CHAPTER EIGHT

Consciousness

To Think, to Feel, to Know

I have entered the azure waters of Paradise—where, to my alarm, I am sinking like a stone.

Minutes earlier, I had flipped backward off the side of the boat into rolling waves. That part was on purpose. Our boat, the 20-foot Opunohu, is too small for divers to enter the water using the giant stride. So, on my first dive since Mexico, I’ve successfully performed a back-roll entry. You sit facing backward on the edge of the boat with your tank suspended behind you. Holding your mask and regulator against your face with one hand, and your hoses in front with the other, you tuck your chin to your chest and lean backward to fall into the water, head over heels—a maneuver my scuba manual described as “somewhat disorienting.”

But all went well, and after I signaled to my fellow divers at the surface that I was okay, holding on to the Opunohu’s anchor line and passing hand under hand, we descended for about 20 feet. Everything was fine . . . until I dumped the air from my buoyancy compensation device and let go. Now I am plunging toward the bottom, upside down, like a turtle on its back, a position from which I am able to watch the white bottom of our boat recede above me like a bad dream.

Luckily, my dive buddy, Keith Ellenbogen, former scuba instructor and an acclaimed underwater photographer, grabs my hand and halts my descent. He understands immediately what’s wrong. Most countries use small, light, aluminum cylinders for scuba, but here in Mooréa, still technically part of France, divers remain loyal to the original material for the first Aqua-Lung tank, developed in 1943 by their countrymen Jacques Cousteau and Émile Gagnan—durable, but much heavier, steel. Yet in my brand-new BCD, I am carrying an additional 14 pounds of weight—less than the 17 I carried in Caribbean waters, but still too much for a small person with a steel tank.

Keith’s grip gives me a chance to right myself. I’m grateful but mortified. We had buoyed each other through the twenty hours of travel from his home in New York, to Los Angeles, to Tahiti, and then the ferry ride to Mooréa, imagining this moment—when after months of anticipation, we would, at last, dive the tropical reefs of Polynesia in search of octopuses. Now that we are finally doing so, Keith—a Fulbright scholar who normally dives with the likes of Philippe Cousteau—has to drag me through the water as if pulling a sled up a hill.

I’m keen to return to the spot where, just the day before, Keith had experienced what he called “one of the most exciting moments of my life.”

While Keith had been diving that day, I’d been with the rest of the scientific team snorkeling, scouting study sites in the shallows. Jennifer Mather, the leader of our expedition, doesn’t dive, and doesn’t need to: All her studies of wild octopus have been conducted in shallow water, where she has always found plenty of octopuses. But here in Mooréa, we were having trouble.

It was not for lack of expertise. Jennifer is one of the world’s few preeminent researchers of octopus intelligence. Google “octopus intelligence” and her studies are the ones you’ll see cited most. David Scheel, fifty-one, whom I had met at the Octopus Symposium, has studied giant Pacific octopus for nineteen years in the cold, murky waters of Alaska, where he pioneered the first workable way to track octopuses with telemetry—by piercing a hole in the octopus’s gill slit, like you would an earlobe to accommodate an earring, and attaching a satellite tracking tag with a locking bolt. Brazilian researcher Tatiana Leite, thirty-seven, who had completed her doctoral studies with Jennifer as one of her advisers, has found and named a new species of octopus off Brazil’s Noronha island, and is in the process of describing five more. A few days into our trip, we had been joined by Keely Langford, twenty-nine. She’s not a scientist, but an educator at the Vancouver Aquarium, where she is renowned for her athletic diving and swimming skills, her encyclopedic knowledge of marine life, and her eagle-eyed observations.

But even with this team of experts, our first three days of scouring the shallows had passed without our spotting a single octopus.

Even by octopus standards, our study species is a master of disguise. Because it is active by day, Octopus cyanea is one of the best-camouflaged octopuses in the world: University of Hawaii researcher Heather Ylitalo-Ward reports that it has one of the highest numbers of pigment cells of any octopus species. And it’s also, she says, one of the smartest. In Hawaii, they often carry halved coconut shells as they walk. When the octopus travels, a coconut acts as portable armor protecting the underside from predators who lurk in the sand. When the octopus flips it over, the shell can provide a handy Quonset-hut-like shelter in an area with no suitable crevices in which to hide.

Keith certainly did not expect to find an octopus on his first dive.

But he did.

With divemaster Franck Lerouvreur, Keith had departed in the boat via the channel just behind the dive center at CRIOBE, the French research station where we’re staying. Within 20 minutes, they arrived at a spot to drop anchor, where they could easily search along the barrier reef to the east of Opunohu. Even though Keith, forty-two, had been diving since he was sixteen, and has dived all over the world, he had never before seen or photographed a wild octopus. But Franck’s sharp eyes had been drawn to two empty scallop shells—evidence of an octopus meal. Inches from the shells, he and Keith found a hole filled with two purplish circles, each about an inch in diameter, set in a whitish background. Above the circles, like a crown, they saw the arc of what turned out to be an arm studded with suckers. The circles, they saw, were the bulbous eyes of an octopus watching them from its den. Keith was able to take several photos before the octopus retreated.

The next day, Keith and Franck returned to the site. To Keith’s delight, they found the octopus right away. And this time, the animal was not shy. It allowed him to hang around while it traveled over a roughly 50-square-foot area of reef, changing color and pattern all the while. “It was like this dude was showing me around,” Keith said. “He seemed playful, and not afraid at all.”

My philosopher friend Peter Godfrey-Smith and an Australian dive buddy, Matthew Lawrence, had discovered a site three hours south of Sydney that they call Octopolis, where, at a depth of about 60 feet, they have found as many as eleven Octopus tetricus living within one or two yards of each other. These are fairly large octopuses, with arm spans of six feet or more, and distinctive, soulful white eyes that also give the species the nickname “the gloomy octopus.” Matthew told me, “I’ve had a couple of experiences where we were diving at this site and an octopus grabbed my hand, and took me to its den, five meters away.” Once, an octopus took him on what he called “a big circuit” around the area, a tour that lasted for ten or twelve minutes. Afterward, the octopus climbed all over Matthew and investigated him with his suckers, as if, having shown him around the neighborhood, he now wanted to explore his human guest in turn. The octopuses he met, Matthew told me, were “not aggressive—they’re curious.” Because he dives Octopolis regularly, Matthew is certain the octopuses there recognize him. Perhaps, he mused, they even look forward to his visits. He often brings them toys—bottles, plastic screw-apart Easter eggs, and GoPro underwater video cameras—all of which they dismantle with interest and sometimes drag into their dens.

