Chapter 5

 

 

Preserved pufferfish. Former flounders. Ex-eels. As we sit at the table in CRIOBE’s collections room each night, the specimens seem to stare down at us from where they float in formalin or coil in glass jars. They’re perched atop tall wooden cases filled with 126 drawers of shells, crab carapaces, and small stoppered vials of marine creatures—a library filled not with books but with bodies. Tens of thousands of specimens surround us as we struggle with the giant jigsaw puzzle of figuring out what our octopuses ate—a puzzle with some of the pieces missing.

“That Cleo, she really ate!” David says. He’s looking at a dozen items collected from her den. He selects just one to start.

“Would you agree,” he asks Jennifer, “that this is a fragment of a cowrie shell?”

Normally a cowrie would be easy to identify: these shiny, egg-shaped shells, the former home of marine snails, sport slitlike openings on the bottom and beautiful designs on top. They’re used for money in West Africa, as a badge of rank in Fiji, and a way to consult spirits and predict the future in India. The problem is, we’ve only got a piece of the shell—and it’s all we’ve got to try to figure out which one of the twenty species of cowrie known to be in Moorea’s waters (there are more than two hundred in the ocean) this one is.

“What we’re doing here is very different detective work” from what we do in the water, Jennifer explains. “Identifying all these shells is an absorbing task.” On the table in front of us are piles of books from CRIOBE’s library, with titles such as Shells of the Western Pacific in Color and Crustacea of New Caledonia. Others are in French: Les Récifs Coraliens de Tahiti et ses Îles.

 

Scallop shells.

 

We’re lucky with this cowrie. Even though it’s just a fragment, the piece we have is part of its upper side, showing a milky blue oval ringed in orange. That’s enough to instantly identify it as the ring cowrie, Monetaria annulus—one of the species used for money, and among the most widespread and best known of the cowries in the world.

Unfortunately, though, “we don’t always have the diagnostic pattern in hand,” Jennifer says. “And it can get really complicated!” For instance, consider the scallop shell Jennifer found outside Kwila’s den: it looks like the one she found in one of her books. “This shell has ridges and looks like that one,” Jennifer says, pointing to the picture. “Mantellum fragilis kiliense? Oh, no,” she says, reading further. “That’s supposed to be Japanese . . .”

Meanwhile, David is looking up crab species in a different volume. “There’s a thousand species of crustaceans here!” he says in amazement.

How do you even start on such a big project? Jennifer explains: “First, we try to get the big shape—and get to the family.” This doesn’t mean we want to meet the crab’s bereaved parents; “family” is a broad scientific classification of related animals, all of whom share certain physical characteristics. For instance, all cats—from your housecat to a lion—are in the same family, Felidae. All cats have short snouts, shearing teeth, and legs adapted for running.

 

In CRIOBE’s library, Keely consults a reference book.

 

Jennifer and David are looking at a crab carapace that was left outside Cleo’s den. The hindmost pair of legs on all crabs in this family are paddlelike—which helps them swim. That places them within the family Thalamita, known as the swimming crabs. Now they can try to narrow things down further—to genus and species. If you were trying to classify a cat, you might ask if it has the special bone in the throat called the hyoid. If so, you’d know your cat belongs to the genus Panthera, the roaring cats: tigers, leopards, jaguars, and lions. And next you might ask: Does it have a mane? Then it’s a lion, Panthera leo. Stripes? A tiger, Panthera tigris. And so on.

For crabs, the process is the same. Every detail must be scrutinized. “We need to look carefully,” says Jennifer, “and ask ourselves: What is the shape of the carapace? What about the claws? Are there spines on them?” It might be the clue to classifying the creature within a smaller group, and then a smaller one yet, and finally determining the species.

“Notice the particular shape these claws have,” Jennifer says to David. “Is it Thalamita chaptalii?” That one has triangular bumps on the carapace. Or Thalamita crenata? That one has blue and red on the claws. Or could it be Thalamita integra, with red lines across the claws . . . ?

 

David displays a crab carapace.

 

As frustrating as it sometimes seems, we’re making important progress—and having fun, too. “Oh, wow! We have three unknown crabs here, gang,” David announces. They’re not in the books. Maybe they are in the specimen drawers. Who knows—maybe we will discover a new species, or find a known species in a place where it’s never been recorded before.

“I’m a jigsaw puzzle fanatic,” says Jennifer. “This is what I do when I can’t be watching the animal behave.”

Jennifer and David work late into the night. The rest of us head for bed, hoping to dream of octopuses—and to actually find some the next day.

For most of our first week, it’s been two steps forward and one step back—promise and revelation, then disappointment. True, we’re making progress. But it’s been punctuated with frustration.

