CHAPTER THREE

Kali

The Fellowship of the Fishes

Octopuses are famous for showing up in places that surprise you. One giant Pacific octopus took up temporary residence in a pair of overalls in a shipwreck (and scared a diver half to death when the overalls rose up before him, writhing). Octopuses have turned up inside large conch shells and in scientists’ tiny oceanic measuring instruments. Red octopuses particularly like to den in stubby brown beer bottles.

But I never expected to find Bill’s new octopus in a pickle barrel in the sump.

On my way to visit Octavia, I had walked right past the sump, normally filled only with recirculating seawater, without noticing the barrel. The 55-gallon container’s screw top was fitted with a lid of fine mesh. Its sides had been drilled with hundreds of three-eighth-inch-diameter holes, through which the water of the sump could freely flow.

This is the only container in the aquarium Bill deemed sufficiently octopus-proof for a giant Pacific this small; her head and mantle combined are about the size of a small grapefruit.

Looking into the water of the sump, I can see the dark tips of the new octopus’s arms, fine as dental instruments, questing out from the barrel’s holes. She can extrude her arms almost like toothpaste. Already some six inches of arms are poking through three holes. 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.”

Bill determined her sex only two days ago. You can tell by looking at the tip of the third right arm. If the arm has suckers all the way to the tip, you have a female. If not, the appendage is referred to as the hectocotylized arm, and the animal is male. The reason it takes a while to tell is that octopuses won’t always let you examine this arm, especially the males. They tend to keep the tip—the ligula—balled up and protected, and for good reason: This is the specialized organ for placing the spermatophore inside the female. (But he doesn’t put it between her “legs,” or arms, because that’s where her beak is. He puts it in her mantle opening—or, as Aristotle explained it, he “has a sort of penis on one of his tentacles . . . which it admits into the nostril of a female.”)

At first, Bill admitted, he was a little disappointed about the new octopus’s sex. He was hoping for a boy. “Females can be feisty,” he explains. “Males are more easygoing.” They’re also, he says, easier to name: “Frank, Stewy, Steve—any name for a male octopus is funny. Naming females is more challenging.” He came up with the name Guinevere for his first octopus because he had been watching the movie King Arthur.

This little female, though, has already won Bill over. She was wild a week ago, and yet, by the time he unscrews the top and lifts the lid, she’s already at the surface, looking at the three of us curiously with limpid, slit-pupil eyes.

“What a darling little thing!” I cry.

“She is beautiful,” Wilson agrees.

“We like her,” Bill says, his smile crinkling the edge of his eyes.

Compared with Octavia and Athena, this octopus is an exquisite miniature. She is half the size Octavia was when she first arrived; though it is impossible to pinpoint the age of an octopus (growth rates depend on many variables, including water temperature), Bill estimates she may be younger than nine months. Her arms are less than a foot and a half long. She is a size, perhaps, I can finally get my mind around.

At first, she is a deep, rich chocolate color, except for a light spot on her head. As she looks at us, she turns a lighter brown, mottled with beige. Light stripes now curve down from her eyes toward where her nose would be, if she had a nose, like the “tear streaks” on a cheetah.

The reasons for an octopus’s color change are myriad. Of course, an octopus might change to match or blend with its surroundings and become invisible; it may also change to look like something other than an octopus (presumably something less tasty or more threatening). But other changes certainly reflect mood. Nobody has figured out what all the color changes mean. A few are known: A giant Pacific octopus who turns red is generally excited; a white one is relaxed. 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. A nervous octopus takes special care to disguise its head and especially its eyes, and can create a variety of spots, bars, and squiggles to confuse a predator. The small, deadly poisonous, blue ring octopus of Australia flashes dozens of electric-blue namesake rings all over its body when threatened. Another disguise is known as the eyebar display, in which an octopus makes a thick, dark line extend at the outer edge of the eye from either end of each slit pupil, masking the roundness that is typical of an eye. In Jennifer and Roland’s studies showing that octopuses recognize individual humans, they found that after only a few trials, when the octopuses saw one of the staff members who always touched them with a bristly stick, they would make the eyebar as soon as they saw that person approach. When approached by people who always fed them, they did not.

But the white spot on the new octopus’s head remains constant, even as our new octopus turns a deeper and more uniform brown again. Bill confirms that he has never seen her without this mark. Finally! A feature that stays the same on an octopus!

The spot reminds Bill of the bindi, the dot with which a lady decorates her forehead in India. So he named her Kali, after the dark-skinned, many-armed Hindu goddess of creative destruction. Like octopuses, the Hindu gods and goddesses are always changing form. When Kali takes the form of Prakriti, or Mother Nature, she dances upon the field of Consciousness (pictured as the supine body of her husband, Lord Shiva) with wild abandon. In other depictions, she wears a garland of skulls. Kali is a great name for this outgoing youngster, with her astonishing octopus powers and potentially destructive bent.

Wilson and I each offer her a finger, then a hand. She grips us gently with suckers of her two front arms.

“She’s going to be friendly,” says Wilson.

“Yes,” says Bill, “she’s going to be a good one.”

Kali arrived just in time. In my quest to get to know an octopus better, I had been looking into acquiring one of my own.

Haunting cephalopod forums like TONMO.com (The Octopus News Magazine Online) and surfing the web, I was enchanted with videos posted by doting octopus owners. Some pet octopuses were wonderfully interactive. One person posted a video of a California two-spot hopping, on rear arms, back and forth across the sandy bottom of the tank, wildly waving its front arms at the front of the tank—looking for all the world like an eager student desperate for the teacher to call on him. The owner wrote that the octopus often did this to entice him to play. 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 cartoons, with lots of movement and color. In their authoritative Cephalopods: Octopuses and Cuttlefishes for the Home Aquarium, King and her coauthor, Colin Dunlop, even suggest placing the tank in the same room as the TV, so owner and octopus can enjoy programs together.

