Standing on a short stepstool, I bent over the tank waving a dead squid back and forth in the forty-seven-degree salt water. Finally the muscles of my hand froze. So I switched to my left hand, until it, too, froze and I could move it no longer. But still, despite my efforts with what I had hoped would prove an appealing food item, the New England Aquariums new giant Pacific octopus, a female named Octavia, remained plastered by her suckers to the opposite wall of her 560-gallon tank. She would not come to me—yet. I decided to try again later. I desperately wanted this octopus to be my friend.

Earlier that spring, I had met Octavias predecessor, Athena. The moment the aquarist opened the heavy lid to her tank, she slid over to inspect me. Her dominant eye swiveled in its socket to meet mine, and four or five of her four-foot-long boneless arms, red with excitement, reached toward me from the water. Without hesitation, I plunged my hands and arms into the tank and soon found my skin covered with dozens, then hundreds, of her strong, white, coin-size suckers. An octopus can taste with all its skin, but this sense is most exquisitely honed in the suckers.

“Weren’t you afraid?” my friend Jody asked as Sally and I hiked with her and her poodles through the woods the next day. Jody and I spent hours playing with and exercising our dogs every day; like me, she is a huge animal lover. But an octopus—boneless, cold, covered with slime? “Wasn’t it gross?” she asked.

“If a human had begun tasting me so early in our relationship,” I admitted, “I’d have been alarmed.” But this was an earthbound alien—someone who could change color and shape, who could pour her baggy forty-pound body through an opening smaller than an orange. Someone with a beak like a parrot and venom like a snake and ink like an old-fashioned pen. Yet clearly, this large, strong, smart marine invertebrate—one more different from a human than any creature I had ever met before—was as interested in me as I was in her. And that was why I was so intrigued.

I’d come back twice more to get to know Athena better. She even seemed to recognize me. Experiments I had read about, conducted at the Seattle Aquarium, proved that octopuses can and do recognize individual humans, even when the people are identically dressed and even when the octopuses are simply looking up through the water at them. Athena let me pet her head—something she’d never let a visitor do before. She turned white, the color of a relaxed octopus, beneath my touch. I had only started to know this strange and compelling creature, but already she had opened to me a possibility I’d never before explored: getting to know the mind of a marine mollusk, a creature closely related to brainless clams yet reportedly smart and sensitive.

I was working on a magazine article on octopus intelligence, which I hoped to expand to a book. Then, just one week after my third meeting with Athena, I received terrible news. Athena had died. She had likely succumbed to old age. Nobody knew for sure, as she had hatched in the wild, but Athena was probably three to five years old, the outer limit of giant Pacific octopus longevity.

I wept at the news. Only during my lifetime had scientists begun to acknowledge that chimpanzees, humankind’s closest relatives, are conscious beings. But what about creatures so different from us that you’d have to go to outer space, or into science fiction, to find anything so alien? What might I discover about the interior lives of these animals if I were to use, as a tool of inquiry, not only my intellect, but also my heart? Now that Athena was gone, so, it seemed, was the opportunity for that new adventure.

But days after Athena’s demise came an invitation. “There’s a young pup octopus headed to Boston from the Pacific Northwest,” the aquarist Scott Dowd emailed me. “Come shake hands (8) when you can.”

This would prove easier said than done.

✧

“Let’s try again later. She might change her mind,” Wilson Menashi, a longtime aquarium volunteer who had worked extensively with octopuses, suggested. Though Athena had seized me right away, Octavia showed no interest in meeting me—or anyone else, for that matter.

“They’re all individuals,” Wilson explained. “Even the lobsters have personalities.” Among octopuses, personality differences are well known to those who care for them, and are often reflected in the names aquarists give them. At Seattle Aquarium, one of the octopuses was so timid that she never came out from behind the filter. They named her Emily Dickinson after the reclusive poet. Finally, because she never showed herself to the public, they released her back into Puget Sound, where she’d been initially caught. Maybe, like Emily, Octavia was just shy.

Or there could be another explanation. Usually when the octopus on public display shows signs of aging, the aquarium gets a young octopus who grows up in a large barrel behind the scenes, getting to know people, before the animal takes its place in the big octopus tank. Because Athena had died unexpectedly, the aquarium had to get a new octopus fast, and understandably wanted a big one to impress the public. Octavia wasn’t as big as Athena, but her head was about the size of a cantaloupe, and her arms were about three feet long. It was clear that Octavia was not really a young pup. She was a large, perhaps nearly mature octopus who had been living wild in the ocean just weeks before.

So, even though I tried to interact with her three separate times that day, it was no wonder I got nowhere with Octavia on my first visit. It seemed I was having no better luck on my second trip. That morning, again I offered her squid to no avail. Then Scott got the idea to present the food to Octavia held in long tongs, which could be held right up to her face. Suddenly, Octavia seized the tongs—and then grabbed me. She began to pull.

