The Soul of an Octopus

by Sy Montgomery

  We head toward David, who is waving to us excitedly from 200 yards away. Keely and I swim slowly in the three-foot shallows, barely skimming dead corals, watching for other dens and for the puncturing spines of urchins and stonefish. I can’t see the den he must be pointing to in the lumpy, algae-covered rock just one foot in front of us.

  Until I see that the rock has eyes.

  Arms coiled beneath its large body, the octopus sits one foot tall atop its den, its reddish, warty, nine-inch body hanging down in front of it like a big nose, its eyes camouflaged with a light starburst pattern separated by a white blaze like my border collie’s. Pearly irises split by hyphen pupils swivel as it watches us. For at least a minute, the octopus remains otherwise immobile, allowing its papillae to sway limply in the surge like algae. Finally it moves. Pulling one of its arms up from beneath its body, the animal slides the arm tip inside the gill opening, as if to scratch an itch.

  David and I are so mesmerized we don’t even notice that Keely has swum off. Then from beneath the water, we hear her water-muffled call: “I have another one! And it’s hunting!”

  David stays with his octopus, and I swim over to see Keely’s, just a few yards away. Again, absurdly, I cannot see it at first. At last the image my eyes must be processing materializes in my brain. This octopus is much smaller than David’s, perhaps only six inches tall, even though it’s standing up taller than it is wide. Mottled uniformly brown and white, its body is covered with jagged peaks of papillae, erected especially prominently above the eyes like ear tufts. If someone showed its image and relative size on a screen and asked me what animal this is, I would say it was an Eastern screech owl.

  Until, with the blast of its jet, it transforms into an octopus again. Which, of course, looks like anything but an octopus. Before our eyes, Keely’s octopus becomes a silken scarf, a beating heart, a gliding snail, a rock covered with algae. And then it pours itself into a hole, like water down a drain, and disappears entirely.

  I pull my head out of the water and call to David. “The octopus is hunting!” I yell to him.

  “Mine too!” he answers.

  Keely and I now join David and begin to follow the animal as it flows over the sand on curling arms. As the octopus turns to its left, it reveals the full length of its arms—they may span more than four feet—and we glimpse a dramatic, defining moment in the animal’s personal history. I can see the front three left arms all end halfway down. Like Karma, this octopus survived an encounter with a predator. The skin is healing over, but the limbs have not yet started to regrow. I feel a pang of sympathy and admiration. Surely this bold octopus remembers its brush with death, and yet it doesn’t hide from us. Crawling along the bottom as we follow just feet away, it keeps us in view, seeming as curious about us as we are about it. Like us, it wants to know: Who are you? And for this animal, apparently, the quest to know is worth the risk. It stops, turns, and reaches out to taste my neoprene glove with its intact third right arm.

  Suckers run all the way to the tip. She’s a female—a swashbuckling, peg-legged pirate of an octopus, a fearless adventuress, like Kali.

  We’re a small, mixed-species school, following our octopus leader as she travels along the bottom. She watches us as we move with her. Abruptly, three long rows of light spots spring to her arms, while her background color changes from red to a dark brown. Then she suddenly flashes white—a behavior Jennifer has seen octopuses use to startle prey into moving. But no crab or fish appears. The color change was meant for us. Perhaps she is conducting her own personality test, the equivalent of our touching our subjects with a pencil to see what they do. But we do nothing; we keep watching. I hope our reaction doesn’t disappoint her.

  Next she smooths her skin, turns the color of fawn, and jets away. We frog-kick to keep up. In just a few yards, she alights on the bottom, turns chocolate, re-erects her papillae, and resumes crawling. It feels as if she is taking us, like Keith’s octopus on his dive, and like Matthew’s in Octopolis, on a tour of her neighborhood—a magical mystery tour, on which our guide changes shape and turns psychedelic colors. She even grows a new set of eyes. At one point of our journey together, on each side of her body, she suddenly sprouts ocelli, from the Latin for eye, two-and-a-half-inch-diameter blue rings. They signal to a predator that it has been seen, deflect attention from the real eye, and make its owner appear larger—and might have other meanings as well. At another point, she poses for David’s underwater camera atop some coral rubble, inserting her arms into its holes, probing for prey. The whole time she stares ahead like a person fishing in his pocket for his keys.

