had many times observed wild chimpanzees purposely deceiving one another, for example stifling a food cry to keep others from discovering some fruit. Her long delay in writing of it stemmed from a fear that other scientists would accuse her of anthropomorphizing—projecting “human” feelings onto—her study subjects, a cardinal sin in animal science. I have spoken with other researchers at Gombe who still haven’t published some of their findings from the 1970s, fearing their scientific colleagues would never believe them.
“There’s always an effort to minimize emotion and intelligence in other species,” the New England Aquarium’s director of public relations, Tony LaCasse, said after I met Athena. “The prejudice is particularly strong against fish and invertebrates,” agreed Scott. We followed the ramp that spirals around the Giant Ocean Tank, affectionately known as the GOT, the three-story, 200,000-gallon re-creation of a Caribbean reef community that is the central pillar of the aquarium. Sharks, rays, turtles, and schools of tropical fish floated by like daydreams as we broke the scientific taboo and spoke of minds that many deny exist.
Scott remembered an octopus whose sneaky depredations rivaled those of Goodall’s deceitful chimps. “There was a tank of special flounder about fifteen feet away from the octopus tank,” he said. The fish were part of a study. But to the researchers’ dismay, the flounder started disappearing, one by one. One day they caught the culprit red-handed. The octopus had been slipping out of her tank and eating the flounder! When the octopus was discovered, Scott said, “she gave a guilty, sideways look and slithered away.”
Tony told me about Bimini, a large female nurse shark who once lived in the Giant Ocean Tank. One day the shark attacked one of the spotted eels in the tank and was swimming around with her victim’s tail protruding from her mouth. “One of the divers who knew Bimini well wagged his finger at her, and then bopped her on the nose,” Tony told me. In response, Bimini instantly regurgitated the eel. (Though the eel was whisked to the on-site veterinarian for emergency treatment, he unfortunately could not be saved.)
Once a similar thing had happened with our border collie, Sally. She had come upon a dead deer in the woods and was feeding on it. When I growled, “Drop it!” she actually vomited it up for me. I had always been proud of her obedience. But a shark?
The sharks don’t eat all the fish in the tank, because they’re well fed. “But sometimes they will eat or injure other animals for other reasons besides hunger,” Scott told me. One day, a group of permitsólong, thin, shiny fish whose dorsal fins are shaped like scythes—were thrashing around near the surface of the Giant Ocean Tank. “They were making a lot of noise and commotion,” Tony said. One of the sand tiger sharks shot to the surface to attack the fish, biting their fins—but not killing or eating them. Apparently, the shark was just irritated. “This was a dominance bite, not a predator bite,” Tony said.
To many, we spoke heresy. Skeptics are right to point out that it’s easy to misunderstand animals, even those most like ourselves. Years ago, when I was visiting Birute Galdikas’s research camp in Borneo, where ex-captive orangutans were learning to live in the wild, a new American volunteer, smitten with the shaggy orange apes, rushed up to an adult female to give her a hug. The female picked up the volunteer and slammed her against the ground. The woman didn’t realize that the orangutan didn’t feel like being grabbed by a stranger.
It’s alluring to assume that animals feel as we do, especially when we want them to like us. A friend who works with elephants told me of a woman who called herself an animal communicator, who was visiting an aggressive elephant at a zoo. After her telepathic conversation with the elephant, the communicator told the keeper, “Oh, that elephant really likes me. He wants to put his head in my lap.” What was most interesting about this interaction was the part the communicator may have gotten right: Elephants do sometimes put their heads in the laps of people. They do this to kill them. They crush people with their foreheads like you would grind out a cigarette butt with your shoe.
The early-twentieth-century Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once famously wrote, “If a lion could talk, we couldn’t understand him.” With an octopus, the opportunity for misunderstanding is greatly magnified. A lion is a mammal like us; an octopus is put together completely differently, with three hearts, a brain that wraps around its throat, and a covering of slime instead of hair. Even their blood is a different color from ours; it’s blue, because copper, not iron, carries its oxygen.
In his classic The Outermost House, American naturalist Henry Beston writes that animals “are not brethren, they are not underlings” but beings “gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.” They are, he writes, “other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.” To many people, an octopus is not just another nation; it’s an alien from a distant and menacing galaxy.