Her red skin signaled her excitement. I was excited too. She had my left arm up to the elbow encased in three of hers, and my right arm held firmly in another. There was no way I could resist. A single one of her largest suckers could lift thirty pounds, and each of her eight arms had two hundred of them. An octopus’s arms, by one calculation, can pull a hundred times the animal’s own weight. If Octavia weighed 40 pounds, as Scott thought, that would pit my 120 pounds against her ability to pull 4,000.

But I wasn’t even trying to escape. I was aware that like all octopuses Octavia could bite, hard, with her parrot-like beak inside the confluence of her arms. I knew, too, about her venom. A giant Pacific’s is not, like some species, deadly, but it’s toxic to nerves and dissolves flesh. An envenomated wound can take months to heal. But I felt no threat from Octavia. I felt only that she was curious. I was too.

Scott, however, didn’t want to see me pulled into the octopus tank, so with Octavia tugging on one end of me, he had ahold of the other. “I thought I would end up holding your ankles!” he said once Octavia abruptly released her grip.

I hoped we had achieved a breakthrough. Now, at least, she seemed interested in me, and her interest had not seemed aggressive or dangerous. But was I reading her correctly? Reading an octopus’s intentions is not like reading, for instance, a dog’s. I could read Sally’s feelings in a glance, even if the only part of her I could see was her tail, or one ear. But Sally was family, and in more than one sense. Dogs, like all placental mammals, share 90 percent of our genetic material. Dogs evolved with humans. Octavia and I were separated by half a billion years of evolution. We were as different as land from sea. Was it even possible for a human to understand the emotions of a creature as different from us as an octopus?

Though I had learned much from my time with Clarabelle and her eight-legged kin in French Guiana, never before had I truly become close friends with an invertebrate—much less a marine invertebrate. Even imagining that I could befriend an octopus would be dismissed among many circles as anthropomorphism—projecting human emotions onto an animal.

It’s true that it’s easy to project one’s own feelings onto another. We do this with our fellow humans all the time. Who hasn’t carefully selected a gift for a friend that failed to delight, or asked someone for a date only to be coldly refused? But emotions aren’t confined to humans. A far worse mistake than misreading an animal’s emotions is to assume the animal hasn’t any emotions at all.

✧

A week later, I was back at the aquarium. This time I had company. The producers of Living on Earth, the national environmental radio show, had read my magazine story and were sending the show’s host, a producer, and a sound crew to record a segment on octopus intelligence. None of us—Wilson or Scott or even Bill Murphy, the head Cold Marine Gallery aquarist, who cared for Octavia every day—had any idea what Octavia would do.

As I peered into the water, Wilson selected a silvery capelin from the small bucket of fish perched on the lip of her tank. Octavia came over immediately, grabbing Wilson’s hand with some of her larger suckers. I plunged my hands in and she instantly grabbed me, too. More arms curled up from the water. “Go ahead—you can touch her,” Bill suggested to Steve Curwood, the host of the show. As a single sucker grasped his index finger, Steve gave a little shout. “Oh! She’s grabbing ahold here!” He was enchanted.

Soon, all six of us—Bill, Wilson, Steve and I with our hands in the water, and the producer and sound recorder, watching from the edge of the tank—were overwhelmed with sensation: the sucking grasp of her tasting us, the colors playing over her electric skin, the acrobatics of her suckers and arms and eyes. We stroked her, feeling her soft, silky slime as she tasted our skin, creating red hickeys with her suction. We watched her reshape the surface of her skin, making bumps called papillae that sometimes looked like a covering of thorns and other times looked like fat goose bumps. Sometimes the papillae formed little horns over her eyes.

We decided to feed her another capelin. But when we looked at the edge of the tank, the bucket was gone.

With six humans watching, she had stolen it out from under us.

We didn’t try to get the bucket back. She had let the fish fall out of it and was holding it beneath her, exploring it. But while playing with the bucket, Octavia was still also playing with us. Multitasking for an octopus is easy, because three-fifths of their neurons are not even in their brains, but in their arms. It’s almost as if each arm has its own separate brain—a brain that craves, and enjoys, stimulation.

I noticed that patches of Octavia’s skin had started to turn from red to white—the color of a relaxed octopus.

“She’s happy!” I cried to Wilson.

“Oh, yes,” he agreed. “Very happy.”

✧

The world’s seas are blessed with more than 250 species of octopus. We know little about most of them. But the majority of the species that have been studied—the giant Pacific among them—are thought to be largely solitary. Even mating is a fraught affair, apt to turn into the kind of dinner date when one octopus eats the other. So why would an octopus want to be friends with a person?

The answer, I think, is to play with us.