But my husband was not enthused at the thought of an octopus in our house. In our nearly thirty years of marriage, he has successfully managed (so far) to fend off my getting snakes, iguanas, and tarantulas—as well as prevent me from keeping a red-tailed hawk for a falconry apprenticeship. He failed, however, to deflect a procession of other people’s unwanted parrots from moving in with us, and once bought me a baby cockatiel, whom we both adored. We also adopted our landlord’s cat, rescued two border collies, and raised baby chicks—in my home office, where they perched on my head and slept in my sweater. We even brought home a sick runt baby pig (who lived for fourteen years and grew to 750 pounds). My husband has loved them all, but his patience is often tested when I disappear into some jungle for weeks or months to research a book, and he’s left with animals who invariably choose that moment to run away, try to kill each other, destroy their pens, roll in something, or throw up on the bed. Now an octopus?

When I brought up the subject, he replied, “Tell me this is a bad dream.”

Expense aside—and it would cost thousands of dollars for the setup, food, and the octopus itself—there were logistical issues. Even for a small species like the Caribbean reef octopus, I would want a tank capable of holding 100 gallons of water. This would weigh at least 1,000 pounds—as much as a moose. And like a moose, its weight might collapse the floor of our 150-year-old farmhouse. Too, old houses like ours suffer from an insufficiency of electrical outlets, and a good saltwater aquarium tank needs several to run its complex life-support system: three kinds of filters, an aerator, and a heater to keep the water at the temperature that small tropical octopuses need, typically about 77° to 82°F.

In our neck of the woods, electricity itself is sometimes in short supply. We have frequent power outages, which last from minutes to days (in December 2008, after an ice storm, we had no electricity for a week), and even a relatively short period without filtration and heat can doom a tank and its occupants—especially if your octopus inks in alarm, which can poison the water, including the octopus itself.

Then there was the problem of proper water and food for an octopus. Natural seawater has more than seventy elements dissolved in it. The chemistry of the water must be exactly right for an octopus. Any trace of copper, for instance, will kill it. And while an adult octopus will eat dead, frozen food, a very young one—which is what I would want, since the smaller species’ life spans are even shorter than a giant Pacific’s—needs live food. Since the nearest ocean is a two-and-a-half-hour drive from our house, I would need to raise the baby octopus’s prey, amphipods and mysid shrimp, which would require their own separate aquarium setup.

Finally, if I had to travel (and I already had a research trip to Namibia scheduled that summer), my husband would end up with the perilous responsibility for the delicate octopus. In fact, 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 her stitches.

In the end, I decided that, as great as a personal home octopus might be, it would be too risky for both the octopus and my marriage. Besides, despite the long drive, I loved going to the aquarium. There, too, I had the benefit of being surrounded by experts—people whose observations would enrich and inform my own, people whom I now increasingly missed between visits. My plan, once I returned from Namibia, was to make more frequent trips to Boston to regularly observe Kali’s growth and development. Wilson generously agreed to coordinate his schedule with mine. The week following my return from Africa, we inaugurated what we came to call our Wonderful Wednesdays, and dedicated this day each week to octopus observation. This provided an education both broader and deeper than I could have imagined, and sealed my connection not only with Kali but with the people who grew to love her just as much as I did—people who would become increasingly important in my life.

The next time I visit Kali, a small gaggle of staff and volunteers is already hanging around the sump as if gathered round the office coffeemaker. Except instead of sipping a hot beverage, they are dangling their hands casually in the freezing salt water, in order to hold hands with an octopus.

It’s hard to imagine that Kali does not extrude her arms from the holes hoping for exactly this. In just two weeks, she has grown bigger, stronger, and more curious.

“She’s bored,” says Wilson as he unscrews the top of the barrel. She is already waiting for us at the top. “Correction,” says Wilson, as she reaches up to taste his arm, “she was bored—she’s not now!”

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. And she wants to see as well as taste us. As her arms snake up over ours into the air, she lifts her head and eyes out of the water to look at us.

The slits of her pupils always remains horizontal, no matter what position she is in, cued by balance receptors called statocysts. These saclike structures are lined with sensory hairs and equipped with small, mineralized balls that shift inside the statocyst in response to motion and gravity. But the always-horizontal pupil can change dramatically in thickness. Under the bright light, you would think her pupils would be small, but now they are opened wide, like a person’s when excited or in love.

Wilson hands her a fish—but she passes it away from her mouth. I find this astonishing in a rapidly growing young animal. Apparently her appetite for food is exceeded by her appetite for interaction. Kali wants to climb up our arms. Her glistening, muscular arm tips curl up over my forearm and my elbow and touch the cotton fabric of my shirtsleeve. Gently we pry away her suckers and urge her back into the water, but she grips us anew.

After a few minutes, Wilson breaks off the interaction. He doesn’t want to overstimulate her. “She’s still a baby,” he says. “Let her rest.”

Bill, who has been tending the feather duster worms (which take their name from the beautiful clusters of branched tentacles on their heads), tells us Kali recently entertained international visitors. The aquarium had hosted some staff members from the Beijing Aquarium. They were astonished to get a chance to touch an octopus, and even more astonished to find Kali so friendly. “They believed octopuses were very dangerous,” said Bill.

Sea creatures in general evoke an irrational fear in many people, he has noticed. It’s true that many of the creatures Bill cares for are venomous or have sharp teeth or poisonous spines. Yet all of the many scars on his long arms, he tells us, are from tubes, glass, and tools. “A screwdriver is more likely to draw blood from me than any of my animals,” he says, laughing. “Yes, octopuses can bite. Yes, they can do damage. But people have a big fear of them, way out of proportion.”

It’s only relatively recently in the New England Aquarium’s forty-year history that anyone dared interact with the octopus. Wilson tells me, “Fifteen years ago, nobody would go near the octopus.”

