The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness

by Sy Montgomery

For more than a year and a half, since meeting Athena, since coming to know Octavia and now Kali, each time I’ve reached into the tanks where we have brought these creatures into our world, I’ve longed to enter theirs. At last, in the warm embrace of the sea, breathing underwater, surrounded by the octopus’s liquid world, my breath rising in silver bubbles like a song of praise, here I am.

school of iridescent pink and yellow fish slide by inches from our masks, then wheel in unison like birds in the sky.

I have known no natural state more like a dream than this. I feel elation cresting into ecstasy and experience bizarre sensations:

Irritated by the light, it turns bright red and pours itself back down its hole, vanishing like water down a drain.

or like teens who twitch away at their computer-phones, multitasking but never focusing.

During the second dive, which I also sat out, the water was crammed with more sausages than a German butcher shop. We rescued one of the lost floaters—an older gentleman who was quite shaken by the experience. “Usually when I surface, my boat is waiting for me!” he sputtered. But he couldn’t remember the name of his vessel or his divemaster. We had room for him on our vessel because we had lost the unfortunate fellow we dubbed the Pukey Guy, after he had earlier thrown up, not over the rail as you are supposed to, but on deck, inspiring others to do the same.

In an instant, it flashes speckles on its skin, a starscape, and then pours itself back down its lair.

She makes an eyebar, then mottles, then runs three arms across her brow. Gaping her gill opening wide as a pitcher, she inserts one arm into its entrance and then pokes the tip of her arm out her funnel, waving it like a person hailing a cab. She pulls that arm out, then sticks in another arm. Now she grows paler, expanding hugely with each breath and exhaling forcefully through her funnel. Her pupil is a fat bar, giving her an intense expression. Then she rotates her funnel, more flexible than a tongue, out of my sight. She continues to modify her coloring: Her eyebar gone, now she creates a starburst pattern. Her mottling is as rich and varied as a plush Persian carpet as she fluffs the eggs toward the back of her lair with one arm. She turns and I see that the eggs extend two feet back—there are not just thousands, but tens of thousands of them. I point them out to two children and their mom, and they gasp.

the star slowly conveys the food the full nine inches from the tip of his arm to his mouth—through which he then extrudes his stomach. “He can drool acid right out of his stomach to dissolve his food!” I tell the kids. They squeal with delight as the fish melts away like a cough drop in a person’s mouth.

orange-footed sea cucumbers who look like Technicolor pickles;

She looks like a mime doing the “inside a box” routine, but with 1,600 suckers instead of just two palms. With the possible exception of the holding facility where she was first caught in the wild, she has never felt or tasted glass before.

Christa and Marion and Anna, Wilson and Bill, Scott and I watch, enthralled, as this young, intelligent, vigorous animal finally gets the chance to do what we’ve all wanted for her these long months: to explore an environment more complex and interesting than the dark barrel.

Her arms unfurled, her webbing spread, Kali seems to be soaking up sensations like a swelling sponge.

As much as we all feel her joy as our own, Kali is, I remind myself, a large, strong, wild, nearly adult octopus. We cannot know how she might react to an utterly alien gesture from the human world.

I can feel the weight Bill has borne for these many months, the great burden he has carried, of feeling forced, by circumstances he could not predict and beyond his control, to keep a young, intelligent animal he loved in dark confinement. He says, “I don’t want another octopus stuck in a barrel since May.”

People with Asperger’s often seem emotionally detached, and Anna is not given to sappy outbursts.

That’s proof of Anna’s truly great heart. And of Kali’s charisma and soul.

guess what I’ve discovered,” Anna said to me, “is what you do today doesn’t affect yesterday.” We could not change the fact of Kali’s death; but not even death could eradicate the joy of the day before. After losing a friend with whom she had shared every birthday, every success, every happiness of her youth, Anna knew: “Yesterday,” she assured me, “remains perfect.”

Kali had chosen to face unknown dangers in the quest to widen the horizons of her world.

Two years ago, his lumpfish bred and produced eighty babies. “They are the cutest things!” Bill says. The babies he raised come to him when he leans over the tank, looking up into his face with their round eyes, chubby cheeks, and irresistible, astonished expressions.

which divide again to slender, coiling branchlets more intricate than the rays of the most complex snowflake.

People float by them like plankton, trailing comments like tentacles.

Watching that video, I longed to return to the ocean to watch octopuses where their choices would be as limitless as the sea. Come summer, I would have a chance to get my wish.

When the choir sings, their voices ring deep and sonorous, like a chant coming from the sea itself.

The front of the church faces the ocean, and the sea breeze blows through the open windows like a blessing.

it is what gives life meaning and purpose.

Soul is the fingerprint of God.

Octavia’s response to Bill’s touch showed two remarkable aspects of her relationship with her keeper. She not only remembered him; she trusted him, too.

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.

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.

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.

Her wet grip on my skin felt gentle and familiar, the pull of her suckers tender as a kiss.

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.

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.