To Keith’s amazement, after giving him a guided tour, the first octopus met up with a second octopus. Keith couldn’t decide which one to photograph. How can you decide which of your subjects is more photogenic, when both change color and shape before your eyes?

Keith chose to stick with the first one, who crawled around the side of a rock. As Keith was photographing it, the second octopus traveled up and over a higher rock nearby, stood up tall on its arms, as if on tiptoe, and, with what looked like keen interest, leaned toward Keith and the other octopus he was photographing. “It actively positioned itself so it could observe me,” Keith said. “It was so amazing to be observed like that. In all my years photographing animals underwater—sharks, tuna, turtles, fish—I’ve never encountered anything that watched me like this. It was like a person watching a model at a fashion-photo shoot, or watching a pro football player at a game. Most of the time, fish observe you and notice you. But they don’t look at you like this, like they are watching and learning. It was one of the most incredible experiences of my life.”

Possibly the first octopus had recognized Keith, and that was why it had allowed him so close, and to stay with him so long. On his second dive, Keith had spent about half an hour all told in the company of the first octopus. Perhaps the animal will feel even more at ease if they meet for a third time. And what of the second octopus? Were the two still together? Maybe there are even more octopuses in this area. We might, I hope, make a discovery of great interest to the team.

Keith and I swim over two deep channels that run parallel to the beach. In the crystalline water, we have an excellent view in all directions. Below us, a rubble-strewn landscape tells of destruction and renewal. The reefs here were relatively undisturbed until the 1980s. Then came a plague of reef-eating starfish in 1980 and ’81; hurricanes and cyclones struck the island for the first time since 1906 in 1982, and again in 1991, breaking branching corals and smothering others with runoff from heavy rains. Baby corals have now begun to recolonize the area, making Mooréa a valuable living laboratory for researchers studying reef recovery. Meanwhile, the underwater landscape of holes and crevices seems custom-made for octopuses.

We descend toward the den site, 69 feet below the surface. Holding Keith’s steadying hand, breathing easily underwater, and supported by the comforting pressure of the sea, I feel free, again, to join the floating parade of beautiful, improbable lives around me. Keith points to a school of yellowfin goatfish, their chin whiskers equipped with chemoreceptors that let them taste and smell food hidden among coral and under sand. Right now these 11-inch fish sport electric yellow stripes over satiny white; but, like those of the octopus, their colors aren’t static. These fish are capable of a feat that earned their Mediterranean relatives an unenviable star turn at Roman feasts. Goatfish were presented to guests live, so that diners could watch them, in their death throes, change color. Around us, teacup-size butterfly fish, citrine slashed with ebony, glide alongside their mates, demonstrating a bond they will honor throughout their lives, which may last for seven years. Beneath us, emerald and turquoise parrot fish pluck algae from coral with their beaks—actually mosaics of tightly packed teeth. Each sleeps in its own private mucous cocoon, a slimy sleeping bag secreted from the mouth, to conceal its scent from predators. Parrot fish are sequential hermaphrodites: All are born female, and later transform themselves to males.

The very existence of such creatures reminds me: Anything can happen.

Keith easily locates the octopus den. The two scallop shells are still there, exactly as the octopus had left them. But the octopus is not home. Carefully we explore a 100-foot radius around the den, an area pocked with nooks and crannies into which an octopus could melt as easily as butter into an English muffin. Perhaps Keith’s octopus is out hunting, and if it’s nearby, there’s a chance we’ll spot it.

We swim together, searching, surrounded by fish with cartoon names, in Godspell colors, trailing drama-queen fins. Keith points, and then fins away briefly for a photograph. Treading water furiously so as not to flip or sink, I look up: My dive buddy is surrounded by eight peaceful, four-foot blacktip reef sharks. Backlit by the sun above, all nine swimming creatures are cradled in light like a halo.

We surface too exhilarated to be disappointed. But as another precious day passes with no octopus, it’s hard for me not to remember what else I’m missing. The day I arrived in Mooréa was the day of Marion and Dave’s wedding. Today the transformed Giant Ocean Tank officially opened to the public, filled with its spectacular new coral sculptures and hundreds of new fish. I miss my aquarium friends, both vertebrate and invertebrate—especially after what we’d been through together earlier that spring.

It was remarkable: Even inside the aquarium’s dim halls, far from a source of natural light and enclosed in their tanks of filtered water, so many animals seemed to sense it was spring. Even though some fish, especially from the tropics, breed year around, March’s melt into April had spiked a surge in piscine sex hormones.

A male fallfish—the largest member of the minnow family in northeastern North America—started showing off to the females. Carrying pebbles in his mouth, he built a mound of gravel on the bottom of the tank, and then garnished it with a silk plant he plucked and then planted in the middle. This behavior is similar to that of the male bowerbird of Australia, who, rather than flash gaudy feathers, builds elaborate, brightly decorated sculptures to attract a mate. Though the fallfish is common to swift streams and clear lakes, its elaborate mating rituals have seldom been witnessed.

In Cold Marine, the male lumpfish has finally scored. One of the females is bloated up like a beach ball, full of eggs. Any day now, she will lay her hundreds of orange eggs in the male’s rocky nesting area, which he will fertilize and then assiduously guard.

In the neighboring tank, the goosefish produced another veil.

“If I ever get married,” Anna told Bill and me, “I’m going to design my veil to look like this.”

“Only a little less slimy?” I suggested.

Bill countered, “No—for Anna, she’d want it slime and all.”

And in Freshwater, one morning I arrived to witness a historic birth. Brendan held the lip of a rare, two-inch Lake Victoria cichlid open with one hand and gently squeezed her belly with the other. Out shot twenty-three babies, each the size of guppy fry! Each female incubates her fertilized eggs in her mouth. This species, Scott explains, is so rare it hasn’t got a Latin name yet; they are virtually extinct in the wild, and to his knowledge, no birth had been recorded before in captivity. “We have probably just tripled the world’s population of these fish just now,” Scott said.