 

 

In the wild, octopuses are constantly exploring. They eat a huge variety of foods, from clams with shells that need to be opened, to fish that must be chased, to crabs that hide in coral crevices. But in addition to food, octopuses like to find stuff and take it home. Some species are known to collect two halves of a coconut shell and lug them quite some distance so they can pull the two halves back together around them and create their own private Quonset hut. Others bring stones back to the den and build a wall in front of the entrance. They famously steal GoPros and cameras from divers. Sometimes they’ll tug on divers’ face masks or regulators.

In captivity, octopuses enjoy toys, often the same ones with which children play. Octopuses like to take apart and put together Mr. Potato Head. They play with Legos. They’ll unscrew the lids to jars to get a tasty crab inside—but they enjoy manipulating objects so much, they’ll often screw the lid back on when they’re through. To keep the many octopuses he’s known occupied, Wilson, an engineer and inventor, created a series of nesting Plexiglas boxes with different locks. Octopuses enjoyed unlocking box after box to retrieve a treat inside.

Octavia enjoyed me, I think, because we liked to play with each other. Our games weren’t like baseball or dolls. They were more like versions of patty cake, but with suckers. Of course, staff and volunteers at the aquarium surely loved playing with her too—but they had other duties. I was willing to play endlessly, or at least until my hands froze or her blue copper-powered blood, which affords less endurance than our iron-based blood does, ran out of energy.

Sometimes I brought her new friends to play with. I brought my friend, Liz, a pack-a-day smoker whose taste Octavia did not seem to relish. I brought another friend who studied gorillas in Africa, with whom she played happily.

A high school senior who was job-shadowing me came along another day. Octavia doused her with salt water from her funnel, right in the face!

At one point that first year with Octavia, I had to skip my weekly visit to Boston in order to attend an octopus symposium in Seattle. When I returned to the New England Aquarium and Wilson opened her tank, Octavia jetted to my side and extended her arms to me with enthusiasm as unmistakable as Sally’s puffy smile. The octopus immobilized both my arms, sucking them so hard, I would have hickeys that lasted for days. We stayed together for an hour and fifteen minutes.

But it wasn’t long before Octavia wanted to play no more.

✧

“Octavia is being temperamental,” Bill emailed me.

Abruptly, her behavior had changed. Usually she liked to rest in the upper corner of her tank; now she sat on the bottom, or near the window facing the public, near the brightest lights. Octavia had always been a particularly colorful, often red octopus. Now she was much paler. And importantly, he told me, “She’s less interested in interacting with people.” These are all, he told me, signs of old age. The end of her life could be near.

I came in to see her, and she floated over to see me. But her grip was weak. Our interaction was over in fifteen minutes. I was heartbroken. Soon I’d be leaving on an expedition to Namibia for a book on cheetahs. Would she even be alive when I returned?

✧

I returned from Namibia to find that Octavia’s life, as well as my relationship with her, was profoundly different.

Her skin was as smooth as a blown-up balloon. Her face, her funnel, and her gill openings were turned to the wall. All her suckers faced inward too, holding fast to the sides of the tank and to the rock wall of her lair—all except those on one long arm that hung languidly down like a string from the balloon of her big body. Her color was pink veined with maroon except for the webbing between her arms, which was gray.

While I’d been away, Octavia had laid eggs—eventually, perhaps 100,000 of them. Pearl white, the size of rice grains, they hung in chains by the dozens, or by the hundreds. Each egg had a little black tail-like thread, which, using her dexterous suckers, she had braided together like onions. She then glued each chain to the ceiling or wall of her rocky lair. Because Octavia had not mated, her eggs were infertile. But Octavia could not know they would never hatch. The eggs were now Octavia’s sole focus, just as would be the case for a mother octopus in the wild.

A mother octopus never leaves her eggs, even to eat. In the wild, that means octopuses on eggs starve themselves for the rest of their lives. At least we could offer Octavia food. On the end of long tongs, Wilson extended a fish toward our friend in her lair. Octavia sent one arm, like an emissary, over to accept it. Then, as if remembering something, a second arm followed the first, and then a third reached out to taste mine. But she released me almost instantly. “She’s not friendly anymore,” Wilson told me. She was busy guarding her eggs and didn’t want a visit. “Let her do her job,” Wilson said, closing the lid to the tank.

In those days, I mainly watched Octavia from the public viewing area. I would arrive early, before the aquarium opened, to get a clear view.

Before the crowds arrive, much of the aquarium is dark, mysterious, and intimate. Watching Octavia was like a meditation. I emptied out my mind, sweeping a space clean to let her in. To prepare to see her, I courted stillness. I let my eyes adjust, tuned my brain to switch from seeing nothing to seeing a great deal—often more than I could process at once.