While the rest of the team was still scouting sites, Keith went scuba diving with CRIOBE’s divemaster, Franck Lerouvreur, along the barrier reef to the east of Opunohu Bay—and spotted an octopus hiding in its home! The next day, Keith returned to the site. To his astonishment, the octopus let him stick around as it roamed, changing color and pattern while traveling over roughly a fifty-square-foot area of reef, for more than half an hour. “It was like this dude was showing me around,” Keith said in wonder. “He seemed playful, and not afraid at all.” At one point the octopus even met up with another octopus. While Keith was photographing the first octopus, the second one stood up tall on its arms as if to get a better look, peering at the scene with what seemed like keen interest. “In all my years photographing animals underwater—sharks, tuna, turtles, fish—I’ve never encountered anything that watched me like this—like 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. They don’t appear to watch and learn. It was incredible!” Keith said.

Following an octopus, Keith met a second one.

The second octopus stood up tall to watch Keith photograph the first.

Keith got fabulous photos, and the next day took me scuba diving with him to find the octopus again. We saw dolphins skipping over the surface like stones. We met eight blacktip reef sharks swimming together like dogs running in a pack. But the octopus was gone, unavailable for study, and was not seen again for the rest of our trip.

Back in the shallows, Tatiana and David began habitat transects at Church Copse, yielding three hundred valuable pieces of data from the areas around each den. We all continued to collect shell remains, resulting in a growing menu of octo food items. Jennifer completed the personality test on Cleo (shy) and Grover (bolder).

Sometimes we couldn’t even find the octopuses in our marked dens. One day we took Yannick’s two children, Tamatea, age seven, and Vaimiti, eleven, with us to Church Copse to show them our study subjects. Maybe they could help us find more. Both kids learned how to swim at age three and are almost as at home in the sea as on land. But none of the resident octopuses was in its den. And we found no new octopuses.

Equally worrisome, we need at least one other site—or there will be nothing with which to compare the first one, a crucial element in the study.

Just short of the end of our first week in Moorea, Tatiana and David return from a provisioning trip to one of the small grocery stores. They’ve brought baguettes, cereal, lettuce, tomatoes, cheese, frozen vegetables—and two crab carapaces, the shells of one limpet and one cowrie. “From our new site!” David announces triumphantly. On their way back from the store, he and Tatiana scouted another shallow area on the other side of the bay, a welcome contrast to Church Copse: with a sandy, easy approach, it has more live coral and less of the annoying Turbinaria ornata algae. It’s a quick twenty-minute drive away, close to a dive shop. It even has a picnic table for lunch.

But does it have octopuses?

Jennifer with Tamatea and Vaimiti.

We’re eager to find out, though today our first priority is to return to Church Copse to complete the transects. While there, of course, we’ll look for prey remains—and more octopuses.

Hours pass and we find no new study animals. Tatiana begins the process of ferrying people back to CRIOBE in one of the pickups. Keith and I return first. Tatiana turns back for Jennifer. David and Keely will stay longest, since they can come back in the Frankencar.

David is working on the third transect when Keely, snorkeling fifty yards away, sees something move among the rubble. Could it be an octopus? How to find out? Should I touch it? she wonders, and reaches out her hand . . . then sees it’s not an octopus at all. It’s another master of disguise, who looks exactly like a rock. A poisonous stonefish.

Whew! Gotta be careful, Keely thinks. Shaken, she turns to swim toward David. On her way, another slight movement catches her eye. She’s sure this time: That one’s an octopus!

A mottled brown, the animal pokes its head out of its den and looks Keely square in the eye. Is it Kwila? Or someone new? Because octopuses change color and shape, no one can tell for sure. As Jennifer continues to look for more octopuses, Keely administers the personality test. The animal watches her closely. But when she touches it, the animal retreats into its den. Whoever it is, it’s a rather shy octopus.

Tatiana returns to collect Jennifer, leaving David and Keely to finish the new transect. At CRIOBE, Keith sorts his photos, Tatiana catalogs the transect data, and Jennifer and I start cooking dinner. Before we know it, it’s five thirty p.m.—then six—then six fifteen . . . and getting dark. “What’s keeping them?” asks Jennifer.

Though she remains calm, our expedition leader is nervous. The ocean can be dangerous even in the shallows. She knows these waters are home to deadly stonefish, and hopes our friends haven’t run into one. Spines along its back inject a venom powerful enough to kill a person and is so painful that victims have been known to demand the affected limb be cut off.

It’s six thirty when Keely staggers, exhausted, into the kitchen—sodden but excited. As David hoses the salt water from the back of the Frankencar, Keely tells us what happened:

“Right after Tatiana picked up Jennifer,” she says, “I start to swim toward David—and I see this rock outcropping with shells on a shelf! Here’s definitely the best midden we’ve seen.” She counted seventeen food items in all, mostly crab parts, all tucked carefully into a small crevice to the left and below a hole in the rock. She free-dived and looked in . . . “and there’s the octopus sitting inside, with arms curled into the shape of a handlebar mustache, looking right at me!”

She’s sure it’s none of the other animals from Church Copse. Size is hard to judge in an octopus, but she’s certain that the distance between this one’s eyes is much smaller than in the others.

When David surfaced from his transect, expecting the long day was done, Keely was almost afraid to tell him they now had another transect to do, plus the personality test and prey collection. But David was thrilled—and so were we!