All the breeding had added excitement to my visits that spring. Not that I needed more—my approach to Octavia’s tank was thrilling enough. Though I could have easily taken an elevator or the back stairs, I always loved the anticipation of walking up the spiral ramp, past the penguin tray full of tropical fishes, past the flooded Amazon forest, past the Suriname toads (one of whom, now fully trained for display, was always visible to the public), past the anacondas and electric eel, past the Isles of Shoals and Eastport Harbor exhibits, past the goosefish and her veil, past the velvety green anemones washed by the artificially crashing surf . . . to finally arrive in front of Octavia’s tank.

Until one morning, before my trip to the South Pacific, I came in and found her left eye had swollen to the size of an orange.

At first I told myself I must be mistaken. Maybe what looked like a horrible infection was really an illusion created by the water in dim light. I turned on my flashlight. Octavia’s cornea was still bulging, so opaque I could not see her slit pupil.

“Oh, there you are,” Wilson said. He had been waiting for me to feed both octopuses.

“Look at this!” I cried, too distressed to even greet him. “Look at her eye!”

“Oh, no,” said Wilson. “That isn’t good. Let’s get Bill.”

Bill peered into Octavia’s exhibit. By this time she had turned slightly, and we saw to our dismay that the other eye was swollen and cloudy, too, though less so. “Her eyes weren’t like that on Monday,” Bill said with concern.

Then Octavia began to move. Sucker by sucker, she peeled away from the ceiling and sides of her lair, loosening her grip on her precious, shrinking eggs. Finally, only a few suckers of one arm remained in contact with the mass. Her seven other arms began to meander aimlessly along the bottom.

Her action mystified us. The sea star was in his usual position, as far from her as he could get. No one was threatening her eggs. There was no food on the bottom. She seemed to be . . . just wandering.

I wondered if she were blind—but perhaps that would not matter. Octopuses who have been experimentally blinded navigate flawlessly using their senses of touch and taste. Worse, she could be in pain. (Though cooks who throw lobsters into boiling water insist invertebrates’ attempts to escape are mere reflexes, they’re wrong. Prawns whose antennae are brushed with acetic acid carefully groom the injured sensors with complex, prolonged movements—which diminish when anesthetic is applied. Crabs who have been shocked rub the hurt spot for long periods after the initial injury. Robyn Crook, an evolutionary neurobiologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center, finds octopuses also do this, and are more likely to swim away or squirt ink when touched near a wound than when touched elsewhere on the body.)

“What is happening, Bill?” I asked helplessly.

He watched the old octopus for a few moments. Her movements seemed restless and disoriented. Her mantle was throbbing. Her body looked like the embodiment of a big headache.

“This,” he said to us sadly, “is senescence.”

In her old age, Octavia’s tissues were simply breaking down. The previous weekend, I had seen this in my neighbor, who is ninety-two. She was thinner, dimmer, frailer. Her delicate skin bruised easily. She mentioned having seen an elephant on the lawn. Body and soul, she seemed to be deliquescing like fallen fruit.

When other octopuses go through this phase, “they sort of wander around,” Bill said. “They get white patches. I haven’t seen this with the eye before, though.”

Again I felt the panic that had risen in my chest that night the previous August, when Octavia’s body had looked like a bloated tumor, and Wilson and I both thought she was dying. But now, it seemed, the time we had dreaded had finally arrived.

“What should we do?” I asked.

There is no cure for old age, no treatment for an octopus with senility. “I like finishing up the natural process on exhibit,” said Bill. “But that’s not always possible. . . . ”

Was there anything that would make Octavia more comfortable at the end of her long life? Should she be moved to the cozy safety of the barrel? Wild females on eggs often wall up their dens with rocks. The barrel re-created that situation more fully than the exhibit tank with its big front window.

Moving Octavia would also free up the exhibit for young Karma. She was outgrowing the barrel, as Kali had. She appeared to have given up on trying to get out. At our slap on the water, she would come up to the surface to greet us, a dark reddish brown, eat her food, and then sink to the bottom of the barrel and turn white. She was a sweet, gentle octopus, but we wondered whether it might be healthier for her to be more active.

Wilson strongly felt Octavia and Karma should be switched. Andrew and Christa were horrified at the suggestion. Interestingly, the young people were more concerned about the old octopus, and the elder was arguing for the welfare of the young one. “Take her off exhibit, away from her eggs?” Christa said. “That would devastate her!” Andrew was afraid it would kill her to move.

“But that’s what we do with old people with dementia,” I observed. “When they go senile, we take them off exhibit.” Wilson laughed, a little sadly. “I never thought of it this way,” he said, “but it’s true.” People with dementia can’t safely negotiate the wider world. Many seem calmer in a smaller, simpler space. But what about an octopus?

We owed Octavia repose in her old age. Karma, too, of course, richly deserved the best life we could give her. But we knew Octavia better than we knew Karma. Octavia had enriched our lives since she arrived in spring of 2011, then already a large octopus with knowledge of the wild ocean, an octopus who understood camouflage better than any other Bill or Wilson had ever met. Shy at first, she had opened up to us, and we’d won her over. I remembered so well the first time she had briefly extended the tip of one arm to my friend Liz’s finger, and both withdrew; I remembered the first time she chose to interact with me—and nearly pulled me into the tank. Octavia had made us all laugh when she surreptitiously managed to seize a bucket of fish unseen, while no fewer than five people were watching her. Octavia’s touch had eased Anna through the agony of losing her best friend. We had a history together. For sharing with us her surprising and revelatory life, we owed Octavia comfort and respect at its end.

We were all tortured by the uncertainty. Nature offered no advice; her model is not kind. In the wild, Octavia surely would have been dead by now. Even if she had survived long enough to lay eggs and see them hatch, were she wild, she would have spent her last days wandering, alone, starving and senile, to be eaten by a predator or scavenged, like Olive, the octopus off Seattle’s coast, by sea stars.