Boston’s aquarium was one of the first in the nation 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. With the exception of seals and sea lions (and of course the green sea turtle, Myrtle, who wouldn’t stand for a brush-off), the policy of mirroring nature seemed to preclude much human interaction with the fish, reptiles, and invertebrates.

At lunch, Wilson and Scott tell me about the transformation that took place—one that was part of a quiet revolution throughout zoos and aquariums and profoundly changed the relationships between people and the exotic animals in their care.

“It began with Marion,” Wilson remembers. “Marion was magnificent.”

“Do you mean Marion anaconda or Marion Fish?” asks Scott.

Marion Fish—that really was her last name—had come first. After retiring following twenty-six years working as a surgical trauma nurse, in 1998 she started volunteering on Wednesdays and got to know every animal she cared for personally. She named each fish. And with remarkable accuracy, she could read their moods.

“She and I were sitting here with the octopus one day,” Wilson remembers, “and Marion said, ‘You know, that octopus needs something to do.’ ” The idea of “enrichment”—of providing physical and mental stimulation for zoo animals—was relatively new at the time, even for chimps and tigers. It was unknown for fish and invertebrates. Direct contact with keepers was not part of the aquarium’s plan. “Back then, the others were afraid of touching the octopus, afraid that touching the octopus would hurt it,” Wilson tells me. “But we said to hell with it. The octopus is bored! Then we started playing with it.” Soon Marion and Wilson were regularly opening the tank to stroke the octopus and let the octopus suck on their arms. It was clear the animal enjoyed the interaction, and maybe even looked forward to the next encounter. “Then we gave it things to play with—whatever was at hand. Tubes, things like that. That was the start of everything,” Wilson says. “Then I built the locking cubes.”

Marion Fish left the aquarium in 2003, after a heart attack, and Scott and Wilson lost track of her. But in 2007, another Marion appeared at the aquarium—a young woman whose influence was equally profound. Marion Britt further demonstrated the positive power of interesting, gentle, loving interaction between keepers and the animals in their care. And she did it by directly handling the most fearsome animals in the aquarium—the 13-foot-long, 300-pound anacondas.

“Before Marion,” says Wilson, “nobody would go into the tank with the anacondas.” That sounded pretty reasonable to me. South America’s top predators, anacondas readily hunt and kill adult deer, as well as 130-pound capybaras, and have been known to eat jaguars. I happen to have met one of the best-known biologists studying anacondas, Jesus Rivas, who has documented two predatory attacks by these powerful constricting snakes on his assistants in the field. Humans “are well within the predator-to-prey ratio” of anacondas, who can grow to 30 feet, he said. The only reason anacondas don’t attack humans more often is that, other than Rivas and his field team, people don’t venture where they know anacondas are found.

But Marion did. When she started at the aquarium as a twenty-four-year-old intern in Scott’s gallery in 2007, there were three anacondas—whom nobody could safely touch. “We had to restrain the snakes whenever we handled them,” Scott tells me. “We grabbed them behind the head. They hated it.” By the time Marion stopped working at the aquarium, the two larger anacondas, Kathleen and Ashley, would slither up to her and curl up with their heads in her lap.

And now, thanks to Marion, no more are snakes traumatized by head restraint whenever they need to be moved from their tank for their yearly veterinary checkup, or to treat an illness, or when the tank needs to be drained. The staff no longer dreads interacting with them.

Clearly, the snakes are happier and healthier for it. The proof: Both females (the third, smaller snake, named Orange, turned out to be male) gave birth—the first time any anaconda in a Boston zoo or aquarium had done so. The soft eggs hatch inside the mother’s body, and Marion was actually in the exhibit in her wet suit while Kathleen’s seventeen babies were born. Since Marion handled all the baby snakes from both mothers since infancy, the offspring now on display, named Marion and Wilson (both female), don’t need head restraint, either. With a little urging, they voluntarily submit to handling. The rest of the staff has also learned to recognize when the snakes are not in the mood to be handled, and back off at these times to try another day.

Marion had to leave the aquarium in February 2011 to have surgery, and because of surgical complications, hadn’t returned. But the impact of her work has lasted. The sight of a slender young woman sitting in the anaconda exhibit with a 13-foot-long, predatory reptile snuggling in her lap, the tip of a tail coiled lovingly around one leg, provided dramatic evidence of what Scott and Wilson already knew: “Just about every animal,” Scott says—not just mammals and birds—“can learn, recognize individuals, and respond to empathy.” Once you find the right way to work with an animal, be it an octopus or an anaconda, together, you can accomplish what even Saint Francis might have considered a miracle.

Like Scott’s latest project: training the Suriname toads.

Not only are these animals amphibians—with much less brain to work with than the anacondas—but they are also blind. Their blindness has sculpted their unique appearance: At the head of the toad’s six-inch, flattened brown body are two nostrils, each set at the end of a long, narrow tube. The front limbs have star-shaped tactile organs on the fingertips to help the animals detect food.

Male Suriname toads call to their mates by clicking underwater, and the couple swim together in a series of circular loops while the female lays her eggs on the male’s belly; the male fertilizes them and then rolls the eggs into pouches on the female’s back. There the female’s skin actually encloses the fertilized eggs to protect them. 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.

Alas, the public seldom gets to see these exotic toads because the animals hide in the vegetation in their pretty, naturalistic exhibit. As he did with the electric eels, Scott is trying to figure out a way to induce the toads to show themselves.

How? “You need to get within the mind of the toad,” he says. “We’re engaged in toad psy-ops.” How does a blind toad decide what is a safe, good place to stay—and how does he find it? “You get to learn very fast,” Scott says. “You learn to project empathy. Remember the movie E.T.? It’s kind of like that. You reach out with an invisible hand and read the organism. You have to meet them halfway. You have to be willing to listen.”

