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December 5, 2024 - March 8, 2025
New evidence suggests cephalopods might be able to se...
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Perhaps Octavia had recognized our intelligence, and enjoyed her bucket all the more for having outwitted us.
octopuses use their funnels to repel what they don’t like.
They were both using their funnels—organs originally evolved for respiration and locomotion—to play.
“Only intelligent animals play,” he stressed. “Birds like crows and parrots; primates like monkeys and chimps; dogs and humans.”
dramatically underscores just how little science knows about these charismatic but mysterious animals.
dementia—it’s so human-specific and associated with mental illness, and it’s not normal or natural or inevitable for every person who lives long enough.
senescence happens to every octopus who does.”
had seen this in our first border collie, when she was sixteen. She’d wake my husband and me in the night, crying and frightened, as if she couldn’t remember where she was or who we were. I’d lie on the floor with her and stroke her and kiss her till the light came back into her intense brown eyes, as if her soul had returned from a journey.
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.”
Aristotle explained it, he “has a sort of penis on one of his tentacles . . . which it admits into the nostril of a female.”)
“Females can be feisty,” he explains. “Males are more easygoing.”
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.
The spot reminds Bill of the bindi, the dot with which a lady decorates her forehead in India.
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 cart...
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if your octopus inks in alarm, which can poison the water, including the octopus itself.
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
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.
The slits of her pupils always remain horizontal, no matter what position she is in, cued by balance receptors called statocysts.
her pupils would be small, but now they are opened wide, like a person’s when excited or in love.
has been tending the feather duster worms (which take their name from the beautiful clusters of branched tentacles on their heads),
Sea creatures in general evoke an irrational fear in many people,
to offer naturalistic settings for its animals. It was a visionary change—one that not only made its exhibits more educational for the public, but also made them far more interesting for its animal inmates.
“Just about every animal,” Scott says—not just mammals and birds—“can learn, recognize individuals, and respond to empathy.”
When the female sheds her skin, the babies burst out from her back, pointy heads first. They are born not as tadpoles, but as perfect little toadlets.
“The undersea world is a seriously slimy place.” Slime helps sea animals reduce drag while moving through the water, capture and eat food, keep their skin healthy, escape predators, protect their eggs.
Bermuda fire worms signal with luminous slime to attract mates like fireflies flashing on a summer night. The female fire worms glow to attract the males; the males then flash, after which the two release eggs and sperm in tandem.
creature of the ocean bottom, a hagfish grows to about 17 inches long, and yet, in mere minutes, it can fill seven buckets with slime—so much slime it can slip from almost any predator’s grip. The hagfish would be in danger of suffocating on its own mucus, except it has learned, like a person with a cold, to blow it out its nose. But sometimes it produces too much slime for even a hagfish to tolerate, and for this occasion, it has devised a nifty trick: the animal wraps its tail around its body like a knot and slides the knot forward, clearing the slime.
Octopus slime is sort of a cross between drool and snot. But in a nice way. And it’s very useful. It helps to be slippery if you’re squeezing your body in and out of tight places. Slime keeps the octopus moist if it wants to emerge from the water, which some species of octopus do with surprising frequency in the wild. Though the infamous “tree octopus” “discovered” in 1998 by researcher Lyle Zapato was a hoax (perpetrated to prove, which it did, that too many young people believe everything they read on the Internet), wild octopuses who live in tidal areas often haul themselves out on land in
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At the aquarium I have joined a cadre of colleagues for whom octopus slime serves as a social lubricant.
The ability to ascribe thoughts to others, thoughts that might differ from our own, is a sophisticated cognitive skill, known as “theory of mind.”
Kali is active, interested, friendly, and outgoing. “She’s going to be a wonderful octopus for display,”
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.”
I think of Paul the Apostle’s letter to the Philippians about the power of the “peace that passeth understanding . . .”
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.
But to us, each tank is more like a station of the cross, a site for a series of devotions. Here we are sanctified, baptized over and over by the beauty and strangeness of the ocean.
Standard scuba safety procedure forbids a person dive alone,
They don’t want to hear how Octavia is different from us. They want to know how we’re the same. They know what it’s like to have an itch. They can imagine what it’s like to be a mother. This brief encounter has changed them. Now they can identify with an octopus. They all take pictures on their cell phones. They thank me before they leave. “Take care of that little momma,” one says to me gently.
So many of my friends, once outgoing and social, are transformed once their babies are born.
Hormones and neurotransmitters, the chemicals associated with human desire, fear, love, joy, and sadness, “are highly conserved across taxa,” Jennifer said. This means that whether you’re a person or a monkey, a bird or a turtle, an octopus or a clam, the physiological changes that accompany our deepest-felt emotions appear to be the same. Even a brainless scallop’s little heart beats faster when the mollusk is approached by a predator, just like yours or mine would do were we to be accosted by a mugger.
only five percent of the ocean has been explored. . . .”
who would want to leave this vast, teeming blue world? Surely its waters could wash away all sorrows, heal all brokenness, restore all souls.
I’ve learned,” she said, expressing a wisdom way beyond her years, “that happiness and sadness are not mutually exclusive.”
This names the way we feel as we watch Octavia, our alien, invertebrate friend, caring for her infertile eggs at the end of her life with a tenacity and tenderness at once heartbreaking and glorious.
What was once beautiful will become ugly. What was once tranquil will become noisy. Nothing will be the same.
instead it squished my cheeks toward my nose, as if my head had been caught between the closing doors of an elevator.
His look was quizzical: “What are you doing here?” We held each other’s gaze for many seconds. Then one of us blinked. Since I was the only one with eyelids, it must have been me. The bass vanished as suddenly as a shudder.
screw on my hoses—backward—damaging an O-ring. (Isn’t that what made the space shuttle Challenger blow up?) Now I have an air leak.