We humans changed that natural path when we took Octavia from the ocean. Because of human intervention, Octavia never got to meet a male to fertilize her eggs. Despite her assiduous care, she would never see her eggs hatch. But we had fed her and protected her; we had provided her with marine neighbors, interesting views, and entertaining interactions with people and puzzles. We had kept her from hunger, fear, and pain. In the wild, virtually every hour of every day would have brought the risk that a predator would bite off part of her body, as had happened to Karma, or that she would be torn limb from limb and eaten alive.

Since laying her eggs, Octavia seemed no longer to want our touch or our company, but she still, at least, seemed to enjoy our food. So Wilson offered her three squid. She seized the first in her left front arm, but dropped it to the bottom of the tank, where it was eagerly devoured by an orange sea star. Wilson placed the second squid directly in her mouth, where she held it for a moment, then let it go. She also dropped the third.

If Bill moved her, Octavia might feel rescued from the confusion of too much space and too many options. Or she might fight with her last bit of strength to defend her eggs. But in the absence of any cues that the eggs were alive after all these months, perhaps she was now forgetting about them. We didn’t know. Nobody even knew whether Octavia could be moved.

Bill wasn’t sure what he’d do, but no matter what his choice, the decision would be agonizing.

“Don’t worry.” Jennifer’s voice, coming from beneath the mosquito net cloaking the bed across from mine in our shared room at CRIOBE, greets me at first light. “We’ll find octopuses. I don’t know how many. I don’t know how good the data will be. But we’ll find octopuses, know that. We’ve got bloodhounds. These people are really good.”

I haven’t said a word, but Jennifer knows what I’m thinking. Field science is, by nature, unpredictable. I had learned this on other expeditions, too. We did not see any snow leopards in Mongolia; I saw a tiger exactly once in four trips to India’s mangrove swamp, the Sundarbans. Sometimes your study animal does not materialize. Still, you can often accomplish a great deal: We had collected leopard scat for DNA analysis in Mongolia, and I had studied a lot of tracks, and amassed many local stories, in India. But here in Mooréa, we really must actually meet octopuses—because we need to administer personality tests to them to carry out our study.

Jennifer had created a personality check sheet to measure whether an octopus was bold or shy. Writing in pencil underwater on a plastic dive slate, we were to record how the animal reacted to different situations. What does the octopus do when you approach it? Does it hide, change color, investigate, ink? What happens when you touch the octopus gently with a pencil? Does it jet from its burrow? Retreat? Grab the pencil? Aim its jet at the intruder? Just watch?

Our study aims to test three hypotheses about what these octopuses eat and why. David, a behavioral ecologist, suspects octopuses prefer big crabs, but will eat a wider menu if they can’t find them. Tatiana, a marine ecologist, predicts that octopuses who live in more complex environments will eat a more varied diet. And Jennifer is testing for the effect of personality on food choices. She reasons that, much like many confident, intrepid people, bold octopuses may make more adventurous diners. To find out, we’ll collect and identify the prey remains around each octopus den.

Jennifer had developed the personality test over many years—in spite of many arched eyebrows from skeptical colleagues. She’s sixty-nine, and began her career at a time when few scientists believed animals had personalities—or that women made capable field scientists. That’s why she trained as a psychologist. At Brandeis University, she studied human sensory-motor coordination, specifically eye movements, for her PhD; she later went on to study the eye movements peculiar to people with schizophrenia. But she was fascinated by cephalopods and set up tanks for Octopus joubini in the basement of Brandeis’s Psychology Department, and began cataloging octopuses’ movements and how they used their tank space.

“So when I started asking deeper questions about octopus than just ‘what is it doing?’ I turned to psychology,” Jennifer tells me as sunrise parts the clouds over the jungle-clad volcano out our dormitory window, and roosters start to crow. “I’m quite aware octopuses don’t have a mother complex—Freud is no help! But I am also aware that in animals, as well as people, there is an inborn temperament, a way of seeing the world, that interacts with the environment, and that shapes personality. There’s nobody else doing what I’m doing. It may be weird, but it’s unique.”

Once overlooked or dismissed outright, Jennifer’s work now is respected and cited by cognitive neuroscientists, neuropharmacologists, neurophysiologists, neuroanatomists, and computational neuroscientists—including a prominent international group of whom gathered at the University of Cambridge in England in 2012 to write a historic proclamation, the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness. Signed by scientists including physicist Stephen Hawking in front of 60 Minutes cameras, it asserts that “humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness” and that “nonhuman animals, including all birds and mammals, and many other creatures, including octopuses [italics added], also possess these neurological substrates.”

No one knows octopuses like Jennifer does. If she says we’ll find octopuses, I have to trust that we will.

We head out that morning to snorkel at one of the potential study sites we scouted earlier, an area with a gentle, sloping bottom that comes to a steep drop-off, boasting both live and dead coral, a hard top, and numerous gullies. While the others search the shallows, David and I swim off to the deeper area. David almost immediately finds octopus evidence: two crab claws piled on a flame scallop shell as carefully as a stack of plates piled in the kitchen sink after dinner. “A den, but no octopus,” he observes. “But I declare this site very promising.”

I feel like I’ve won the lottery. Jennifer seems most interested in searching in only three or four feet of water. But I find the shallows difficult. There we constantly plow our lips, foreheads, and chins into big clots of brown, bristly algae called Turbinaria ornata; at every turn, I fear I’ll scrape my nipples off on the jagged skeletons of dead coral. I’m afraid I’ll kick one of the few living corals, or squash a sea cucumber, or, God forbid, impale myself on the tall, black, poisonous spines of one of the sea urchins we see everywhere, or a deadly stonefish, which we don’t see, because they are exactly the color of sand. (Their sting can kill you, but not before inflicting pain so unbearable that victims beg doctors to amputate the afflicted body part.)

Swimming here, in deeper water, is pure delight. All around us, fish dazzle and shimmer with iridescent stripes, glowing eyes, fiery orange bellies, black masks, Jackson Pollock spots. A hawksbill sea turtle swims beneath us, oaring the water with its winglike, leathery front flippers. More blacktip sharks slide by, weightless as dappled light. Beneath us, the bottom, flecked with blue and yellow living corals, offers what seems like countless crevices ideal for octopus.