Many of us respond without thinking to the angle of a horse’s ears, or the position of a dog’s tail, or the expression in a cat’s eyes. Aquarists learn the silent language of fishes. Once, walking into a hallway behind the scenes where some cichlids had just been moved from one tank to another, Scott had announced to me with concern, “I smell fish stress.” The scent is subtle—I cannot smell it at all—but the low-tide odor Scott detects, he explained at the time, is that of heat-shock proteins. These are intracellular proteins that were first discovered to be released, in both plants and animals, in response to heat, and are now known to be associated with other stresses as well. The scent makes Scott feel sick to his stomach—not because the smell is nauseating, but because the thought that fish in his care are stressed fills him with the same urgency and dread he used to feel when his newborn sons would cry.

Scott reads other fish cues just as fluently. When we visited the cichlids in their new home, he compared those who had just been moved to those who had been living there for weeks or months. The stripes on the new immigrants were paler. “And look at this one,” he said, pointing to a fish who was already at home in the tank. “See the sparkle in the eye? Now look at this other one. You don’t see the sparkle.” Scott can read the faces of fishes as easily as you or I read a person’s.

“The problem with reading octopuses,” I say as we walk back to the aquarium, “is that they are too expressive”—much more than any species I’d ever known. “We have our poetry and dance and music and literature. But even with our voices and costumes and paintbrushes and clay and technologies, can we ever come close to expressing what an octopus can say with its skin alone?”

“You’re right,” says Scott. “Imagine the road rage if cephalopods could drive on the Southeast Expressway!”

That afternoon, when Wilson opens her barrel, Kali bobs to the surface. Her eyes swivel, seeking our faces. We give her our arms and she embraces them. She’s a dark reddish brown now, except for the webbing between her arms, which is flecked with lichen-like green. Wilson gives her two more fish, which she eagerly accepts. She holds us gently with her suckers as she lets us stroke her head between her eyes. “Nothing else I have ever touched is this soft,” I say to Wilson. “Not a kitten’s fur, not a chick’s down. Nothing is more lovely than this. I could do this all day.”

“Yes,” Wilson replies, without a trace of sarcasm, “I think you could.”

The bliss of stroking an octopus’s head is difficult to convey to most people, even to animal lovers. When, back home in New Hampshire, during our walks with our dogs in the woods, I rhapsodized to my friend Jody, I could tell she was trying hard not to conclude I had gone insane.

“But,” she asked, “aren’t they slimy? I mean, what about the slime?”

It might be more appealing to describe octopuses as slippery. But a banana peel is slippery; slime is a very specialized and essential substance, and there’s no denying that octopuses have slime in spades. Almost everyone who lives in the water does. “More of the ocean’s residents use, deploy, or are made up of slime than I ever expected,” marine scientist Ellen Prager observes. “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. Tube worms like Bill’s feather dusters secrete slime to build a leathery tube, like a flower stalk, to protect their bodies and keep them attached to a rock or coral. For some fishes—Scott’s Amazon discus and cichlids among them—slime is the piscine equivalent of mother’s milk. The babies actually feed off the parents’ nutritious slime coat, an activity called “glancing.” The brightly colored mandarin fish exudes bad-tasting slime to deflect its enemies; the deep-sea vampire squid, an octopus relative, produces glowing slime to startle predators. 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.

“Kali’s and Octavia’s slime isn’t bad,” I told Jody. “Anyway, they’re way less slimy than a hagfish.”

A 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 mucous, 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.

“Gross!” Jody cried. “That’s so disgusting!” But then she asked me to tell her more about Kali and Octavia’s now modest-seeming 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 surprisingly 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 order to visit different tide pools for better hunting. They may also do this to escape predators in the water, such as another octopus. I had read that in areas blessed by constant ocean spray, an octopus might be able to survive out of water for thirty minutes or more.

“Slime doesn’t wreck anything,” I explained to Jody. “After all,” I reminded her, “slime is part of the two greatest pleasurable experiences known to humankind.”

She thought for a moment.

“What’s the other one?” she asked.

“Eating,” I replied.

“CEPHALOPARTY!” Brendan Walsh’s deep voice booms over the hum of the pumps and the heavy metal music playing on the radio. Brendan, thirty-four, tall and burly, works at the aquarium’s IMAX theater. Then he goes home to tend to his fish tanks. Right now, he says he has “only” five; he used to have twenty.

He’s part of a growing crowd standing around Kali’s barrel, waiting for Wilson to open the top so we can play with her. At the aquarium I have joined a cadre of colleagues for whom octopus slime serves as a social lubricant.

Here, too, is Christa Carceo, twenty-five, pretty and petite, with dark hair falling in loose curls down her back, a tiny black jewel perched on its stud above her upper lip, and a smile that lights up the room. “Growing up,” she tells me, “other girls had dolls. I had fish.” She started with a one-gallon bowl with goldfish, then added bettas, then tetras, guppies, and snails, until she had ten tanks. “You’d go to my room,” she says, “all you’d hear is humming.” Christa just started volunteering one day a week with Scott in the Freshwater Gallery. She’s working as a bartender to pay off her college loans. But what she would really love to do is work at the aquarium.

Marion Britt, the anaconda tamer, returning to the aquarium for the first time since her surgery, has joined our Wonderful Wednesdays, too. With hazel eyes and soft, brown, shoulder-length hair, she has a gentle manner that belies a razor-sharp intelligence, which she applies to her many endeavors, whether devising the first “spot maps” enabling the keepers to tell baby anacondas apart (she sketched their distinctive patterns on pre-drawn forms while holding the foot-long newborns as they bit her) or growing a new exotic yarn business, Purple Okapi, that she can run, despite persistent migraines caused by her surgery, from home.

