THE SOUL OF AN OCTOPUS

Nonfiction

We’ve all had dates like that

THE SOUL OF AN OCTOPUS
By Sy Montgomery
272 pp. Atria

Reviewed by Marty Carlock

Visitors at Boston’s New England Aquarium watch staffers handling an octopus. An incredulous man asks them, “Does it know you?”

The answer is yes.

The octopus not only knows them, it plays with them. It knows who it likes and dislikes, who feeds it and who doesn’t, who smells good and who smells like medicine. The octopus gets so bored that its friends give it toys to play with – plastic Easter eggs to screw and unscrew, jars to open, rubber toys. The octopus’s friends have to be ingenious to keep it from escaping, because it is curious about everything and has a tendency to want to go exploring. Such an excursion is usually fatal.

Naturalist Sy Montgomery likes to write about unlikely animals. An earlier book of hers, The Good Good Pig, was a biography of a porcine named Christopher Hogwood, who lived with her and her family for 18 years. Octopuses, to her dismay, don’t live that long.

A lion is a mammal like us; an octopus is put together completely differently, with three hearts, a brain that wraps around its throat, and a covering of slime instead of hair. Even their blood is a different color from ours; it’s blue, because copper, not iron, carries its oxygen.

Montgomery begins this book with an odyssey to the New England Aquarium to make the acquaintance of a giant Pacific octopus. (She points out that “octopus” is a word of Greek origin, not Latin, so we must resist our tendency to say “octopi.”) A female named Athena, the octopus is simpatica with the writer, and vice versa. Montgomery sticks her forearms into the tank, and:

Instantly both my hands and forearms are engulfed by soft, questing suckers…Athena’s suction is gentle, though insistent. It pulls me like an alien’s kiss. Her melon-sized head bobs to the surface, and her left eye – octopuses have a dominant eye, as people have dominant hands – swivels in its socket to meet mine…I instinctively reach to touch her head…to my surprise, her head is silky and softer than custard. Her skin is flecked with ruby and silver, a night sky reflected in a wine-dark sea. As I stroke her with my fingertips, her skin goes white beneath my touch. White is the color of a relaxed octopus…

Montgomery admits not everyone would like this. In myth octopuses are hideous monsters, and some otherwise intrepid adventurers found it revolting to be kissed by suckers on coiling tentacles. She feels Athena is tasting her – octopuses can taste with their entire bodies, but most exquisitely with their suckers – perhaps recognizing her as female, possibly tasting skin, muscle, bone and blood beneath. “Although we have just met, Athena already knows me in a way no being has known me before.”

This naturalist’s personal approach to writing produces science information wrapped in personal,  easy-to-read narrative. There’s wry humor, too. One expert says, “With Athena, I’ve had four 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,” the author observes.

Later she admits that the creature can be dangerous. 

An octopus’s muscles have both radial and longitudinal fibers, thereby resembling our tongues more than our biceps, but they’re strong enough to turn their arms to rigid rods – or shorten them in length by 50 to 70 percent. An octopus’s arm muscles …are capable of resisting a pull one hundred times the octopus’s own weight. In Octavia’s case, that could be nearly 4,000 pounds. 

More than one aquarium octopus tried to pull Montgomery into the tank with it. The writer says she can almost always feel fear or anger from a mammal or a bird, but with mollusks, she’s not so sure. In her encounter with Octavia, she had just stubbed her toe and was feeling some pain. Recognizing the neurotransmitters of pain would be a useful ability for an octopus, she theorizes, enabling it to recognize prey that was injured and thus easy to catch.

Octopus ink, which the cephalopod squirts when it feels threatened, contains some surprising chemicals: the pigment melanin; dopamine, the feel-good hormone, and tyrosinase, an enzyme that irritates eyes, clogs gills, and alters hormones. Its arms not only can regrow; they can operate so independently that some researchers see them as “intelligence without a centralized self…Does each arm literally have a mind of its own?” 

Snorkeling and diving in the Pacific, Montgomery is befriended by a neuroscientist who points out evidence “that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness.” The author begins to ask each octopus she meets, “Who are you?”

“In this watery realm,” she writes, “I was…drawn to possibilities I had never before imagined.” Improbably, she takes us with her.

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Once a journalist chasing facts for The Boston Globe, Marty Carlock finds it’s more fun to make things up; her short fiction has appeared in a dozen-plus journals and quarterly publications. She’s author of A Guide to Public Art in Greater Boston and several unpublished novels. She sometimes writes for Sculpture and Landscape Architecture magazines.