David teaches me to free-dive. Holding your breath, you dive below to investigate a den site, then emerge blowing water from your snorkel like a spouting whale. He’s found more than ten piles of food remains, so many shells and carapaces he’s stopped collecting them in the lidded bucket attached to his weight belt. Inspecting coral crevices with his waterproof flashlight, David finds the evidence everywhere: Shells are stacked up one atop the other, with crab claws resting on top, like spoons in a bowl. “Nobody else is going to leave these in a pile!” he says. “The octopus must have just stepped out.” In fact, by midmorning, he’s located at least three octopus dens. But none of the occupants is in.

Overhead, we notice the sky is bruised with the dark clouds of a gathering storm. Reluctantly, we turn toward shore to rejoin the others. In the distance, we can see them waving at us. We swim faster to catch up. Jennifer pulls her snorkel from her mouth. “I’m looking at an octopus!” she announces, and plunges her face back into the water.

By the time I find the octopus, all I can see in the cavern into which it has retreated are some white suckers along one bluish arm. But there’s more good news: This is the second octopus of the day. Tatiana had found one in the first ten minutes of their foray. The animal had been out hunting, its arms and interbrachial web spread across a shallow gully, its skin an iridescent blue-green. When it saw her, it turned its head brown first, and then its arms, and then poured itself down its hole.

The clouds now hiss rain down on us, loud as sizzling grease. The water is not a good place to be when lightning threatens, so we decide to head back to CRIOBE. As Tatiana sits down in the foot-deep water to remove her fins, David takes one last look. Right beside her, he notices a pile of shells beside a rock, a hole—and the suckers of a third octopus.

On subsequent days, we investigate more sites, mostly without octopus sightings. Still, by the end of our first week, we have located six octopuses at three different study sites. We’ve gathered and identified hundreds of prey items; we’ve collected thousands of data points from the habitat. I feel deeply attached to my new friends and, profoundly grateful for the success of our expedition, I want to give thanks. So that Sunday, when the team takes a day off, while the others sightsee and birdwatch, I go with Keith to the octopus church.

In the village of Papetoai, just a short drive from CRIOBE, there was once a temple dedicated to the octopus, the guardian spirit of the place. To Mooréa’s seafaring people, the supernaturally strong, shape-shifting octopus was their divine protector, its many reaching arms a symbol of unity and peace. Today, a Protestant church occupies that site. Built in 1827, the oldest church in Mooréa still honors the octopus. The eight-sided building nestles in the shadow of Mount Rotui, whose shape, to the people here, resembles the profile of an octopus.

Taking seats in the back, Keith and I are the only foreigners to join the packed congregation of about 120 people. Almost everyone around us has a tattoo; many of the women wear elaborate hats made of bamboo and live flowers. The minister wears a long, waist-length garland of green leaves, yellow hibiscus, white frangipani, and red and pink bougainvillea; the women in the choir are adorned with headdresses of flowers and leaves. 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. “This is like going to Atlantis,” Keith whispers.

The service is conducted in Tahitian, a language I don’t understand. But I understand the power of worship, and the importance of contemplating mystery—whether in a church or diving a coral reef. The mystery that congregants seek here is no different, really, from the one I have sought in my interactions with Athena and Kali, Karma and Octavia. It is no different from the mystery we pursue in all our relationships, in all our deepest wonderings. We seek to fathom the soul.

But what is the soul? Some say it is the self, the “I” that inhabits the body; without the soul, the body is like a lightbulb with no electricity. But it is more than the engine of life, say others; it is what gives life meaning and purpose. Soul is the fingerprint of God.

Others say that soul is our innermost being, the thing that gives us our senses, our intelligence, our emotions, our desires, our will, our personality, and identity. One calls soul “the indwelling consciousness that watches the mind come and go, that watches the world pass.” Perhaps none of these definitions is true. Perhaps all of them are. But I am certain of one thing as I sit in my pew: If I have a soul—and I think I do—an octopus has a soul, too.

There are no crucifixes or crosses in this church—only carvings of fish and boats, which make me feel free and forgiven. Riding the rolling waves of Tahitian vowels, I’m transported by the pastor’s sermon: to the Gilbert Islands, where the octopus god, Na Kika, was said to be the son of the first beings, and with his eight strong arms, shoved the islands up from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean; to the northwest coast of British Columbia and Alaska, where the native people say the octopus controls the weather, and wields power over sickness and health; to Hawaii, where ancient myths tell us our current universe is really the remnant of a more ancient one—the only survivor of which is the octopus, who managed to slip between the narrow crack between worlds. For seafaring and coastal people everywhere, the octopus’s transformative powers and elastic reach connected land and sea, heaven and earth, past and present, people and animals. Facing the ocean in an eight-sided church, drenched in blessings, immersed in mystery, my natural response, even on an expedition in the name of science, is to pray.

I pray for the success of our expedition. I pray I’ll finally get to see more than just some suckers under a rock. I pray for my husband, my dog, my friends back in the States; I pray for the Giant Ocean Tank—please, God, don’t let it leak!—and for my friends at the aquarium. And I pray for the souls of the octopuses I have known; those who are alive, and those who have died, but whom I will never forget.

After I had left the aquarium, Octavia’s left eye got worse, and her right eye was cloudy. Especially if she were senescent, and not in her right mind, in a tank full of other animals and rough surfaces, the chances she might further injure herself were great. And by Thursday morning, another factor had arisen that Bill was forced to consider.

At about 10 a.m., his glance was drawn to movement in Karma’s barrel. Without opening the top, he looked down on a sight he had never before seen: an octopus hanging upside down at the surface, her black beak clearly visible, persistently chewing on the mesh-like plastic conweb across the top of the lid.

Karma had already severed some of the brand-new cable ties that held the mesh onto the screw top. When Bill saw this, he understood why he’d had to replace some of the ties after Kali died. Now he realized that the damage to the ties had not just been the result of normal wear and tear: Kali, like Karma, had been systematically gnawing through them in an effort to escape.