Today, I also meet Anna Magill-Dohan, who has just completed her sophomore year of high school. Short and small, her dark hair pulled back in a careless ponytail, she has been volunteering at the aquarium for the past two years. During the summer, she puts in four days a week. She has had fish tanks since she got her first as a present at age two. “After that,” she tells me, “I kept getting tanks. My parents said no more tanks, but I would just get them and not tell them.” Finally she got a pet flounder and her mother found out. As punishment—and here I feared a frying pan would enter the picture, but no—her mother, an elementary school teacher, decreed that she, not Anna, would name the fish. (She named him “Floundie.”)

In addition to the usual crowd around Kali’s barrel, two aquarium educators have joined us, and Brendan has brought his girlfriend as well. “This is a record,” says Wilson. In all, Kali has nine visitors today—more than she has arms for. No other octopus he has known has had this big a backstage fan club.

Though she’s never seen this many people before, Kali proves a perfect hostess. She tugs playfully at each arm, looks into our faces, and accepts fish and squid gracefully.

“Wow!” the educators say when Kali’s suckers grip their fingers. “Awesome!” whispers Brendan’s girlfriend, as a slippery arm coils up to taste her hand.

Around her barrel, we’re not only getting to know Kali, and getting her to know us; we are getting to know each other. And for most of us, there is no better way to get to know a person than while petting an octopus. While interacting with Kali, Christa told us about her twin, whose favorite animal is the octopus. Danny has pervasive developmental disorder—a broad diagnostic category for significant, sometimes disabling delay in acquiring basic skills. Christa is working to get legal custody of Danny. Not because her parents, living in nearby Methuen, don’t want custody, or because Danny is unhappy there. Vivacious, beautiful Christa wants custody of Danny because, she said, “I can’t imagine living without my brother. He wakes up happy every day!”

Danny so loves octopuses that when they go to the aquarium together, he narrates to Christa with great excitement every move the animal makes. “Now she’s going up! Now she’s moving her arm!” Once Christa took Danny to a fish market in Boston, and he was upset to find octopus for sale for food. But the carcasses of the slain cephalopods so fascinated him that she eventually bought him one as a present. He keeps it in the freezer and periodically takes it out to look at it.

Thanks to Octavia and Kali, I have begun to learn more about Wilson and his family, too. Born to Jewish Iraqi parents in Rasht, Iran, he grew up attending an American-style Presbyterian mission school in a Persian state, and, at an early age, learned to slip quietly between cultures. When he was sixteen, he went to boarding school in England, and then on to the University of London to study chemistry. He came to America (he remembers the date: January 3, 1957) to study chemical engineering at Columbia University in New York, and moved to Boston to join the Arthur D. Little Corp. There he met his wife, Debbie, a forward-thinking, independent-minded social worker, whose mother was born on the Russian/Polish border and whose dad was American. A year and a half later, Debbie announced that they were going to get married. Wilson instantly agreed. But his conservative, widowed mother was so mortified that Wilson had chosen a woman not of Iraqi Jewish ancestry that she flew to America to try to dissuade him.

Wilson was used to being misunderstood. In a world that demands conformity, in a culture that values animals little, and aquatic animals least of all, we all were. Perhaps that’s what helped us bond around a barrel containing a slimy invertebrate that most people considered a monster.

Relatively few people understand, for instance, why Marion would even go into an exhibit filled with giant constricting snakes. “Do you think they know you?” people would ask. Of course the snakes knew her, and liked her. And she loved them. Marion wept when Ashley died in summer 2011. Scott understood her feelings perfectly; the moment he’d gotten the call, at 4 a.m. on New Year’s Day, that Ashley had given birth, Scott had left his baby son, born just five days before, to rush to the aquarium and tend to the newborn anacondas.

Anna, like all teenagers, feels misunderstood, too. Though a twin, like Christa, Anna is nothing like her athletic, outgoing brother. Extremely smart and forthright, she tells us unabashedly that she is enrolled in a “special” school; that she has Asperger’s syndrome, a mild form of autism; that she suffers from migraines, attention deficit disorder, low blood pressure (which once caused her to faint in the anaconda tank), and a tremor; and that she’s on various medications. At home, her fish, plus her blue-tongued skink, Laila, help her find some peace; but it wasn’t until she started volunteering at the aquarium that she felt truly whole.

“Going behind the scenes at the aquarium changed my life,” Anna tells us as we stroke Kali. Before and after sixth grade, Anna spent part of her summers at “fish camp” at the aquarium. Then when she was fourteen, she started taking an art class on Saturdays, and after class would take the T to spend the rest of the day at the aquarium. Dave Wedge, the bearded, outgoing former high school teacher who runs the Edge of the Sea exhibit and the Education Center’s Wet Lab, recognized her from fish camp and invited her to see his lab. He told her to meet him in an hour. But Anna had no sense of time and did not own, and could not read, an analog watch. So she waited outside the door to the Wet Lab for an hour—in the pouring rain. Dave was so impressed that, even though Anna was too young to be an official volunteer, he started finding things for her to do behind the scenes.

Now an official volunteer, Anna not only has a digital watch (and knows how to read it), but she also knows the common and Latin names for every marine vertebrate and invertebrate in the aquarium. She apologizes that she hasn’t memorized all the ones in Freshwater yet.

“The people here are as different from regular people as an octopus. I feel at home here,” Anna says, speaking for all of us, “like I belong.”

Belonging to a group is one of humankind’s deepest desires. We’re a social species, like our primate ancestors. Evolutionary biologists suggest that keeping track of our many social relationships over our long lives was one of the factors driving the evolution of the human brain. In fact, intelligence itself is most often associated with similarly social and long-lived creatures, like chimps, elephants, parrots, and whales.

