Her lair is beneath a rocky overhang, into which she can flow like water, but I cannot,

constrained as I am by bones and joints. (5)

“A man-eating shark, a giant poison-fanged moray, a murderous barracuda, appear harmless,

innocent, friendly and even attractive when compared to the octopus. No words can
adequately describe the sickening horror one feels when from some dark mysterious lair,
the great lidless eyes of the octopus stare at one… One’s very soul seems to shrink
beneath their gaze, and cold perspiration beads the brow.” (7, John Williamson)

Octopuses realize that humans are individuals too. They like some people; they dislike others.
And they behave differently towards those they know and trust. (9)

Her long delay in writing of it stemmed from a fear that other scientists would accuse her of
anthropomorphizing—projecting “human” feelings onto—her study subjects, a cardinal sin in
animal science. (10)

Henry Beston writes that animals “are not brethren, they are not underlings” but beings “gifted
with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never
hear.” (13)

She was leading me to a new way of thinking about thinking, of imagining what other minds
might be like. And she was enticing me to explore, in a way I never had before, my own planet—
a world of mostly water, which I hardly knew. (13)

“A lot of people are freaked out by them,” he told me. “When visitors come, we always have
someone there to help in case the person freaks out. Keeping the octopus in the tank is the
main goal. We can’t guarantee what they’ll do. With Athena, I’ve had four of her arms on me,
and you peel them off and then the other four arms are on.”
“I think we’ve all been on dates like that,” I observed. While Athena was tasting my arms and
hands, she had made a point of looking into my face. I was impressed that she ever recognized
a face so unlike her own, and wondered whether Athena might like to taste my face as well as
look at it. (15)

“I don’t have the language to answer that question.”… He means that he hasn’t thought of this
before. (22)

We as well as other animals can mimic another’s emotional state… If you are with, for example, a
calm, deliberate person, your own perception of time may begin to match his. Perhaps, as we
stroked her in the water, we entered into Athena’s experience of time—liquid, slippery, and
ancient, flowing at a different pace than any clock. I could stay here forever, filling my senses
with Athena’s strangeness and beauty, talking with my new friends.
Except our hands froze—so red and stiff that we could not move our fingers. Taking our
hands out of Athena’s tank felt like breaking a spell. I was suddenly desperately uncomfortable,
awkward, and incompetent. Even after rinsing my red skin with hot water for nearly a minute, I
was so cold I still couldn’t pick up the pen in my purse, much less write in my notebook. It was
as if I had trouble returning to the person, the writer, I was before. (23)

Being nosy about everything that goes on in the tank. Whenever we’re at the platform, she’s
hanging all over us, trying to see what’s on the platform, around the platform, and I’m
constantly pushing her away.” (32-33)

“They have different personalities. Even lobsters have different personalities. You stick around
here long enough and you’ll see.” (33)

“An aquarium without an octopus is like a plum pudding without plums.” (33)

Pindar of Thebes, the Greek lyric poet, suggested that the soul is more active while dreaming
than while awake. (38)

The rats’ dreams took place in an area of the brain known to be involved with memory, further
supporting a notion that one function of dreams is to help an animal remember what it has
learned. (38)

…fish sleep. Even nematodes and fruit flies sleep. (38)

When a fish appears to you in a dream, according to Jungian interpretation, the animal
rpresents insights bubbling up from intimate, oceanic mystery of the unconscious. (39)

…an octopus had tasted my pain. (41)

“I smell fish stress”… the low-tide odor Scott detects, he explained at the time, is thatof heat-
shock proteins. These are intracellular proteins that were first discovered to be released, in both
plants and animals, in response to heat, and are now known to be associated with other stresses
as well. (73)

“The problem with reading octopuses… is that they are too expressive.” … But even with our
voices and costumes and paint brushes and clay and technologies, can we ever come close to
expressing what an octopus can say with its skin alone? (74)

“slime is part of the two greatest pleasurable experiences known to humankind.” She thought
for a moment. “What’s the other one?” she asked. “Eating,” I replied. (76)

And for most of us, there is no better way to get to know a person than while petting an
octopus. (78)
But Anna had no sense of time and did not own, and could not read, an analog watch. So she
waited outside the door to the Wet Lab for an hour—in the pouring rain. (80)

Belonging to a group is one of humankind’s deepest desires. We’re a social species, like our
primate ancestors. Evolutionary biologists suggest that keeping track of our many social
relationhips over our long lives was one of the factors driving the evolution of the human brian.
IN fact, intelligence itself is most often associated with similarly social and long-lived creatures,
like chimps, elephants, parrots, and whales. But octopuses represent the opposite end of this
spectrum. (Short-lived, non-social) (81)

The ability to ascribe thoughts to others, thoughts that might differ from our own, is a
sophisticated cognitive skill, known as “theory of mind.”… self-awareness. (I think this, but you
might think that) (83)

This is why Octavia no longer wants to interact with us. She has more important things to do.
Caring for her eggs is the job that will last a female octopus to the end of her life. (95)