“I was nervous,” Bill told me. “I still didn’t want to move Octavia.” He was afraid he might injure her; he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to catch her at all. He had never moved a live octopus out of the exhibit before. “But Karma gave me no choice. Octavia gave me no choice.”

Bill spent the rest of that Thursday moving around fish: he transferred some redfish from Eastport to the Boulder Reef tank to make room for some rainbow smelt to move from behind the scenes to the Eastport tank, so that some new sea stars from Japan could occupy their vacated tank. He moved two small redfish, two snailfish, and one radiated shanny from behind the scenes to the Eastport tank, freeing their tank for a new, small red octopus, the size of my hand, who had just arrived. Bill chose to try to move Octavia and Karma after the public had left, because he wasn’t sure how it would go.

Luckily, Bill’s Thursday volunteer, Darshan Patel, twenty-nine, was there to help. Together they lifted Karma’s 50-gallon barrel out of the sump and placed it on the floor. Bill propped open the lid to Octavia’s exhibit. While Darshan watched from the public side, Bill used a soft, deep-bodied mesh net with a metal handle to try to scoop Octavia up from her corner. At the touch of the net, Octavia tucked up deeper into her corner; Bill couldn’t reach her from that angle. So the two men switched positions, and Darshan went upstairs to make sure Octavia didn’t try to escape the open tank while Bill went downstairs to assess the situation.

To give them more room to maneuver, they needed to remove an additional portion of the cover, which was bolted to the tank. Darshan donned waders so he could stand in the tank while Bill worked from above. Octavia’s cloudy eyes swiveled to follow him as he worked.

Darshan is five foot ten; the water came up to his waist, but when he bent over, cold water poured inside his waders. When the lid came off, Octavia began to move toward the back glass that separates her tank from the wolf eels. Bill worked a net above; Darshan used a net, plus his free hand, while in the water. “We were being gentle, trying to guide her into the net,” Bill told me. But Octavia evaded them again and again. Even with four of her arms in the net, she was holding on to the rocks with four others. As Darshan pursued her, she poured two of her arms and half her body into a crevice and refused to let go. “For an old octopus, she was still super-strong,” Darshan said. “You have to have respect for her suckers. It’s crazy how strong they are.”

It was obvious this wasn’t going to work. So while Darshan, soaked and freezing, stayed in the tank, with Octavia just inches from the top, Bill changed quickly into his wet suit. They prayed Octavia wouldn’t try to come out.

Darshan moved back as Bill got into the cramped tank, both men careful to step around the two leather stars and the anemones on the bottom. And then, as the sea star observed the proceedings eyelessly from his usual position across from Octavia’s lair, Bill bent his six-foot-five frame in half so that, although he couldn’t see her tucked up under the rocks, he could feel Octavia’s suckers. With his fingers, he gently urged her into his waiting net.

To Darshan’s astonishment, at the touch of Bill’s hand, Octavia entered Bill’s net on the first try. She had not tasted Bill’s skin for ten months. All that time, because she was under the ceiling of her lair, she could not see it was him handing her food on the grabber. And yet, 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.

It’s really no wonder the wild octopuses don’t come out when we find them in Mooréa. Even the bolder ones—several have grabbed our pencils when prodded gently—seem to know the world is dangerous for an invertebrate without a protective shell. We’ve come face-to-face with a number of moray eels at our study sites, as well as sharks, and worse: We investigated one promising site and couldn’t figure out why there weren’t any octopuses there—until we discovered fishermen had been there before us.

So, just three days before my planned departure, most of the octopuses have done nothing but hide. When we return to one of our previous study sites to check a marked den, the octopus who lives here again shows us nothing but her suckers.

We head toward David, who is waving to us excitedly from 200 yards away. Keely and I swim slowly in the three-foot shallows, barely skimming dead corals, watching for other dens and for the puncturing spines of urchins and stonefish. I can’t see the den he must be pointing to in the lumpy, algae-covered rock just one foot in front of us.

Until I see that the rock has eyes.

Arms coiled beneath its large body, the octopus sits one foot tall atop its den, its reddish, warty, nine-inch body hanging down in front of it like a big nose, its eyes camouflaged with a light starburst pattern separated by a white blaze like my border collie’s. Pearly irises split by hyphen pupils swivel as it watches us. For at least a minute, the octopus remains otherwise immobile, allowing its papillae to sway limply in the surge like algae. Finally it moves. Pulling one of its arms up from beneath its body, the animal slides the arm tip inside the gill opening, as if to scratch an itch.

David and I are so mesmerized we don’t even notice that Keely has swum off. Then from beneath the water, we hear her water-muffled call: “I have another one! And it’s hunting!”

David stays with his octopus, and I swim over to see Keely’s, just a few yards away. Again, absurdly, I cannot see it at first. At last the image my eyes must be processing materializes in my brain. This octopus is much smaller than David’s, perhaps only six inches tall, even though it’s standing up taller than it is wide. Mottled uniformly brown and white, its body is covered with jagged peaks of papillae, erected especially prominently above the eyes like ear tufts. If someone showed its image and relative size on a screen and asked me what animal this is, I would say it was an Eastern screech owl.

Until, with the blast of its jet, it transforms into an octopus again. Which, of course, looks like anything but an octopus. Before our eyes, Keely’s octopus becomes a silken scarf, a beating heart, a gliding snail, a rock covered with algae. And then it pours itself into a hole, like water down a drain, and disappears entirely.

I pull my head out of the water and call to David. “The octopus is hunting!” I yell to him.

“Mine too!” he answers.

Keely and I now join David and begin to follow the animal as it flows over the sand on curling arms. As the octopus turns to its left, it reveals the full length of its arms—they may span more than four feet—and we glimpse a dramatic, defining moment in the animal’s personal history. I can see the front three left arms all end halfway down. Like Karma, this octopus survived an encounter with a predator. The skin is healing over, but the limbs have not yet started to regrow. I feel a pang of sympathy and admiration. Surely this bold octopus remembers its brush with death, and yet it doesn’t hide from us. Crawling along the bottom as we follow just feet away, it keeps us in view, seeming as curious about us as we are about it. Like us, it wants to know: Who are you? And for this animal, apparently, the quest to know is worth the risk. It stops, turns, and reaches out to taste my neoprene glove with its intact third right arm.