But octopuses represent the opposite end of this spectrum. They are famously short-lived, and most do not appear to be social. There are intriguing exceptions: Male and female lesser Pacific striped octopuses, for instance, sometimes cohabit in pairs, sharing a single den. Groups of these octopuses may live in associations of forty or more animals—a fact so unexpected that it was disbelieved and unpublished for thirty years, until Richard Ross of the Steinhart Aquarium recently raised the long-forgotten species in his home lab. But the giant Pacific, at least, is thought to seek company only at the end of its life, to mate. And even that is an iffy proposition, as one known outcome is the literal dinner date, when one octopus eats the other. If not to interact with fellow octopuses, what is their intelligence for? If octopuses don’t interact with each other, why would they want to interact with us?

Jennifer, the octopus psychologist, says, “The same thing that got them their smarts isn’t the same thing that got us our smarts.” Octopus and human intelligence evolved separately and for different reasons. She believes the event driving the octopus toward intelligence was the loss of the ancestral shell. Losing the shell freed the animal for mobility. An octopus, unlike a clam, does not have to wait for food to find it; the octopus can hunt like a tiger. And while most octopuses love crab best, a single octopus may hunt many dozens of different prey species, each of which demands a different hunting strategy, a different skill set, a different set of decisions to make and modify. Will you camouflage yourself for a stalk-and-ambush attack? Shoot through the sea with your siphon for a quick chase? Crawl out of the water to capture escaping prey?

Losing the shell entailed a trade-off: Now that the animal is “a big packet of unprotected protein,” as one researcher put it, just about anything big enough to eat it will do so. Octopuses are well aware of their vulnerability and make plans to protect themselves. Jennifer saw this clearly when she was watching a common octopus in Bermuda on an expedition in the 1980s. Returning home from a hunting expedition, the octopus was clearing the front of the den with its arms. Then, suddenly, it left the den, crawled a meter away, picked up a rock, and placed it in front of the den. Two minutes later, the octopus ventured forth again to select a second rock, and then a third. Attaching its suckers to both rocks, it lugged the load home, slid through its den opening, and then carefully arranged the rocks in front of the lair like a stone fortress in front of a castle. What the octopus was thinking seemed obvious, Jennifer said: “ ‘Three rocks are enough. Good night!’ ” Now it felt safe enough to go to sleep.

In 2009, researchers in Indonesia documented octopuses that were carrying around pairs of half coconut shells, which they used as portable Quonset huts. With obvious effort, the octopuses would lug the shell halves, nested one inside the other, beneath their bodies as they walked stiff-armed across the sandy bottom, then assemble the half shells into a sphere and climb inside. At the Middlebury octopus lab, assistant animal caretaker Caroline Clarkson noticed another instance of tool use. A sea urchin was feeding too near the entrance of the den belonging to a female California two-spot. So the octopus ventured out of her lair to pick up a 3.5 by 3.5-inch piece of flat slate lying six inches away and dragged it back to the den, where she erected it like a shield to protect herself from the urchin’s spines.

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 for so many possibilities? Doing so demands, to some degree, anticipating the actions—in other words, imagining the minds—of other individuals.

The ability to ascribe thoughts to others, thoughts that might differ from our own, is a sophisticated cognitive skill, known as “theory of mind.” Once it was thought to be unique to humans. In typical children, theory of mind is believed to emerge around age three or four. The classic experiment goes like this: A toddler views a video of a girl who leaves a box of candy behind in her room. While she’s gone, an adult replaces the candy in the box with pencils. Now the child comes back to open up her box again. The experimenter asks the tot, what does the little girl expect to find in the box? The toddler will say: pencils. Only an older child will understand that the little girl would expect to find candy, even though that’s not what’s really there.

Theory of mind is considered an important component of consciousness, because it implies self-awareness. (I think this, but you might think that.) Dr. Brian Hare, director of the Duke Canine Cognition Center, recently demonstrated that dogs understand that others might have knowledge that they do not possess. As an experiment, he presented dogs with two smell-proof containers, one with food, one without. The dogs quickly figured out that the people knew what they did not, and would follow a human’s pointing finger to the hidden treats.

This is precisely what Nancy King’s octopus, Ollie, was doing when she followed her finger to discover the crab she couldn’t find by herself.

Of course, there are many other examples. The birds of prey with whom falconers hunt look to the falconer, or to her dogs, to flush game. African honey badgers follow certain birds (known as honey guides) to find bees’ nests. Both parties seem to realize that when badgers open up the nests to eat the honey, the birds can then feast on the bee larvae.

But of all the creatures on the planet who imagine what is in another creature’s mind, the one that must do so best might well be the octopus—because without this ability, the octopus could not perpetrate its many self-preserving deceptions. An octopus must convince many species of predators and prey that it is really something else. Look! I’m a blob of ink. No, I’m a coral. No, I’m a rock! The octopus must assess whether the other animal believes its ruse or not, and if not, try something different. In Jennifer’s book, she and her coauthors report that specific displays are directed at particular species under specific conditions. The Passing Cloud display, for instance, is used by an octopus to scare an immobile crab into moving and thus giving itself away. But to fool a hungry fish, an octopus is more likely to use a different strategy: to rapidly change color, pattern, and shape. Most fish have excellent visual memories for particular search images, but if the octopus changes from dark to pale, jets away, and then turns on stripes or spots, the fish can’t keep track of it.

To survive long enough to meet us at the New England Aquarium, Kali may have met and matched wits with many different species of bird, whale, seal, sea lion, shark, crab, fish, and turtle, as well as other octopuses and human divers—all with different kinds of eyes, different lifestyles, different senses, different motives, different personalities, and different moods. Compared with most people, whose daily lives involve direct interaction with only one species, Kali is a cosmopolitan sophisticate, and we are small-town bumpkins.