The proper end of any female octopus’s life should be laying eggs. Guarding them, aerating
them, cleaning them, Octavia will be able to complete the same rituals her mother completed
before her, and her mother before her, and her mother before her, back hundreds of millions of
years. (96)

In her memoir of living among the Bushmen, The Old Way: A Story of the First People, my friend
Liz lovingly invokes an image first coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins: “You are
standing beside your mother, holding her hand. She is holding her mother’s hand, who is
holding her mother’s hand…” Eventually the line stretches tree hundred miles long and goes
back five million years, and the clasping hand of the ancestor looks like that of a chimpanzee.
(96)

In the wild, most female octopuses lay eggs only once, and then guard them so assiduously they
won’t leave them even to hunt for food. The mother starves herself for the rest of her life. A
deep-sea species holds the record for this feat, surviving four and a half years without feeding
while brooding her eggs near the bottom of Monterey Canyon, nearly a mile below the surface
of the ocean. (97)

Then, she’d start throwing the herring back. (98)

A bite from a fish or an octopus is proof we are willing, even eager, to literally give ourselves
(even tiny, actual pieces) to the animals here, in order to touch the wild. (103)

Among the corals of the Giant Ocean Tank, a species of fish called the bird wrasse starts out life
as a black or brown female, then turns into a male. The commonest of sea creatures are
miracles. Take the jelly-fish. Many are born here; from eggs and sperm, they begin life as
plankton, then turn into brown blobs and settle on rocks or docks, as polyps. They start out
looking like something you’d scrape off the bottom of your shoe, then grow into something
more beautiful than an angel. (107)

So many of my friends, once outgoing and social, are transformed once their babies are born.
Women who couldn’t sit through a two-hour concert are held transfixed by their infants, even
though the babies do little more than suck, sleep, and cry. Hormonal changes that occur at birth,
including a flood of oxytocin, popularly known as “ the cuddle hormone,” help make possible
this change. Similar hormones might inspire Otavia’s devotion. In fact, octopuses have a
hormone so like oxytocin that scientists named it cephalotocin. (115)

A female octopus’s estrogen level spikes when she is of egg-laying age and meets a male. The
male’s testosterone levels rise.
Hormones and neurotransmitters, then chemicals associated with human desire, fear,
love, joy, and sadness, “are highly conserved across taxa,” Jennifer said. This means that whether
you’re a person or a monkey, a bird or a turtle, an octopus or a clam, the physiological changes
that accompany our deepest-felt emotions appear to be the same. Even a brainless scallop’s
little heart beats faster when the mollusk is approached by a predator, just like yours or mine
would do were we to be accosted by a mugger. (115-116)

“I’ve learned that happiness and sadness are not mutually exculsive.” (118, Anna)

Eggs were surely life’s first love, and protecting one’s eggs was surely love’s first urge. Love is
that anvient, that pure, that lasting. It has persisted through billions of species, through millions
of years. No wonder the sages say that love never dies.
And Anna well knows this truth. As Octavia tends her infertile eggs, Anna tends her
young friend’s grave. She looks for special, beautiful rocks to bring ot the cemetary, she tells me.
She knows that love lasts through everything, and that not even death can erase it.
Though Octavia’s eggs will never hatch, it fills us with gratitude that Octavia tends them
with diligence and grace. For when she dies, Octavia will do so in the act of loving as only a
mature female octopus, at the end of her short, strange life, can love. (118-119)

Sound travels four times faster in water than in air, and directionality is distorted… water carries
heat away from the body twenty-five times faster than in air. (127)

Pain was not the sole source of my suffering. It was the prospect of defeat. (128)

I have known no natural state more like a dream than this. I feel elation cresting into ecstasy and
experience bizarre sensations: my own breath resonates in my skull, faraway sounds thump in
my chest, objects appear closer and larger than they really are. Like in a dream, the impossible
unfolds before me, and yet I accept it unquestioningly. Beneath the water, I find myself in an
altered state of consciousness, where the focus, range, and clarity of perception are dramatically
changed. Is this what Kali and Octavia feel like all the time?
The ocean, for me, is what LSD was to Timothy Leary. He claimed the hallucinogen is to
reality what a microscope is to biology, affording a perception of reality that was not
before accessible. Shamans and seekers eat mushrooms, drink potions, lick toads, inhale
smoke, and snort snuff to transport their minds to realms they cannot normally experience.
(Humans are not alone in this endeavor; species from elephants to monkeys purposely eat
fermented fruit to get drunk; dolphins were recently discovered sharing a certain toxic puffer
fish, gently passing it from one cetacean snout to another, as people would pass a joint, after
which the dolphins seem to neter a trancelike state.
The desire to change our ordinary, everyday consciousness does not seize
everyone, but it’s sa persistent theme in human culture. Expanding the mind beyond the
self allows us to relieve our loneliness, to connect to what Jung called universal
consciousness, the original, inherited shapes shared with all minds; unites us with what
Plato called the animus mundi, the all-extensive wo rld soul shared by all of life. Through
meditation, ,drugs, or physical ordeal, certain cultures encourage seeking altered states to
commune with the spirits of animals, whose wisdom may seem hidden from us in ordinary
life. In my scuba-induced altered state, Ii’m not in the grip of a drug: I am lucid in my
immersion, voluntarily becoming part of what feels like the ocean’s own dream.
Who is to say that dreams are not real? Hindu mythology tells the story of the ascetic
Narada, who won the grce of Vishnu and was invited to walk with the god. When Vishnu
became thirsty, he asked Narada to fetch him some water. Narada went to a house and there
met a woman so beautiful he forgot what he came for. He married the woman; together they
farmed the land, raised cattle, and had three children. Then came a violent monsoon. Floods
threatened to carry away the village’s houses, the cattle, the people. Narada took his wife by the
hand, his children by the other. But the waters were too strong and they were lost. Narada was
swept beneath the waves. Washed up on shore, he opened his eye… to see there, still waiting for
his drink of water, Vishnu—the gogd who is often pictured as sleeping on a fathmonless ocean
as his dreams bubble forth to create the universe.
Once back on board the Reef Star, I pull off my mask and weep with joy. (143-145)