Suckers run all the way to the tip. She’s a female—a swashbuckling, peg-legged pirate of an octopus, a fearless adventuress, like Kali.

We’re a small, mixed-species school, following our octopus leader as she travels along the bottom. She watches us as we move with her. Abruptly, three long rows of light spots spring to her arms, while her background color changes from red to a dark brown. Then she suddenly flashes white—a behavior Jennifer has seen octopuses use to startle prey into moving. But no crab or fish appears. The color change was meant for us. Perhaps she is conducting her own personality test, the equivalent of our touching our subjects with a pencil to see what they do. But we do nothing; we keep watching. I hope our reaction doesn’t disappoint her.

Next she smooths her skin, turns the color of fawn, and jets away. We frog-kick to keep up. In just a few yards, she alights on the bottom, turns chocolate, re-erects her papillae, and resumes crawling. It feels as if she is taking us, like Keith’s octopus on his dive, and like Matthew’s in Octopolis, 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. At one point of our journey together, on each side of her body, she suddenly sprouts ocelli, from the Latin for eye, two-and-a-half-inch-diameter blue rings. They signal to a predator that it has been seen, deflect attention from the real eye, and make its owner appear larger—and might have other meanings as well. At another point, she poses for David’s underwater camera atop some coral rubble, inserting her arms into its holes, probing for prey. The whole time she stares ahead like a person fishing in his pocket for his keys.

Time ceased to have meaning while we swam with the octopus in the warm shallows; we could have been together for five minutes or an hour. Later we would figure the encounter lasted nearly half an hour. Eventually, David pulled his head from the water and suggested we leave so that our presence didn’t interfere further with her hunting.

Our encounter with her seemed to bless our study with new luck. In the next two days, we would locate three new octopuses at this site. Ultimately, the team would find eighteen octopuses at five different sites; collect 244 shells and carapaces of octopus prey; catalog 106 food items outside active octopus dens; and identify forty-one different species of prey. Our study yielded enough data for Jennifer, David, and Tatiana to pore over happily for months.

But for me, the greatest gift of the expedition remained our swimming with the stump-armed female. David confirmed just how lucky we were. “It was definitely the best octopus encounter of my life,” David said—high praise from a man who had studied octopus in the wild and in captivity for nineteen years.

Swimming with a wild octopus was a dream come true, but the octopus experience I would treasure most deeply had been back at the aquarium, with Octavia, at April’s end, near the very end of her life.

Once in the barrel, Octavia had seemed very calm. She made no motions to suggest she was looking for her eggs. She didn’t chew on the mesh. And Karma was delighted with her new space. She was shy at first—she wouldn’t come out of her barrel until Bill led her out by one arm. But once out, she began exploring almost immediately, turning red with excitement and unfurling her body in her larger quarters like a banner in the wind.

Bill had made the right choice. Though for many months, Octavia’s constant attentions to her eggs were rituals rich and full of meaning, at some point, her tending may have ceased to feel fulfilling. A wild octopus tending fertile eggs is surely rewarded, as are birds on the nest, by the signals that her eggs are alive, her embryos growing. Mother birds and their babies chirp and cheep to one another when the young are still in the egg; the mother octopus can see her babies developing inside the egg, starting with the dark eyes, and feel them moving. But Octavia had no such feedback. Perhaps the very sight of the eggs inspired her to try to protect them, the way a mother orangutan will continue to carry and even groom a dead infant, often for many days, and some dogs will refuse to leave the body of someone they love who has died. 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.

Removing Octavia from her display tank also made possible an unintentional bonus for the rest of us. 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.

When Wilson and I arrived at the aquarium the following Wednesday, we learned that Octavia hadn’t moved much since the transfer. Mostly she rested in one area of the barrel, covering her swollen left eye with two of her arms. Her appetite had been steadily declining for weeks now, even though Bill had been tempting her with special delicacies; on Friday she had enjoyed a live crab, with the claws removed so it couldn’t hurt her. She ate shrimp on Sunday, but nothing Monday or Tuesday.

For the first time, I dreaded seeing my old friend. All these months, I had seen her only through glass, under low light. Now, for the first time in nearly a year, I was going to see her up close again, not separated by a pane of glass. I feared what I might find. I didn’t want to see her eye clouded and swollen. I didn’t want to see her skin fading and thinning. I didn’t want to see her weak or disoriented or upset.

Yet I longed to be with her. We hadn’t touched since she had laid her eggs last June. I never knew whether, as I watched her tending her eggs from the public side of her tank, she looked out through the glass of her exhibit and recognized me as the same person who had fed her and stroked her as she looked up through the water’s rippling surface so many months before.

As Christa and Brendan stood back and watched, Wilson and I unscrewed the lid from the barrel. Octavia was coiled and calm, a brownish maroon color, at the bottom. The left, swollen eye faced away from us. Her right eye, miraculously, now seemed normal, its pupil large and alert. Wilson held a squid in his right hand and waved it through the water, offering Octavia its taste and scent. Within twenty seconds she flipped upside down, and floated up, three quarters of the way to the surface, showing us her lacy white suckers. Wilson plunged his hand into the cold water to place the squid against the large suckers near her mouth. She grabbed it. I put in my hand as well, both of us offering our skin for her to taste. Would she accept us again? Would she remember?

Octavia rose a few more inches in the water, and hundreds of her suckers broke the surface. She gently grasped the back of Wilson’s hand, first with just a few suckers, then with more. And then, slowly but deliberately, she extended one arm out of the water, curling it up over his hand, his wrist—and, next, her neighboring arm followed, rising and unfurling like a wine-dark wave, her suckers attaching to his hand, his wrist, his forearm.

“She knows you!” cried Christa. “She remembers you, Wilson!” And next, still embracing Wilson with two arms, she did the same to me—first with one of her arms on my right arm, then with two arms on my left. Her wet grip on my skin felt gentle and familiar, the pull of her suckers tender as a kiss.

“When I heard what happened when she recognized Bill, I almost couldn’t believe it,” Wilson said. “Now I do . . . there is no doubt. Clearly, she remembers.”