And right now, she’s working the crowd. Kali is curious about her company—and what is more endearing than someone showing interest in you? She explores Brendan and his girlfriend with the tip of her second left arm while she investigates the two educators by folding a sucker around their fingertips. She flips upside down, unfurling the creamy suckers on her arms like a blooming flower. Christa, Anna, Marion, and I offer our hands and forearms; she attaches her suckers and pulls gently, seemingly playful. Her skin mottles; she creates thorns and horns; she pulls her head up and lets me pet it again, now going white beneath my touch. Her eye rolls. She is looking for Wilson. She finds his face, and two of her arms rise up and envelop his arm like two slices of bread around sandwich filling.

Bill, watching the scene from behind us, is delighted. Kali is active, interested, friendly, and outgoing. “She’s going to be a wonderful octopus for display,” he says proudly.

Even though it’s not a Wednesday, Wilson and I have made a special trip to the aquarium. Today we are celebrating Christa and Danny’s birthday. With the cooperation of Bill and Scott, we’re here to share Christa’s surprise for her brother.

Last night, Danny took the bus from their parents’ home in Methuen to Christa’s apartment in Boston. At 11:15 a.m. Wilson and I are waiting, ready for Christa to bring her brother behind the scenes on the third floor.

“He was always reading encyclopedias,” she boasts. “My sister and I would glance at them, but he would read them. My mother ended up getting a lot of encyclopedias,” she said. Danny’s favorite entry, since he was thirteen, was the octopus. What about octopuses most fascinates him? “Their appearance,” he says. “How smart they are. They’re covered with suction cups!”

Last night, Christa says, she read my article in Orion to Danny. She whispers conspiratorially to me, “He said, ‘Can you imagine getting to touch an octopus?’ ” All he knew yesterday about today’s plan was that they were going to the aquarium together. “So we’ll see the octopus today,” he had said to her this morning. “It’s going to be a good day.”

He has no idea what we have in store.

Wilson leads Danny over to Octavia’s tank. “Guess whose tank this is?” Christa asks him.

Danny’s eyes widen. “The Big O?”

Wilson attempts to attract Octavia, proffering a fish in the tongs. Christa, Danny, and I rush downstairs to the public viewing area to see how Octavia reacts. Danny waves at her through the glass. Octavia ignores the tongs at first. Finally she grabs them with two arms, three arms—and turns bright red. The fish drops. She doesn’t want to eat. She lets go of the tongs and Wilson withdraws them.

Wilson appears in front of the tank with us. “Did he see that?”

“That was amazing!” says Danny. That was surprise enough for him. But then we go back upstairs and stand by Kali’s pickle barrel. Wilson starts unscrewing the lid.

“Hey, Danny, check this out,” Christa says as Kali, dark reddish brown, floats to the surface.

“I always thought there was just one octopus in this place!” Danny says. Wilson extends his hand and Kali covers it with her suckers.

Danny begins to shake with excitement. “Here, give her a fish,” Wilson says to him. “Put it in the sucker and let her take it,” he urges.

Danny holds the fish, but he is leery at first. “I think she’s grabbing!”

“Let it go—let her take it,” says Wilson. “She won’t hurt you. Put your hand in the water!”

Kali’s head and three of her arms are now out of the water, coming up over the edge of the tank: She is eager to greet us. We’re all petting her and urging Danny to do the same. But he’s frightened. He pokes at a single sucker with one finger and withdraws, shaking. He can’t help it: Later he tells me he was thinking of a TV show in which he saw an octopus as big as a building attacking people.

Suddenly, a fountain of water gushes up from the barrel. “That’s her saying hi to you!” says Christa. This is followed by another gusher, and then a much taller spout—hosing Danny right in the face.

This doesn’t bother him a bit. He looks no more or less dazed than he did before. He is in the dazzling presence of an octopus, thrilling and frightening at the same time.

Dripping, Danny reaches a finger out to touch one of Kali’s suckers.

“I do have a frozen octopus in my freezer,” he says to me, “but that one’s dead.”

Kali starts to heave her gelatinous mass out of the tank toward us. “Here she comes!” says Christa. Wilson and I try to urge some of her arms back in the water. Kali attaches her suckers to our arms. “She’s much more eager to touch me than him,” Wilson says to me. “It’s the nervousness. She can feel his nervousness. I’ve never seen it more clearly than that.”

“If you were a crab or a fish,” Wilson tells Danny, “she’d move you all the way down to her mouth. But you’re a human so she won’t.” Instead he hands Danny another fish. “Let it go. She’ll take it.”

And she does.

“Oh, this is awesome!” says Danny. He waves at her, wiggling the fingers of his left hand.

And now he feels safe enough to give her his hand. Kali gently attaches five suckers, then ten, and now perhaps twenty to the palm of his hand. “She feels like a rubber glove!” Danny says.

“His nervousness is decreasing and she’s more willing to interact,” says Wilson. “She has much more awareness of us than we do of her.”

“I think she really likes me!” Danny says to us, astonished.

“Her name is Kali,” Christa says.

“Hi, Kali,” Danny says, as if to a person. She is moving, sucker by sucker, up the side of the pickle barrel, rolling forward like a Slinky.

But now Wilson feels we might be in danger of exhausting her. He puts the top back on.

Danny is starstruck. “I petted a live octopus at the aquarium!” he cries. “Wow, that was adventurous! I can’t wait to tell my parents! She liked me, too!”

And there’s more. Now Wilson brings out a jar and removes the blue surgical glove covering the top. Inside, about an inch long, black, chitinous, and in two interlocking, curved pieces, is one of Wilson’s prize possessions.

“Do you know what this is?” he asks Danny.

“A shell?”

“No—”

Danny remembers a picture from the encyclopedia. “It looks like an octopus beak!”

“This was the beak of a very old octopus,” says Wilson. It was George’s beak. “And it’s for you.”

Danny is stunned.

“What do you think?” asks Christa.

“It came from a real octopus!”

Wilson has brought another gift for Danny from his collection: a mounted photo of George by photographer Jeffrey Tillman. “I’ll put it in my room,” says Danny, awed. “All I have to do is put in a nail. I’ll put it right by my bed.”

