“There is a connection here that crosses a divide not just from air into water, but also across half a billion years of separation. And it’s been a privilege to have a relationship with such a strange and wonderful creature.”
During PBS Nature’s press session this past summer in Beverly Hills, Calif. on Octopus: Making Contact, the season-opening program in the venerable wildlife filmmaking showcase, marine biologist David Scheel regaled the semi-annual gathering of the Television Critics Association about a critter that, for all its familiarity in popular culture, science doesn’t know that much about.
Their remarkable intelligence, for starters. When the program aired last month, viewers learned about innumberable escape stories of octopus in their dealings with humankind over the years, everything from an octopus that hid in a teapot while onboard a trawler in the English Channel to the octopus at a New Zealand aquarium that escaped its tank, crawled across the floor, disappeared down a drain and swam out to sea, and freedom.
“Some of my favourite stories are about pet octopus popping out of their tank to snack on their neighbours,” Scheel recalled. “My investigations into this suggest an octopus leaving its tank to grab a snack does happen. But finding its way back? That’s probably urban legend.”
Scheel, a oprofessor of marine biology at Alaska Pacific Univeristy and his teenage daughter Laurel set up a glass aquarium in their living room in Anchorage and studied an octopus over time, watching everything from its hunting habits to its growing fascination with TV.
“You look at them,” Scheel said, “and you feel like they’re looking back.”
That’s not an illusion, he insists. They are looking back.
After years of studying octopuses in the wild, Scheel wanted answers to some of the questions that have confounded scientists for years.
“We take our way of existence for granted, but there are other ways of being. Octopuses followed a different evolutionary path, making them different from all the other intelligent animals on this planet.
“But me? I’m less intrigued by the differences and more interested in our similarities . . . What would I find out if I invited an octopus into my home? What kind of connection is possible with an animal that has three hearts and blue blood running through its veins?”
An octopus that watches TV was a first, even for Scheel.
“We'd come in,” Scheel’s daughter Laurel said, “we'd turn on the TV, we'd sit down, and a couple of minutes later, she'd move over to the front of the tank, closer to the TV.
“She started doing that pretty much every time we would come into the living room to watch TV.
“And so, we'd have TV time with the octopus.”
So far, so weird.
The most intriguing part came at the end, though, in a video that has since gone viral.
It turns out our eight-legged sea creature companions can dream. Who knew? The show-stopping footage, showing the mysterious creature asleep and changing colour from grey to yellow and then translucent to the point of seeming to be invisible, went viral on Twitter, and has been viewed, shared and talked about more than 3 million times — 3,023,978 to be exact, on YouTube alone, since the end of September.
There’s a bigger issue in play, though, not so much science-based as moral. If it’s true that octopuses are sentient, and much more intelligent than we give them credit for, is it right to pen them up in a glass box for the sake of observation?
As one commenter posted on YouTube, “Se’s dreaming about the day she was just minding her business snacking on crab legs and then captured by some nerd.”
“Nerds like him help extend the horizons of human knowledge through years of research and study,” another commentor responded angrily. “What have you recenty done for civilization, salty boy?”
Even so, the original comment hit a nerve. “Stuck in a tank and put on YouTube,” someone else commented, hoping to have the final word. “This is sad. Free the octopus.”
They are highly intelligent, another scientist noted. It’s entirely possible she is dreaming.
“Imagine the things we would not have experienced had the Internet not been invented.”
Food for thought.
Or, put another way:
Guy: “Dreaming about food.”
Octopus: “Dreaming about transdimensional multiverse travels.”