For perhaps five minutes, Octavia stayed at the surface, holding us, tasting us, remembering us. She reached out to Christa with one arm as well—they had met once before. “What is she feeling?” I whispered.

“She is an old lady,” said Wilson, tenderly, as if that observation contained the answer. Wilson grew up in a traditional culture that, unlike our own, reveres the old. In her book The Old Way, my friend Liz relates that the Bushmen, when approached by lions, would address them respectfully with the word n!a, which means “old”—“a term,” Liz notes, that “they also use when speaking of the gods.” The word lady, too, was deeply meaningful, though rarely applied to an octopus: For like a true lady, Octavia was behaving in a well-mannered and considerate way, rising to greet her friends, even though any movement must have been quite an effort.

None of us spoke as she held us, for five minutes—or was it ten? Who knew? We were on Octopus Time. Hanging upside down, Octavia offered us her white suckers, and we stroked them, and she latched on to our fingertips. Gently she blew from her siphon, but unlike the blasts of icy salt water she used to shoot, they barely rippled the surface.

Her arms were so relaxed that we could see the very tip of her beak, a black speck at the joining point of all her limbs, like the center of a flower. “She is very gentle,” Wilson said softly. “She is very calm.”

And then Wilson did something I had never seen him do before. He gently but deliberately put his finger to her mouth.

“I wouldn’t do that, man!” warned Brendan, who had been with us the day Kali bit Anna. He’d been nearby when the arowana bit me, and had dressed my wound. Though Brendan is a tough guy who has been through a lot of physical pain himself, he hates to see other people get hurt. And Wilson is not a man to court unnecessary danger. He’s not like the interns and volunteers who let the electric eel shock them just to see how it feels.

“She’s not going to bite,” Wilson assured Brendan. And then Wilson stroked Octavia’s mouth with his index finger, petting her with an intimacy and level of trust he had never shared with any other octopus.

Finally, Octavia sank to the bottom, still regarding us with her good eye. How tired she must be, I thought, after her rich, full life—a life lived between worlds. 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.

I leaned over the barrel and stared at her in awe and gratitude. My eyes brimmed, and a tear dripped into the water. Human tears of intense emotion are chemically distinct from tears produced by eye irritants; tears of both joy and sorrow contain prolactin, a hormone that peaks in men and women during sex, dreams, and seizures, and is associated in women with the synthesis of breast milk. I wondered if Octavia could taste my feelings. She may have recognized the taste: Fish have prolactin. Octopuses do too.

As she rested, pale areas spread over Octavia’s brownish skin in a weblike pattern. “She’s beautiful,” said Brendan reverently. He had never seen her up close before, only through the glass of her exhibit. But even now, even so near the end of her life, Octavia was beautiful, and except for her bad eye, she looked healthy, if thin, with no white patches of dead skin. “She’s a beautiful old lady,” I said.

We rested, people and octopus regarding one another for several more minutes. And then, to my surprise, she floated up again to us. As she rose, we scanned the bottom of the barrel and saw that she had dropped the squid Wilson had fed her. We wished she had eaten, but we learned something new: Hunger was not the reason she had surfaced earlier, and it wasn’t what brought her now.

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.

When it was first filled with harbor water, the finished Giant Ocean Tank glowed a magical, promising, living green. As it cleared, like dawn, its waters sparkled with the colors and shapes of all the new coral sculptures and hundreds of new fishes. Staff had wisely returned the smallest fish to the tank first, so they could own the crevices, establishing territories where they’d feel safe and confident, before introducing the larger, predatory fishes—who never bothered them. Myrtle again ruled her old domain. The penguins returned to their tray, took up the exact same spots each had defended eleven months before, and again filled the aquarium’s first floor with their welcome, raucous braying.

The public opening for the transformed GOT on July 1 was glorious—and so was Marion and Dave’s wedding. Scott’s secular homily focused on Marion’s work with anacondas, prompting one guest to comment, “Well, that was the best snake wedding I ever attended.” Wilson and his family managed to spring his wife from her assisted living facility to attend, in her wheelchair, a party for her granddaughter, Sophie. She recognized everyone and seemed to enjoy the gathering. At the end of the summer, Christa was chosen out of fifty people who were interviewed for the one open permanent position in the aquarium’s education department. Four hundred and thirty thousand people came to visit the New England Aquarium that July and August, the highest number of visitors in the institution’s forty-four-year history.

On a Wednesday in September, I arrive at the octopus tank to find Karma entertaining a crowd, crawling vigorously across the front of her exhibit on her large, white suckers, watching the people out of one slit-pupil eye. “Ooooh! Oct-oh-PUS!” cries a little girl with three blond pigtails held in place with pink ribbons. “Wow! Way cool!” says a teenage boy in a leather jacket. “Come see this, class!” a school trip chaperone summons the students in her charge. “The octopus is out!”

I rush upstairs to join Wilson, and we open the top of her tank. Karma, bright red, flows over to greet us and flips upside down. We can see the flash of cameras below as we hand her one capelin after another, six in all, which she accepts eagerly. We see the fish crowded together at the center of her arms. But even as she’s eating, she’s eager to play with us. Her arms coil out of the water to grab us, sucking so vehemently she leaves love bites on our forearms and the backs of our hands.

Did she actually eat all six capelin? We go back downstairs to her exhibit to see if she dropped any.

“Was that you with the octopus?” a young boy asks, as if we had just been seen having dinner with the president. We nod proudly.

“Does it know you?” a middle-aged man with a moustache asks, incredulous.

Of course she does, we answer. Perhaps as well as or better than we know her.

But I still have so many questions. What goes on in Karma’s head—or the larger bundle of neurons in her arms—when she sees us? Do her three hearts beat faster when she catches sight of Bill, or Wilson, or Christa, or Anna, or me? Would she feel sad if we disappeared? What does sadness feel like for an octopus—or for anyone else, for that matter? What does Karma feel like when she pours her huge body into a tiny crevice of her lair? What does capelin taste like on her skin?

I can’t know this, of course; and I can’t know exactly what I mean to her. But I know what she—and Octavia and Kali—have meant to me. They have changed my life forever. I loved them, and will love them always, for they have given me a great gift: a deeper understanding of what it means to think, to feel, and to know.