  Time ceased to have meaning while we swam with the octopus in the warm shallows; we could have been together for five minutes or an hour. Later we would figure the encounter lasted nearly half an hour. Eventually, David pulled his head from the water and suggested we leave so that our presence didn’t interfere further with her hunting.

  Our encounter with her seemed to bless our study with new luck. In the next two days, we would locate three new octopuses at this site. Ultimately, the team would find eighteen octopuses at five different sites; collect 244 shells and carapaces of octopus prey; catalog 106 food items outside active octopus dens; and identify forty-one different species of prey. Our study yielded enough data for Jennifer, David, and Tatiana to pore over happily for months.

  But for me, the greatest gift of the expedition remained our swimming with the stump-armed female. David confirmed just how lucky we were. “It was definitely the best octopus encounter of my life,” David said—high praise from a man who had studied octopus in the wild and in captivity for nineteen years.

  Swimming with a wild octopus was a dream come true, but the octopus experience I would treasure most deeply had been back at the aquarium, with Octavia, at April’s end, near the very end of her life.

  Once in the barrel, Octavia had seemed very calm. She made no motions to suggest she was looking for her eggs. She didn’t chew on the mesh. And Karma was delighted with her new space. She was shy at first—she wouldn’t come out of her barrel until Bill led her out by one arm. But once out, she began exploring almost immediately, turning red with excitement and unfurling her body in her larger quarters like a banner in the wind.

  Bill had made the right choice. Though for many months, Octavia’s constant attentions to her eggs were rituals rich and full of meaning, at some point, her tending may have ceased to feel fulfilling. A wild octopus tending fertile eggs is surely rewarded, as are birds on the nest, by the signals that her eggs are alive, her embryos growing. Mother birds and their babies chirp and cheep to one another when the young are still in the egg; the mother octopus can see her babies developing inside the egg, starting with the dark eyes, and feel them moving. But Octavia had no such feedback. Perhaps the very sight of the eggs inspired her to try to protect them, the way a mother orangutan will continue to carry and even groom a dead infant, often for many days, and some dogs will refuse to leave the body of someone they love who has died. Perhaps, now that her eggs were no longer in view, Octavia at last was freed of duties she might have suspected were pointless but had felt compelled to perform. Perhaps now, at last, she could rest.

  Removing Octavia from her display tank also made possible an unintentional bonus for the rest of us. When she had laid her eggs in June, we all assumed that we would never be able to touch her again. She would guard her eggs to the end, we thought, and nevermore show any interest in us. Perhaps now she would consent to touch us again—affording an opportunity for a bittersweet farewell.

  When Wilson and I arrived at the aquarium the following Wednesday, we learned that Octavia hadn’t moved much since the transfer. Mostly she rested in one area of the barrel, covering her swollen left eye with two of her arms. Her appetite had been steadily declining for weeks now, even though Bill had been tempting her with special delicacies; on Friday she had enjoyed a live crab, with the claws removed so it couldn’t hurt her. She ate shrimp on Sunday, but not
hing Monday or Tuesday.

  For the first time, I dreaded seeing my old friend. All these months, I had seen her only through glass, under low light. Now, for the first time in nearly a year, I was going to see her up close again, not separated by a pane of glass. I feared what I might find. I didn’t want to see her eye clouded and swollen. I didn’t want to see her skin fading and thinning. I didn’t want to see her weak or disoriented or upset.

  Yet I longed to be with her. We hadn’t touched since she had laid her eggs last June. I never knew whether, as I watched her tending her eggs from the public side of her tank, she looked out through the glass of her exhibit and recognized me as the same person who had fed her and stroked her as she looked up through the water’s rippling surface so many months before.

