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Editor's ViewpointMeditations Of A Minnesota Mossback |
Wake For An Octopus … Move Down! Move Down!
I must have been about 10 years old when my dad got the call about the octopus. Caught by chance in a commercial fisherman’s net, it was really, really big, my dad was told, and it wasn’t moving much.
Dad grabbed his hip waders, jumped in the car and headed west to Edmonds, where he taught biology classes at the high school and had earned a bit of a reputation as being the “go-to” guy when wild animals needed a helping hand.
I was waiting several hours later when he returned home, tired and dejected, with a dead octopus in the trunk, his efforts to revive the massive creature clearly unsuccessful.
I imagine that any visions I may have harbored of Dad trying to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to an octopus— which is more closely related to a clam than a human— were immediately dispelled by his telling of the tale around the family dinner table.
It seems that he had donned said waders, reintroduced the octopus to the sea at Edmonds Beach, and spent the next hour pacing back and forth along the shore of Puget Sound, guiding the octopus behind him to try to revive it. The sight soon attracted a large number of spectators.
It soon became evident, however, that the octopus was a goner.
“I was in a bit of a quandary,” Dad recalls. “I could let go of the octopus, I could swim five miles across to Kingston, or I could walk back into the crowd and admit defeat.”
As I remember, we buried the cephalopod in great-grandma’s raspberry patch: nobody wanted it left on the public beach to rot, and my parents figured it would make good fertilizer.
How many adults could say that as a kid they learned that octopuses don’t go through rigor mortis? At least, ours didn’t.
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It seems octopuses (yes, Oxford prefers that plural form over “octopi”) have been back in the news. The creatures— though spineless—have been recognized as the only invertebrates to use tools.
And that’s a big deal.
In fact, animal cruelty laws in the United Kingdom now recognize octopuses as “honorary vertebrates,” extending various protections to them due to their higher cognitive abilities.
I’d hazard a guess that you haven’t seen an octopus doing the New York Times Sunday crossword, so what is it these cephalopods can do?
They use tools.
Small veined octopuses off the coast of Indonesia have been videotaped harvesting discarded coconut shell halves on the ocean floor to use as shelter. The tasty, boneless animals are easy pickings for predators unless they can hide themselves. Coconut shells—about the size of a large teacup—serve them well, especially when they can take two halves and join them together while inside.
But what really shocked scientists is that the octopuses were seen collecting the shells, blowing the mud out in jets, and stacking the shell halves, before transporting their heavy burdens over 50 feet away by “stilt-walking” on tiptoe on the seabed.
“I almost drowned laughing when I saw this the first time,” one scientist was quoted as saying.
Scientists report that octopuses remember cues and solve mazes. The creatures are known for mischievous behavior, escaping “escapeproof ” aquariums to raid other locked aquariums full of fish while no one is looking.
Octopuses have also been seen building retaining walls out of rocks at the entrance to their dens to keep the predators out.
It seems that the tool-users of the world—man, chimpanzees, monkeys, dolphins and crows—must, to quote Alice’s Mad Hatter, “Move down! Move down!” to make room for the octopus.
And, while we’re at it, we may just as well set some more places at the table.