This, I learned, is a sign of a relaxed octopus. When I stroked her soft head with my fingertips, she changed color beneath my touch, her ruby-flecked skin going white and smooth. Athena was tasting me and feeling me at once, knowing my skin, and possibly the blood and bone beneath, in a way I could never fathom. Although an octopus can taste with all of its skin, in the suckers both taste and touch are exquisitely developed. But to me, Athena’s suckers felt like an alien’s kiss - at once a probe and a caress. “I have always a struggle before I can make my hands do their duty and seize a tentacle,” he confessed. The famous naturalist and explorer William Beebe found the touch of the octopus repulsive. Each arm has more than two hundred of them. “She’s looking at you,” Dowd said.Īs we gazed into each other’s eyes, Athena encircled my arms with hers, latching on with first dozens, then hundreds of her sensitive, dexterous suckers. Her left eye (octopuses have one dominant eye like humans have a dominant hand) swiveled in its socket to meet mine. Athena’s melon-sized head bobbed to the surface. I plunged both my arms elbow deep into the fifty-seven-degree water. Her eight arms boiled up, twisting, slippery, to meet mine. She had already oozed from the far corner of her lair, where she had been hiding, to the top of the tank to investigate her visitor. The moment the lid was off, we reached for each other. Regardless of whether they live on land or water, more than 95 percent of all animals are invertebrates, like Athena. We think of our world as the “real” one, but Athena’s is realer still: after all, most of the world is ocean, and most animals live there. The other world was hers, the reality of a nearly gelatinous being breathing water and moving weightlessly through it. One world was mine and yours, the reality of air and land, where we lumber through life governed by a backbone and constrained by jointed limbs and gravity. The heavy lid covering her tank separated our two worlds. In a back room, he would open the top of Athena’s tank. Now was my chance: senior aquarist Scott Dowd arranged an introduction. Their findings are challenging our understanding of consciousness itself. But now, increasingly, researchers who study octopuses are convinced that these boneless, alien animals - creatures whose ancestors diverged from the lineage that would lead to ours roughly 500 to 700 million years ago - have developed intelligence, emotions, and individual personalities. Only recently have scientists accorded chimpanzees, so closely related to humans we can share blood transfusions, the dignity of having a mind. Octopuses are classified within the invertebrates in the mollusk family, and many mollusks, like clams, have no brain. How can an octopus know anything, much less form an opinion? Octopuses are, after all, “only” invertebrates - they don’t even belong with the insects, some of whom, like dragonflies and dung beetles, at least seem to show some smarts. Not long ago, a question like this would have seemed foolish, if not crazy. Many times I have stood mesmerized by an aquarium tank, wondering, as I stared into the horizontal pupils of an octopus’s large, prominent eyes, if she was staring back at me - and if so, what was she thinking? But most intriguing of all, recent research indicates that octopuses are remarkably intelligent. Here is someone who, even if she grows to one hundred pounds and stretches more than eight feet long, could still squeeze her boneless body through an opening the size of an orange an animal whose eight arms are covered with thousands of suckers that taste as well as feel a mollusk with a beak like a parrot and venom like a snake and a tongue covered with teeth a creature who can shape-shift, change color, and squirt ink. No sci-fi alien is so startlingly strange. I came to meet Athena, the aquarium’s forty-pound, five-foot-long, two-and-a-half-year-old giant Pacific octopus.įor me, it was a momentous occasion. ON AN UNSEASONABLY WARM day in the middle of March, I traveled from New Hampshire to the moist, dim sanctuary of the New England Aquarium, hoping to touch an alternate reality.
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