Danny and Christa and I will spend the rest of our day together at the aquarium, but Wilson has to leave early. He got the call earlier this morning: There is a bed for his wife in a nearby hospice. If she is going to take it, she must move today. The doctors still don’t understand what is wrong with her, only that her self and her strength are ebbing away, and there seems no stopping it. Wilson’s afternoon will be spent getting his wife, with whom he’s traveled the world, ready for her final journey. He is making plans himself to move from their large, beautiful home, with its huge kitchen with tiles around the stove and many bedrooms for visiting guests and grandchildren and Debbie’s home office. Preparing to move to a smaller place, Wilson is giving away treasures—he has given Christa and Marion and me coral and shells and books, and donated large specimens to the aquarium. And yet, in the face of looming tragedy, Wilson has chosen to be with us this morning, celebrating the birthdays of these two young, happy people.

He has managed to make this day a good one—a miracle of sorts. And who better to preside over such a miracle than an octopus, wielder of otherworldly powers—an octopus named after Kali, the goddess of creative destruction, the deity embodying the opposites of kindness and cruelty, sorrow and joy?

A bright summer afternoon in Boston: Outside, park rangers in hats answer questions about the whale watch and harbor view cruises, happy children and parents spin and shout on the merry-go-round on the Common, while grownups crowd Faneuil Hall eating soft pretzels and ice cream. Inside the aquarium, Anna is assisting Scott, Christa is distributing black worms, and Bill is feeding the endangered freshwater turtles, red-bellied cooters whom he is raising for the state of Massachusetts for release. Wilson and I are with Kali, who has finished eating her squid. Still upside down, she lingers at the surface. She holds one of my fingertips in one of her suckers and squeezes it periodically, like you’d squeeze a hand you were already holding. One of her arms encircles Wilson’s wrist; another holds his other hand and forearm. I reach with my free hand to her head and begin to stroke her.

From all appearances, the three of us are as languid as the summer day, as if time has eddied in its flow and we have escaped the confines of clock and calendar, and perhaps even species. “If someone came upon us now,” I say to Wilson, “they might think we’re members of some strange religious cult.”

“Cult of the octopus?” Wilson chuckles softly.

“The route to peace and ecstasy,” I answer.

“Yes,” says Wilson, his voice soft as a lullaby. “This is very peaceful.”

While stroking an octopus, it is easy to fall into reverie. To share such a moment of deep tranquility with another being, especially one as different from us as the octopus, is a humbling privilege. It’s a shared sweetness, a gentle miracle, an uplink to universal consciousness—the notion, first advanced by pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Anaxagoras in 480 BC, of sharing an intelligence that animates and organizes all life. The idea of universal consciousness suffuses both Western and Eastern thought and philosophy, from the “collective unconscious” of psychologist Carl Jung, to unified field theory, to the investigations of the Institute of Noetic Sciences founded by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell in 1973. 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.” Who would know more about the infinite, eternal ocean than an octopus? And what could be more deeply calming than being cradled in its arms, surrounded by the water from which life itself arose? As Wilson and I pet Kali’s soft head on this summer afternoon, I think of Paul the Apostle’s letter to the Philippians about the power of the “peace that passeth understanding . . .”

And then—SPLASH!—we’re hosed.

Kali’s funnel, less than an inch in diameter, manages to hit us both at once, soaking our faces, our hair, our shirts, and our pants with 47°F salt water.

“Why . . . ?!” I sputter. “Is she mad at us?”

“That was not aggression,” says Wilson. We both lean over the barrel and see she has sunk to the bottom, from where she looks up at us innocently. “That was playful,” he says. “Remember, they are all individuals.” We put our hands right back in. But she doesn’t attach her suckers right away. Instead, she points her funnel at us, like a kid aiming a squirt gun. I’m not fast enough to dodge it, but I can’t help watching to see what she does next. She rises so that her head now lies just beneath the surface, and I see the water swelling from the pressure of her siphon. Clearly, she can modulate the flow with great precision.

She can also move the funnel with astounding flexibility. I had assumed the organ, though supple, was firmly attached to just one side of her head. But Kali shows us that clearly it is not. At one moment, her funnel is on the left side; the next, she’s swung it 180 degrees, to her right. It’s as surprising as if you saw a person stick his tongue out his mouth, and next out his ear—and then out his other ear.

Then Kali fluffs up the suckers on her arms like the frills on a petticoat and waves her arms at us. If she were a person, we could reach no other conclusion than that she is teasing us, coyly daring us to try again.

When it’s time for me to tear myself away, I go down the hall to say goodbye to Scott in the Freshwater Gallery. Earlier that day, I had apologized for causing inconvenience, since he always has to send someone downstairs to the lobby to get me every time I show up at the aquarium, to take me behind the scenes. The few times I came up unaccompanied, I was stopped by staff worried about thieves. (The items most often stolen—before locks were installed on their tank tops—were small turtles like Bill’s red-bellied cooters.) So Scott has spoken on my behalf to Will Malan, one of the coordinators of the aquarium’s extensive volunteer program. Six hundred and sixty-two adult volunteers donate an estimated $2 million worth of time to the aquarium, performing tasks from cleaning up penguin poop, to giving educational talks, to feeding and moving animals to helping to design new exhibits. Another hundred young people help through internships and teen volunteer programs. All wear badges identifying them as volunteers, allowing them behind the scenes.

I fit none of these categories, but Scott ushers me into Will’s office, where Will takes a photo that will be emblazoned on my new badge. Half my hair is still plastered to my head from Kali’s dousing, but I am overjoyed with the title Will and Scott have given me: I am now the aquarium’s official “Octopus Observer.”

The badge is a talisman. It gives me access throughout the aquarium, even outside of public visiting hours. This will prove indispensible, for now I have yet another reason for visiting the aquarium:

Octavia has laid eggs.