But to me, Athena was more than an octopus. She was an individual—who I liked very much—and also, possibly, a portal. She was leading me to a new way of thinking about thinking, of imagining what other minds might be like. And she was enticing me to explore, in a way I never had before, my own planet—a world of mostly water, which I hardly knew.
Back at home, I tried to replay my interaction with Athena in my mind. It was difficult. There was so much of her, everywhere. I could not keep track of her gelatinous body and its eight floaty, rubbery arms. I could not keep track of her continually changing color, shape, or texture. One moment, she’d be bright red and bumpy, and the next, she’d be smoother and veined with dark brown or white. Patches on different parts of her body would change color so fast—in less than a second—that by the time I registered the last change, she would be on to another. To borrow a phrase from songwriter John Denver, she filled up my senses.
Unconstrained by joints, her arms were constantly questing, coiling, stretching, reaching, unfurling, all in different directions at once. Each arm seemed like a separate creature, with a mind of its own. In fact, this is almost literally true. Three fifths of octopuses’ neurons are not in the brain but in the arms. If an arm is severed from an octopus’s body, the arm will often carry on as if nothing has happened for several hours. One presumes the severed arm might continue hunting and perhaps even catching prey—only to pass it back toward a mouth to which the arm is, sadly, no longer attached.
Just one of Athena’s suckers was enough to seize my complete concentration—and she had 1,600 of them. Each was busily multitasking: sucking, tasting, grabbing, holding, plucking, releasing. Each arm on a giant Pacific octopus has two rows of suckers, the smallest at the tips, the largest (three inches across on a big male, perhaps two on Athena) about a third of the way to the mouth. Each sucker has two chambers. The outer one is shaped like a broad suction cup, with hundreds of fine radial ridges stretching to the rim. The inner chamber is a little hole in the center of the sucker, which creates the suction force. The whole structure can bend to fit the contours of whatever the sucker is grasping. Each sucker can even fold to create a pincer grip, like your thumb and forefinger can. Each is operated by individual nerves that the octopus controls voluntarily and independently. And each sucker is fantastically strong. James Wood, webmaster of the long-running biological website The Cephalopod Page, has calculated that a 2.5-inch-diameter sucker can lift 35 pounds of weight. If all the suckers were that size, the octopus would have a sucking capacity of 56,000 pounds. Another scientist calculated that to break the hold of the much smaller common octopus would demand a quarter ton of force. “Divers,” Wood said, “should be very careful.”
Athena’s suction had been tender with my skin. Since I was not afraid, I had not resisted her pull. This was fortunate, I learned when I later spoke with her keeper, Bill, on the phone, setting up my next visit.
“A lot of people are freaked out by them,” he told me. “When visitors come, we always have someone there to help in case the person freaks out. Keeping the octopus in the tank is the main goal. We can’t guarantee what they’ll do. With Athena, I’ve had four of her arms on me, and you peel them off and then the other four arms are on.”
“I think we’ve all been on dates like that,” I observed.
While Athena was tasting my arms and hands, she had made a point of looking into my face. I was impressed that she even recognized a face so unlike her own, and wondered whether Athena might like to taste my face as well as look at it. I asked Bill if that was ever allowed. “No,” he said emphatically, “we don’t let them near the face.” Why? Could she pull out an eye? “Yes,” Bill said, “she could.” Bill has gotten into futile tugs-of-war with octopuses who have grabbed the handles of cleaning brushes. “The octopus always wins. You have to know what you’re doing,” he said. “You cannot let her go near your face.”
“I felt as if she wanted to pull me into the tank,” I told him.
“She could pull you into the tank, yes,” he said. “She will try.”
I was eager to give her another chance. We set a date for a Tuesday, when both Bill and his most experienced octopus volunteer, Wilson Menashi, would be there. Scott, and now Bill, told me the same thing about Wilson: “He has a real way with octopuses.”
Wilson is a former engineer and inventor with the Arthur D. Little Corp. with many patents to his name. Among his other accomplishments is having brought cubic zirconia to market as an imitation diamond. (It had been artificially produced by the French, but they didn’t know what to do with it.) At the aquarium, Wilson had been tasked with an important mission: designing interesting toys to keep the intelligent octopus occupied. “If they have nothing to do, they become bored,” Bill explained. And boring your octopus is not only cruel; it’s a hazard. I knew from living with two border collies and a 750-pound pet pig that to allow a smart animal to become bored is to court disaster. They will invariably come up with something creative to do with their time that you don’t want them to do, as the Seattle Aquarium