  As Christa and Brendan stood back and watched, Wilson and I unscrewed the lid from the barrel. Octavia was coiled and calm, a brownish maroon color, at the bottom. The left, swollen eye faced away from us. Her right eye, miraculously, now seemed normal, its pupil large and alert. Wilson held a squid in his right hand and waved it through the water, offering Octavia its taste and scent. Within twenty seconds she flipped upside down, and floated up, three quarters of the way to the surface, showing us her lacy white suckers. Wilson plunged his hand into the cold water to place the squid against the large suckers near her mouth. She grabbed it. I put in my hand as well, both of us offering our skin for her to taste. Would she accept us again? Would she remember?

  Octavia rose a few more inches in the water, and hundreds of her suckers broke the surface. She gently grasped the back of Wilson’s hand, first with just a few suckers, then with more. And then, slowly but deliberately, she extended one arm out of the water, curling it up over his hand, his wrist—and, next, her neighboring arm followed, rising and unfurling like a wine-dark wave, her suckers attaching to his hand, his wrist, his forearm.

  “She knows you!” cried Christa. “She remembers you, Wilson!” And next, still embracing Wilson with two arms, she did the same to me—first with one of her arms on my right arm, then with two arms on my left. Her wet grip on my skin felt gentle and familiar, the pull of her suckers tender as a kiss.

  “When I heard what happened when she recognized Bill, I almost couldn’t believe it,” Wilson said. “Now I do . . . there is no doubt. Clearly, she remembers.”

  For perhaps five minutes, Octavia stayed at the surface, holding us, tasting us, remembering us. She reached out to Christa with one arm as well—they had met once before. “What is she feeling?” I whispered.

  “She is an old lady,” said Wilson, tenderly, as if that observation contained the answer. Wilson grew up in a traditional culture that, unlike our own, reveres the old. In her book The Old Way, my friend Liz relates that the Bushmen, when approached by lions, would address them respectfully with the word n!a, which means “old”—“a term,” Liz notes, that “they also use when speaking of the gods.” The word lady, too, was deeply meaningful, though rarely applied to an octopus: For like a true lady, Octavia was behaving in a well-mannered and considerate way, rising to greet her friends, even though any movement must have been quite an effort.

  None of us spoke as she held us, for five minutes—or was it ten? Who knew? We were on Octopus Time. Hanging upside down, Octavia offered us her white suckers, and we stroked them, and she latched on to our fingertips. Gently she blew from her siphon, but unlike the blasts of icy salt water she used to shoot, they barely rippled the surface.

  Her arms were so relaxed that we could see the very tip of her beak, a black speck at the joining point of all her limbs, like the center of a flower. “She is very gentle,” Wilson said softly. “She is very calm.”

  And then Wilson did something I had never seen him do before. He gently but deliberately put his finger to her mouth.

  “I wouldn’t do that, man!” warned Brendan, who had been with us the day Kali bit Anna. He’d been nearby when the arowana bit me, and had dressed my wound. Though Brendan is a tough guy who has been through a lot of physical pain himself, he hates to see other people get hurt. And Wilson is not a man to court unnecessary danger. He’s not like the interns and volunteers who let the electric eel shock them just to see how it feels.

  “She’s not going to bite,” Wilson assured Brendan. And then Wilson stroked Octavia’s mouth with his index finger, petting her with an intimacy and level of trust he had never shared with any other octopus.

  Finally, Octavia sank to the bottom, still regarding us with her good eye. How tired she must be, I thought, after her rich, full life—a life lived between worlds. She had known the sea’s wild embrace; she had mastered the art of camouflage; she had learned the taste of our skin and the shapes of our faces; she had instinctively remembered how her ancestors wove eggs into chains. She had served as an ambassador for her kind to tens of thousands of aquarium visitors, even transforming disgust to admiration. What an odyssey she had lived.

  I leaned over the barrel and stared at her in awe and gratitude. My eyes brimmed, and a tear dripped into the water. Human tears of intense emotion are chemically distinct from tears produced by eye irritants; tears of both joy and sorrow contain prolactin, a hormone that peaks in men and women during sex, dreams, and seizures, and is associated in women with the synthesis of breast milk. I wondered if Octavia could taste my feelings. She may have recognized the taste: Fish have prolactin. Octopuses do too.