Her body might be brownish, mottled with white. She might look pink. Her skin could be thorny or smooth; her eyes, coppery or silver. She might be glued to the top of her den, or plastered to its sides. But she was always, always on her eggs. One morning, her arm was under her mantle—the part that looks like a head but is really the octopus’s abdomen—another arm attached by twenty-eight suckers to the ceiling of the lair. The skin between her arms hung as still as drapery. And suddenly, after twenty-five minutes of stillness, two other arms began to vigorously sweep through chains of eggs, like a person vacuuming the curtains.

At other times, she would fluff them, a different, softer motion, like you might use to plump a pillow. She also used her funnel to shoot jets of water at them, the way you might use a nozzle on a hose. Through her gill slits, she’d inhale a great breath of water, making her mantle expand like a blooming pink lady slipper orchid—and then she’d let loose with a typhoonic blast.

Egg-cleaning sometimes looked like a caress, Octavia using only the thin tips of her arms to stroke her eggs with the tenderness any mother would show to her baby. But even when she was motionless, Octavia was caring for her eggs. Much of the time, most of the eggs were hidden because she plastered her body over them, protecting them from all comers. Even though there were no predators in her tank, she would not leave her eggs.

I could not help but wish that her eggs were fertile and that her offspring would hatch. I wished that her end, which would be coming all too soon, might be vindicated, as Charlotte the spider’s was, with abundant new life resulting from her careful nurturing. But eggs fertile or no, Octavia’s devotion to them was profoundly beautiful. In each caress, each cleaning, each hour of steadfast protection of this mother’s eggs, I could see the ancient shape of life’s first love.

Thousands of billions of mothers—from the gelatinous ancestors of Octavia, to my own mother—have taught their kind to love, and to know that love is the highest and best use of a life. Love alone matters, and makes its object worthy. And love is a living thing, even if Octavia’s eggs were not. Molly. Christopher. Tess . . . all were no longer living, yet I loved them no less. And, I realized, too soon, Octavia herself would be no more. But love never dies, and love always matters. And so it still fills me with gratitude that Octavia tended her eggs with such diligence and grace. For I could face the inevitable fact of her dying with the knowledge that she would do so in the act of loving, as only a mature female octopus at the end of her short, strange life can love.

✧

In those days, to cheer up, I used to watch a video of giant Pacific octopus eggs hatching. The mother, having guarded and cleaned the eggs for six months, uses her funnel to blow the tiny babies, who look like exact miniatures of herself, out of the lair and into the open ocean, where they will live as plankton until they grow heavy enough to crawl. The mother octopus uses some of her last breaths to boost her newborns out to the sea. Within days, the divers who filmed this will return to find her dead.

But six months after Octavia laid her eggs, she was still strong. Seven months passed. Eight. Some of the eggs, despite her diligent cleaning, were disintegrating and falling to the floor of her exhibit. But still she would not leave them. Nine months passed. Then ten. It seemed some sort of miracle, but Octavia remained steadfastly plastered to her eggs, still hanging on.

Then one day I came in and noticed one of her eyes was horribly swollen. There was no treating the infection; she, like her decomposing eggs, was now simply falling apart. To make her more comfortable, Bill decided to remove her from the big tank and its potentially dangerous rocks, lights, and noisy public. But would she leave her eggs?

To everyone’s surprise, when Octavia tasted the touch of Bill’s hand, she agreed to move into a net and from there was transferred to a quiet, dark barrel behind the scenes.

Because she had been holed up in her rocky lair, she had not looked up at our faces through the water for ten long months. I had not touched or played with her all that time. But still, after her transfer from the main display tank, I wanted to see her at least one last time.

Wilson and I unscrewed the lid to her barrel and peered in. We held a squid for her in case she wanted to eat. She floated to the top and took the squid from our hands. But she dropped it. Hunger was not what brought her to the top of the tank.

She was old. She was sick. She was weak and near death. She hadn’t had any contact with us for ten months—given an octopus’s life span, that’s like not seeing someone for twenty-five years. But she not only remembered us, but made the effort to greet us one last time.

Octavia looked us in the eyes and gently but firmly attached her suckers to our skin. She stayed, tasting us for a full five minutes, until she sank back to the bottom.

✧

Did Octavia finally realize her eggs were infertile? In her last days, was she comfortable? Could she know how much I cared about her? Did it matter to her?

I wish I knew, but I don’t. But now, thanks to Octavia, I know something perhaps deeper and more important, perhaps best expressed by Thales of Miletus, a Greek philosopher who lived more than 2,600 years ago. “The universe,” he’s reported to have said, “is alive, and has fire in it, and is full of gods.” Being friends with an octopus—whatever that friendship meant to her—has shown me that our world, and the worlds around and within it, is aflame with shades of brilliance we cannot fathom—and is far more vibrant, far more holy, than we could ever imagine.