Chapter 3

 

 

Wet bathing suits. Wet scuba booties. Wet wetsuits. In French Polynesia, it’s winter in July. When we’re donning wet gear in the morning, even temperatures below 70 feel downright chilly. David calls it “the wet kiss of anticipation—of getting in the water and finding an octopus!”

We worked out our plan the night before. We’re heading back to Church Copse to explore an area with numerous gullies and both live and dead coral—the sort of place where Jennifer and Tatiana have seen octopuses in their previous studies at other tropical sites. They will work the shallows while David and I head to deeper waters.

We walk into the shallows, don our fins, masks, and snorkels, and start swimming. A brisk ten-minute swim takes David and me past the shallows to where finally the water is over our heads. “Now we look for octopus!” he says—and then dives like a seal.

I follow him and discover a whole different world. Corals flecked with blue and yellow. Fish with iridescent stripes and glowing eyes. Fish with black masks like bandits, and fish with orange bellies that glow like fire. Many look more like modern sculptures than something alive. Some of Jennifer’s favorites, Moorish idols, are dressed more flamboyantly than rock stars, in bold stripes of yellow, black, and white. From the back of the head, slender white dorsal fins trail beyond their tails like banners in a breeze.

When David emerges from his dive, I can hear his spout even though I’m underwater. I surface and tread water to see what he’s found: two crab claws piled on a flame scallop shell, like a stack of plates piled in the kitchen sink after dinner. “A den, but no octopus,” he says. “But I declare this site very promising.”

We continue our exploration. We spot a handsome reddish hawkfish. A loner with a large head and thick body, it watches us from atop a yellowish coral. Thanks to the large pectoral fins on the sides of their bodies, these fish are capable of perching safely even on stinging fire coral—a species that, happily, we haven’t yet encountered. Pairs of mated butterfly fish with dazzling stripes swim by us like proud couples in an Easter parade.

David returns from one dive holding more clam shells—possible remains of octo meals—and drops them into the collecting bucket on his weight belt and fastens the lid. We return to cruising along the surface, scanning below the way pilots of low-flying aircraft look down on a city. Once you get over the dazzle and shimmer of their colors, you can watch the fish for what they are doing: darting into corals, peeking out of hiding holes, hurrying along on their way like busy people in New York City. And they are probably doing basically the same things as people: looking for suitable food and mates and homes, and trying to stay safe while they go about their daily chores.

A loose school of small black fish with white side stripes contracts into a tight ball as David dives again. He emerges with more shells—the bounty of a detective at work on a whodunit, trying to locate the perpetrator with clues supplied by the victims.

We reach the cardinal marker by ten a.m. With a shallow dive, we inspect beneath the cement piling and see it’s encrusted with young yellow and orange coral. “You just know an octopus sat here and enjoyed its morning tea,” David says. “It’s too beautiful a spot to pass up.” The animal could easily change its skin to rest here in complete invisibility.

A hawksbill sea turtle swims by, oaring the water with its winglike, leathery front flippers, each with one distinctive claw sticking out like a thumb on a mitten. The species is critically endangered, mainly because people eat its eggs. Unlike the turtle, though, I am not going forward—but backwards. When I pause, treading water, to take notes in pencil on my white plastic underwater dive slate, I look up to see that the current has carried me far from David. “Don’t drift out to sea while you write!” he shouts.

 

This stingray measured more than five feet across.

 

Once I catch up, we round the point together. We continue our octopus search on our way back to join Tatiana and Jennifer in the shallows. David dives, picks up rocks, shines his underwater flashlight into crevices. He’s finding plenty of evidence that octopuses live here: beside little caves in dead coral, 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.” He’s found more than ten separate piles of food remains, so many that he’s stopped collecting them in his bucket, and at least three potential octopus homes. And he keeps looking—even inside a green glass bottle, in case a youngster’s hiding there. Back in the States, off the Pacific Northwest coast, a small species known as the red octopus favors beer bottles as homes, especially stubby brown ones. But nobody’s home in ours.

 

The hawksbill sea turtle is endangered worldwide.

 

We see that the sky overhead is bruised with dark clouds. A storm is gathering. So we turn toward shore to look for Jennifer and Tatiana. There they are! We wave—and they wave back enthusiastically. Only once we’re within a hundred yards can we hear what they’re shouting at us. “OCTOPUS!”

It’s 10:10 by the time we catch up. Jennifer pulls her head out of the water just long enough to say “Mmmmnnthth!” She’s so excited, she forgets to pull her snorkel out of her mouth at first. Seeing our puzzled expressions, she remembers to remove it. “I’m looking at an octopus!” she says, then pops the snorkel back in and plunges below again.

By the time I can locate it, the octopus has retreated into a hole. All I can see are white suckers along one bluish arm, curved inside a small cavern in some dead coral. Jennifer announces that she will name it Kwila after her dog, a half malamute, half border collie she adopted as a puppy.

 

An octopus peers at us from atop some coral.

 

It turns out Kwila is the second octopus of the day! Tatiana was the first to spot one—and she found it during the first ten minutes of their foray. It was hunting, spread across a shallow gully, its skin a beautiful blue-green color. “When it saw me, its head turned brown, and then its arms turned brown,” she says, “and then it went down its hole.” She named it Cleo, after her white poodle—a dog who has no fewer than three octopus-shaped plush toys to play with.

The clouds that were gathering are now hissing down rain. It’s cold above water, but from beneath the surface, looking up, the drops look like inside-out dimples and the rain sounds like sizzling grease. Jennifer asks us to make just a few more passes over the shallows. “Look for disruption. Somebody moving rubble around.” We agree to turn back at eleven—water is not a good place to be when there might be lightning. We all head toward shore.

The team is confident now. “As soon as we got here,” says Tatiana, “I said, ‘Yeah! This is the place. We’ve found our study area!’” Our site reminds her of one of her octopus study areas in Brazil, Tatiana tells us as she sits down in the foot-deep water to remove her fins and walk ashore. David takes one last look—and right beside Tatiana he finds a pile of shells, a hole in the rock—and inside, another octopus! Sticking with the dog theme, he names it Grover, after the beagle his family adopted when he was ten.

Before leaving, we mark the three dens so we can find them again. We leave a collection bucket tied to a rock near one and a red bungee cord at another. We haul a flat black rock over to mark the third. In the cold rain, we pile into the truck to return to CRIOBE, wash our gear, and take a hot shower. It doesn’t matter that nobody has a dry towel.