Making Friends
with an Octopus

I have always loved watching octopuses in public aquariums, and had always dreamed of actually meeting one. In March of 2011, I got my chance.

At the New England Aquarium in Boston, one of the keepers took me behind the scenes. He opened the top of the tank housing the aquarium’s giant Pacific octopus. Her name was Athena, he told me—and immediately, the octopus turned bright red with excitement and flowed over to meet me.

Athena’s eye swiveled in its socket and locked on to my own. I plunged my arms into the cold 47-degree water, and her eight arms came boiling out, reaching for mine. She latched on to the skin of my arms and hands with her suckers, and soon I had the honor of feeling dozens of her strong, beautiful white suckers tasting me at once. They felt like cold, wet kisses with extra-strong suction.

I knew Athena was powerful enough to pull me into her tank, but I was never afraid. And she wasn’t afraid of me, either. How did I know? Because Athena allowed me to stroke her head—the first time she had done this with a stranger. And her skin turned white beneath my touch. I later learned that this is the color of a relaxed giant Pacific octopus.

Our interaction lasted more than a quarter of an hour before she let go of me. Even though Athena and I last shared a common evolutionary ancestor 500 million years ago, I strongly felt she was as curious about me as I was about her. Across the chasm of half a billion years, it seemed we were having a meeting of the minds.

I visited Athena twice more after that. Alas, just as we were becoming friends, she died of old age—which for a giant Pacific octopus can be the tender age of three. But since her death, I’ve come to know four other giant Pacific octopuses at the New England Aquarium, all of them females. Each had her own distinct personality. Each came to know me, and would rise to the top of the tank to greet me and explore my skin with her suckers.

The spring that Athena died, I met her successor, Octavia. I visited her every week. At first she was shy. But soon she came to know me. When my friend Wilson Menashi (the man who designed the locking cubes to entertain the octopus) would open the tank, she would hurry to meet us, and then flip upside down to accept a fish from our hands. Sometimes she’d try to pull me in, or reach for my face, or hold my hands with her arms.

A year after we met, Octavia laid eggs, and her behavior changed. At night, when nobody could see her, she began attaching long chains of oval, cream-colored eggs, each one the size of a grain of rice, to the ceiling and sides of her lair. Her eggs were infertile because she had no mate, but she probably didn’t know that. Now she wanted nothing to do with us. She occasionally accepted fish we handed her with a long tool, but for ten months, she was completely absorbed with her eggs, cleaning them, fluffing them, and guarding them.

Octopuses lay eggs only once, at the end of their lives, and Octavia was nearing the end of hers. The following spring, when her egg chains were disintegrating, Octavia developed an eye infection. Her keeper, Bill Murphy, decided to move Octavia to another tank behind the scenes, where her condition could be better monitored. A volunteer tried to urge her into a bucket, so she could be moved. Octavia wouldn’t go. But when Bill, her best human friend, who had known her and fed her since the day she arrived at the aquarium, touched her, she immediately agreed to enter the bucket. She was then safely transferred into the other tank.

And when I came in to visit her in her new home, she floated right to the top of the tank, looked into my eyes, and embraced me with her suckers. Even though she had not touched or looked at me for ten months, even though she was very old and probably very tired and weak, she remembered me and made the effort to greet me one last time.

I can’t know exactly what I meant to Octavia. But I know what she, and Athena, and the other octopuses I have known have meant to me. I am immensely grateful to them, for they have given me a great gift. They have given me a far deeper understanding of what it means to think and feel and know. They have shown me that, even though our lives could not be more different, an octopus and a person can find connection with each other.

 

An octopus uses the webbing between its arms to keep prey from getting away, throwing the webbing over the prey like a blanket to prevent escape.