…fish bright as parrots… (145)

I expect the time to drag, but it goes quickly. In the sea, perhaps, time itself is slowed by the
water’s weight and viscosity. Even with just my hands in Kali’s or Octavia’s tank, time proceeds
at a different pace. (147)

To dive beneath the surface feels like entering the Earth’s vast, dreaming subconscious.
Submitting to its depth, its currents, its pressure, is both humbling and freeing. (147)

To see my friends, seasoned, graceful divers, looking so pathetically awkward and helpless, so
willing and vulnerable, is a shock. In a heartbeat, the diver is reborn, swallowed into another
reality, ,transformed from a shambling monster into a being of weightless grace. Is this what
happens to the spirit at death when it flies up to heaven? (148) (Sy, why you make me cry?)

I ascend with him slowly, like a dying soul reluctant to leave its body, and we watch the silver
trail of our bubbles rising above us like shooting stars. (153)
“I guess what I”ve discovered, is what you do today doesn’t affect yesterday.” We could not
change the fact of Kali’s death; but not even death could eradicate the joy of the day before.
After losing a friend with whom she had shared every birthday, every success, every happiness of
her youth, Anna knew: “Yesterday remains perfect.” (178)

She died like a great explorer. Like the astronauts who died blasting off in Challenger, oro the
brave men who perished in attempts to find the source of the Nile, penetrate the Amazon, visit
the poles, Kali had chosen to face unkown dangers in the quest to widen the horizons of her
world. (179)

It is no different from the mystery we pursue in all our relationships, in all our deepest
wonderings. We seek to fathom the soul.
But what is the soul? Some say it is the self, the “I” that inhabits the body; without the
soul, the body is like a lightbulb with no electricity. But it is more than the engine of life, say
others; it is what gives life imeaning and purpose. Soul is the fingerprint of God.
Others say that soul is our innermost being, the thing that gives us our senses, our
intelligence, our emotions, our desires, our will, our personality, and identity. One calls soul “the
indwelling consciousness that watches the mind come and go, that watches the world pass.”
Perhaps none of these definitions is true. Perhraps all of them are. But I am certain of one thing
as I siti in my pew: If I have a soul—and I think I do—an octopus has a soul, too. (227-228)

Hawaii, where ancient myths tell us our current universe is really the remnant of a more ancient
one—the only survivor of which is the octopus, who managed to slip between the narrow crack
between worlds. For seafaring and coastal people everywhere, the octopus’s transformative
powers and elastic reach connected land and se, heaven and earth, past and present, people
and animals. Facing the ocean in an eight-sided church, drenched in blessings, immersed in
mystery, my natural response, even on an expedition in the name of science, is to pray. (228)

Finally, Octavia sank to the bottom, still regarding us with her good eye. How tired she must be,
I thought, after her rich, full life—a life lived between worlds. She had known the sea’s wild
embrace, she had mastered the art of camouflage; she had learned the taste of our skin and the
shapes fo our faces; she had instinctively remembered how her ancestors wove eggs into chains.
She had served as an ambassador for her kind to tens of thousands of aquarium visitors, even
transforming disgust to admiration. What an odyssey she had lived. (238)

Human tears of intense emotion are chemically distinct from tears produced by eye irritants;
tears of both joy and sorrow contain prolacin, a hormone that peaks in mena dn women during
sex, dreams, and seizures, and is associated in women with the synthesis of breast milk… Fish
have prolactin. Octopuses do too. (239)

Hunger was not the reason she had surfaced earlier, and it wasn’t what brought her now. (239)

The reason she surfaced was abundantly clear. She had not interacted with us, or tasted our skin,
or seen us above her tank for ten full months. She was sick and weak. In less than four weeks, on
a Saturday morning in May, Bill would find her, pale, thin, and still, dead at the bottom of her
barrel. Yet, despite everything, we knew in that moment that Octavia had not only remembered
us and recognized us; she had wanted to touch us again. (239)