  As she rested, pale areas spread over Octavia’s brownish skin in a weblike pattern. “She’s beautiful,” said Brendan reverently. He had never seen her up close before, only through the glass of her exhibit. But even now, even so near the end of her life, Octavia was beautiful, and except for her bad eye, she looked healthy, if thin, with no white patches of dead skin. “She’s a beautiful old lady,” I said.

  We rested, people and octopus regarding one another for several more minutes. And then, to my surprise, she floated up again to us. As she rose, we scanned the bottom of the barrel and saw that she had dropped the squid Wilson had fed her. We wished she had eaten, but we learned something new: Hunger was not the reason she had surfaced earlier, and it wasn’t what brought her now.

  The reason she surfaced was abundantly clear. She had not interacted with us, or tasted our skin, or seen us above her tank for ten full months. She was sick and weak. In less than four weeks, on a Saturday morning in May, Bill would find her, pale, thin, and still, dead at the bottom of her barrel. Yet, despite everything, we knew in that moment that Octavia had not only remembered us and recognized us; she had wanted to touch us again.

  When it was first filled with harbor water, the finished Giant Ocean Tank glowed a magical, promising, living green. As it cleared, like dawn, its waters sparkled with the colors and shapes of all the new coral sculptures and hundreds of new fishes. Staff had wisely returned the smallest fish to the tank first, so they could own the crevices, establishing territories where they’d feel safe and confident, before introducing the larger, predatory fishes—who never bothered them. Myrtle again ruled her old domain. The penguins returned to their tray, took up the exact same spots each had defended eleven months before, and again filled the aquarium’s first floor with their welcome, raucous braying.

  The public opening for the transformed GOT on July 1 was glorious—and so was Marion and Dave’s wedding. Scott’s secular homily focused on Marion’s work with anacondas, prompting one guest to comment, “Well, that was the best snake wedding I ever attended.” Wilson and his family managed to spring his wife from her assisted living facility to attend, in her wheelchair, a party for her granddaughter, Sophie. She recognized everyone and seemed to enjoy the gathering. At the end of the summer, Christa was chosen out of fifty people who were interviewed for the one open permanent position in the aquarium’s education department. Four hundred and thirty thousand people came to visit the New England Aquarium that July and August, the highest number of visitors in the institution’s forty-four-year history.

  On a Wednesday in Sept
ember, I arrive at the octopus tank to find Karma entertaining a crowd, crawling vigorously across the front of her exhibit on her large, white suckers, watching the people out of one slit-pupil eye. “Ooooh! Oct-oh-PUS!” cries a little girl with three blond pigtails held in place with pink ribbons. “Wow! Way cool!” says a teenage boy in a leather jacket. “Come see this, class!” a school trip chaperone summons the students in her charge. “The octopus is out!”

  I rush upstairs to join Wilson, and we open the top of her tank. Karma, bright red, flows over to greet us and flips upside down. We can see the flash of cameras below as we hand her one capelin after another, six in all, which she accepts eagerly. We see the fish crowded together at the center of her arms. But even as she’s eating, she’s eager to play with us. Her arms coil out of the water to grab us, sucking so vehemently she leaves love bites on our forearms and the backs of our hands.

  Did she actually eat all six capelin? We go back downstairs to her exhibit to see if she dropped any.

  “Was that you with the octopus?” a young boy asks, as if we had just been seen having dinner with the president. We nod proudly.

  “Does it know you?” a middle-aged man with a moustache asks, incredulous.

  Of course she does, we answer. Perhaps as well as or better than we know her.

  But I still have so many questions. What goes on in Karma’s head—or the larger bundle of neurons in her arms—when she sees us? Do her three hearts beat faster when she catches sight of Bill, or Wilson, or Christa, or Anna, or me? Would she feel sad if we disappeared? What does sadness feel like for an octopus—or for anyone else, for that matter? What does Karma feel like when she pours her huge body into a tiny crevice of her lair? What does capelin taste like on her skin?

  I can’t know this, of course; and I can’t know exactly what I mean to her. But I know what she—and Octavia and Kali—have meant to me. They have changed my life forever. I loved them, and will love them always, for they have given me a great gift: a deeper understanding of what it means to think, to feel, and to know.