VAN PELT: He really does believe that he is the superior species. And he has endless amounts of time to watch the humans. And he has a very sharp observational capacity. And I think he relieves a lot of his boredom by sort of, you know, creating these little soap opera moments and just really honing his observations and his thoughts about humans and how we operate. The body itself is protean, all possibility’ … an octopus hunting in a lagoon on the island of Mayotte near Madagascar. Photograph: Gabriel Barathieu But octopuses do some things very differently. Take sex: while humans get up close and personal, octopuses do it at arm’s-length. It’s even possible that the octopuses have some shy arms and some bold arms. University of Vienna researcher Ruth Byrne reported that her captive octopuses always choose a favorite arm to explore new objects or mazes—even though all of their limbs are equally dexterous…Her team counted the octopuses using only forty-nine different combinations of one, two or three arms for manipulating objects, when, according to her calculations, 448 combinations were actually possible…(160) Many variations in observed habits are discussed here, but the important thing is that octopuses don’t generally have a long lifespan—usually around two years, though the range is six months to four years, depending on the species. Sexual activity takes place towards the end of the lifespan, the mother often dying shortly after the eggs have successfully hatched. During gestation the mother typically doesn’t eat, neither attracted to food nor interested to attract possible predators to the cave in which she is holed up with a bunch of developing eggs. Her last days are spent spurting oxygenated water over the eggs attached to the walls of caves.

Much of what we know about the octopus is that they are great escape artists: they squeeze into tight spots, change color, and will lose an arm to evade capture. They can also put on a dazzling camouflage called ‘Passing Cloud,’ which is designed to confuse potential prey, not predators. This display makes nearby prey think something large is passing over their environment casting a moving shadow. It is thought the intent is to startle a motionless prey into revealing their location so they can be captured by the octopus with spread arms and web. From building shelters to shooting ink to changing color, the vulnerable octopus must be ready to outwit dozens of species of animals, some of which it pursues, others it must escape. How do you plan fro so many possibilities? Doing so demands, to some degree, anticipating the actions—in other words, imagining the minds—of other individualsYet commonalities between us and them are not surprising: as Scheel notes, like other animals, we share a deep evolutionary history. Theory of mind is considered an important component of consciousness, because it implies self-awareness. (83) VAN PELT: Well, I think it really started for me watching octopus videos on the internet, which is a wonderful way to pass the time if you've never gone down that particular rabbit hole. You know, watching them, they're trying to escape. They get into all sorts of antics because they're just bored. And for me, watching those, I just really felt like there was a character in there, the frustration that an animal must feel when it almost must feel kind of superior to the beings that have captured it. Sy Montgomery's book, The Soul of an Octopus is an antidote to these negative perceptions, and does an excellent job of showing how amazing and intriguing Octopuses are, and the relationships that humans can have with them. Beyond that, however, this book didn't live up to my expectations. An 60lb Giant Pacific Octopus lays 100,000 eggs which takes 6 months to hatch. During that time the mother keeps them safe in her den, wafting away predators, intruders, debris, barnacles and keep the water pure for her potential babies. She doesn't eat, her body digests itself, not fat as it doesn't have any, but muscles. And as soon as her eggs hatch, she dies. The story of Olive the Octopus in the book is also here in the Seattle Times together with a picture of her.

I'm a wildlife lover and activist so I try to branch out into different books on creatures I know nothing about. I was worried this was going to be another textbook style read and I don't like those. This is about a woman (the author) who gets to study octopuses <--- (not octopi) at The New England Aquarium. I never even thought an octopus could have such a wonderful memory, could play, could hug you in their own way or shoot water in your face if they didn't like you or wanted to play. There are so many other things I learned. As a memoir, this functions on about the same level of Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know, another book that promised to explore the science but was ultimately bound to the idiosyncratic interpretations and ideas of its author. This is a decent enough read to get a passel of facts, but not the survey of the wonder of octopus intelligence the title seems to promise. I have moved on to The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins, which seems to be a more promising treatment of a similar subject, although not, unfortunately, of the wondrous octopus. A good book on octopuses (that's right, not octopi or, heaven forbid, octopodes). They're one of my favorite types of animals, but I only knew about them from Wikipedia articles and David Attenborough documentaries. So, I decided to get a book that would be a broad but still scientific survey of the species and I was not disappointed in this one. If you do that against an immobile surface, the octopus arm will crawl tip first away from the mouth, as each bit of substrate below it is passed towards the mouth,” says Scheel.Last year, the UK established the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022, with octopuses among the animals covered. The companion to the highly-anticipated National Geographic television special, this beautifully illustrated book explores the alluring underwater world of the octopus—a creature that resembles an alien lifeform, but whose behavior has earned it a reputation as one of the most intelligent animals on the planet. Montgomery describes the ascent from her final dive: “I ascend with [Rob] slowly, like a dying soul reluctant to leave its body, and we watch the silver trail of our bubbles rising above us like shooting stars.” Is this how Kali felt on her final ocean ascent? Is this how Kali feels in her barrel right now? Until I read ‘The Soul of an Octopus’, by Sy Montgomery, talented amateur scientist (journalist) octopuses were almost not ever in my thoughts in any way. As I have learned in reading this book, this was a serious deficiency in my education.

Octopuses have very strange brains. While the human brain has four different lobes each associated with different functions. "An octopus brain...has as many as 50 to 75 different lobes. And most of an octopus's neurons aren't even in the brain but are in the arms." Octopuses are adapted to extreme multi-tasking--all those arms can act independently and the arms seem to be able to both taste and see. Uh, I was saying...about octopuses? Um, here's something you might be interested in. The plural of octopus isn't octopi because that would be slapping a Latin suffix on a Greek root. The Greek plural would be octopodes. But the writers of the book call them octopuses. Not that we should believe anything they're saying. Below is a link to a talk given by the author, posted on Youtube. She reads from the book, so, you don’t really have to read the book, I guess, if you want the condensed version. It is as interesting as the book is. However, the book goes into more detail about many of the employees and volunteers who work with octopuses at the Boston New England Aquarium. The book also describes how the author learned to scuba dive, and the observations she made of sea life. The octopus cyan is one of the best camouflaged octopuses in the world. In Hawaii they often carry a coconut shell to use as a hut-like shelter when there are no crevices to hide in. (You never know what you'll find under a coconut shell.)

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And while the Kraken may be a myth, there is no shortage of alarming encounters, from native legends to Scheel’s personal experience of Calamity, the captive octopus who had a penchant for squirting water from her tank and attempting to pull aquarists in. Right now there is a special exhibit on at the NEAQ of octopuses, squid and other tentacled creatures. I can hardly wait for my next day off!