Sy Montgomery, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas,
AlterNet.org
October 2017
"Short of Martians showing up and offering themselves up to science,” says neuroscientist Cliff Ragsdale of the University of Chicago, octopuses and their kin “are the only example outside of vertebrates of how to build a complex, clever brain.”
"So if an octopus is this smart,” one of our guests asked her keeper, “what other animals are out there that could be this smart—that we don’t think of as being sentient and having personality and memories and all those things?” An excellent question indeed.
[The following essay is by Sy Montgomery, taken from Sy Montgomery and
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’ new book Tamed and Untamed: Close Encounters of
the Animal Kind (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017) and is reprinted with
permission from the publisher.]
Everyone wanted to pet Octavia. And no wonder. She was beautiful, graceful
and affectionate. The fact that she was boneless, slimy, and living in
painfully cold, 47°F water deterred none of us.
What thrilled us—me, New England Aquarium volunteer Wilson Menashi, and four
visitors from the environmental radio show "Living on Earth"—was the
surprising fact that Octavia, who clearly wanted to be petted, was a giant
Pacific octopus.
When her keeper, Bill Murphy, opened the top of her exhibit, Octavia had
recognized Wilson and me immediately; we’d been working with her for several
weeks. Turning red with excitement, she flowed over toward us from the far
side of her tank. When we put our hands in the water, her arms rose to meet
ours, embracing us with dozens of her strong, sensitive, white suckers.
Occasionally Wilson handed her a fish from the plastic bucket perched on the
edge of her tank.
Soon the "Living on Earth" crew joined in. People were tentative at first. In
movies and stories, octopuses are portrayed as monsters, and the giant
Pacific is the largest and strongest of them all. A single sucker on a large
male can lift 30 pounds, and the animal has 1,600 of them. Octavia’s were
strong enough to leave hickeys on our arms. But she was so curious and
friendly that no one could resist the chance to touch her skin, which was
soft as custard. We stroked her much as we would a dog, enchanted with the
spectacle of her color-changing skin, the sensation of her suckers, the
acrobatics of her many arms.
Then, as Menashi reached for another capelin to feed her, we realized the
bucket of fish was gone.
While no fewer than six people were watching, and three of us had our arms
in her tank, Octavia had stolen the bucket right out from under us.
“Octopuses are phenomenally smart,” Menashi says. And he should know: He has
worked with them for twenty years and is expert in keeping these intelligent
invertebrates occupied. Otherwise, they become bored. Aquariums design
elaborate escape-proof lids for their octopus tanks, and still they are
often thwarted. Octopuses not infrequently slip out of their exhibits and
turn up in other tanks to eat the inhabitants. Many aquariums give their
octopuses Legos to dismantle, jars with lids to unscrew, and Mr. Potato
Heads to play with. Menashi, a retired inventor, designed a series of
nesting Plexiglas cubes, each with a different lock, which Boston’s
octopuses quickly learned to open to get at a tasty crab inside.
And just recently, aquarists at Kelly Tarlton’s Sea Life Aquarium in New
Zealand teamed up with Sony engineers to teach a female octopus named Rambo
to press the red shutter button on a waterproofed camera to take photos of
visitors, which the aquarium sells for $2 each to benefit its conservation
programs. Though there’s no evidence that Rambo realizes the end product of
her photography, she learned to work the gadget in just three attempts.
Intelligence so like our own may seem surprising in a creature so unlike us.
“Short of Martians showing up and offering themselves up to science,” says
neuroscientist Cliff Ragsdale of the University of Chicago, octopuses and
their kin “are the only example outside of vertebrates of how to build a
complex, clever brain.”
The octopus brain looks very different from a human’s. Our brain sits like a
nut in the shell of our skull. Octopuses lack bones of any kind, and their
brains wrap around the throat. Our brain is organized into four lobes.
Theirs has fifty to seventy-five lobes, depending on how you count them.
Most of our nerve cells are in our brain. Three-fifths of an octopus’s nerve
cells are in the arms.
The wonder is that octopuses and humans may think, in many ways, alike. We
both enjoy learning new things, solving puzzles, meeting new friends. And
possibly, we both enjoy a good joke: When Octavia stole the bucket, she
didn’t eat any of the fish in it. When we finally realized she had taken it,
we saw she had wrapped it in the webbing between her arms, as if she was
purposely hiding it from us. As long ago as the turn of the third century,
Roman naturalist Claudius Aelianus wrote of the octopus that “mischief and
craft are plainly seen to be the characteristics of this creature.” Perhaps
Octavia especially enjoyed her caper for having outwitted us humans.
“So if an octopus is this smart,” one of our guests asked her keeper,
“what other animals are out there that could be this smart—that we don’t
think of as being sentient and having personality and memories and all those
things?”
An excellent question indeed.
Sy Montgomery has written more than 20 books, including The Soul of
an Octopus (a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award
finalist), The Good Good Pig and Birdology.
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas' books include The Hidden Life of Dogs (a New York
Times bestseller), The Social Lives of Dogs and The Tribe of
Tiger.
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