Octopus: The Footed Void
by Caspar Henderson
The closer you look at an octopus, the more you see.
Consider its anatomy: the “head,” a sack resembling a human scrotum that can shift through the entire color spectrum; the three hearts pumping blood that contains copper rather than iron; the eyes so very like human ones and yet radically more elegant in design. In a celebrated poem Ogden Nash begs the octopus to tell him if its limbs are arms or legs. Textbooks have a no-nonsense answer: they are arms, not legs (and emphatically not tentacles). But super tongues would be at least as good. Each octopus arm is a muscular hydrostat, like a human tongue, and each of the tens or hundreds of suckers on it is lined with tens of thousands of chemoreceptors—taste buds to you and me—and a comparable number of nerve endings that provide an exquisite sense of touch.
Or consider its intelligence: In experiments carried out with the Common octopuses, individuals are faced with five opaque doors, only one of which has a crab, which they love to eat, hidden behind it. Different symbols are visible on each door. After a few tries, the octopus accidentally chooses the correct symbol. In subsequent trials, the octopus quickly recognizes the symbol and opens the correct door, even when they are all moved around. If a crab is placed behind a door with a different symbol the octopus quickly learns the new symbol. In other experiments octopuses have shown ability to distinguish symbols about as well as a three- or four-year-old child.
Octopuses also play—there is no other word—with objects that are of no apparent use to them, such as little balls thrown into their tanks. These behaviors, and others, are unique among animals without back-bones, and more sophisticated than any displayed by fish as well as many reptiles and mammals.
Their intelligence is all the more striking because it has evolved completely independently of the line that gave rise to us: our last common ancestor—perhaps some simple, slug-like creature—lived well over 540 million year ago. Humans are more closely related to starfish and sea cucumbers. And yet across a chasm in evolutionary time we encounter a creature with some striking resemblances to ourselves: a mind that calculates and even, perhaps, possesses a form of awareness. In some ways, their abilities surpass ours.
There are more than three hundred different octopods (that is, species of octopus). One species, the blanket octopus, has the most extreme divergence in size between the two sexes in a single species of any animal: females weigh 10,000 times as much as males. Having sex must take imagination, as well as skill. Stauroteuthis, which lives in open water 2,000 meters below the surface, glows in the dark to attract prey, and inflates its webbed pink arms to make what is probably the world’s only bathypelagic tutu. The deepest living octopus discovered so far—typically 3,000–4,000 meters down—is Grimpoteuthis, popularly known as the dumbo octopus because large flaps on its body resemble the ears with which the cartoon elephant flies.
The Vampire squid—which is actually an octopodiform and not a squid, and looks like an apparition from an impossibly ancient dream—is harmless to humans. But the tiny blue ring octopus, which lives in shallow waters around Australia, is one of the most venomous animals in the world despite being only a few inches across. The mimic octopus, which was only discovered in 2005 in shallow Indonesian waters, can rapidly morph its body to resemble a flounder, a sea snake, a lionfish, and almost anything else it sees. Its cousin Wunderpus photogenicus, discovered in 2006, is not so flexible but the contrast between its white stripes and the rich red-brown background of its body is nature’s answer to the op art of Bridget Riley.
Compared to this reality, our cultural imagination is massively impoverished. Octopuses are more likely to appear as an item on the menu, as a scary monster in a creaky horror movie, as a participant in Japanese soft porn, or as an item of World Cup infotainment. Appetite, loathing, and lust have certainly played big parts in human imaginings of these beasts. But we should take a cue from the Minoans who portrayed them in images that, even after 3,500 years, almost sing out loud in celebration of their strangeness and beauty.
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The closer you look at an octopus, the more you see.
Consider its anatomy: the “head,” a sack resembling a human scrotum that can shift through the entire color spectrum; the three hearts pumping blood that contains copper rather than iron; the eyes so very like human ones and yet radically more elegant in design. In a celebrated poem Ogden Nash begs the octopus to tell him if its limbs are arms or legs. Textbooks have a no-nonsense answer: they are arms, not legs (and emphatically not tentacles). But super tongues would be at least as good. Each octopus arm is a muscular hydrostat, like a human tongue, and each of the tens or hundreds of suckers on it is lined with tens of thousands of chemoreceptors—taste buds to you and me—and a comparable number of nerve endings that provide an exquisite sense of touch.
Or consider its intelligence: In experiments carried out with the Common octopuses, individuals are faced with five opaque doors, only one of which has a crab, which they love to eat, hidden behind it. Different symbols are visible on each door. After a few tries, the octopus accidentally chooses the correct symbol. In subsequent trials, the octopus quickly recognizes the symbol and opens the correct door, even when they are all moved around. If a crab is placed behind a door with a different symbol the octopus quickly learns the new symbol. In other experiments octopuses have shown ability to distinguish symbols about as well as a three- or four-year-old child.
Octopuses also play—there is no other word—with objects that are of no apparent use to them, such as little balls thrown into their tanks. These behaviors, and others, are unique among animals without back-bones, and more sophisticated than any displayed by fish as well as many reptiles and mammals.
Their intelligence is all the more striking because it has evolved completely independently of the line that gave rise to us: our last common ancestor—perhaps some simple, slug-like creature—lived well over 540 million year ago. Humans are more closely related to starfish and sea cucumbers. And yet across a chasm in evolutionary time we encounter a creature with some striking resemblances to ourselves: a mind that calculates and even, perhaps, possesses a form of awareness. In some ways, their abilities surpass ours.
There are more than three hundred different octopods (that is, species of octopus). One species, the blanket octopus, has the most extreme divergence in size between the two sexes in a single species of any animal: females weigh 10,000 times as much as males. Having sex must take imagination, as well as skill. Stauroteuthis, which lives in open water 2,000 meters below the surface, glows in the dark to attract prey, and inflates its webbed pink arms to make what is probably the world’s only bathypelagic tutu. The deepest living octopus discovered so far—typically 3,000–4,000 meters down—is Grimpoteuthis, popularly known as the dumbo octopus because large flaps on its body resemble the ears with which the cartoon elephant flies.
The Vampire squid—which is actually an octopodiform and not a squid, and looks like an apparition from an impossibly ancient dream—is harmless to humans. But the tiny blue ring octopus, which lives in shallow waters around Australia, is one of the most venomous animals in the world despite being only a few inches across. The mimic octopus, which was only discovered in 2005 in shallow Indonesian waters, can rapidly morph its body to resemble a flounder, a sea snake, a lionfish, and almost anything else it sees. Its cousin Wunderpus photogenicus, discovered in 2006, is not so flexible but the contrast between its white stripes and the rich red-brown background of its body is nature’s answer to the op art of Bridget Riley.
Compared to this reality, our cultural imagination is massively impoverished. Octopuses are more likely to appear as an item on the menu, as a scary monster in a creaky horror movie, as a participant in Japanese soft porn, or as an item of World Cup infotainment. Appetite, loathing, and lust have certainly played big parts in human imaginings of these beasts. But we should take a cue from the Minoans who portrayed them in images that, even after 3,500 years, almost sing out loud in celebration of their strangeness and beauty.
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