We Welcome Our Cephalopod Overlords: Octopus! - Reactor

Just in time for this chapter of the Bestiary, Prime Video has debuted a new docuseries narrated by Phoebe Waller-Bridge and starring our favorite cephalopod. It’s a lighthearted and loving look at the octopus. “There does seem to be a unique connection between the human and the octopus,” our narrator tells us, despite the fact that we’re many millions of years removed from a common ancestor.

The series features scientist/quilter/octopus superfan named Dr. Jenny Hoffmeister, octopus specialist Piero Amodio, underwater photographer Luis Lamar, Greek fisherman/conservationist Giorgos, and entertainer Tracy Morgan, whose love for sea creatures and his giant aquarium serve as a sort of frame for the narrative (he doesn’t keep octopuses any longer, he couldn’t take the sadness of their short lives). It’s stitched together by Doris, an animated representative of the universal octopus. We follow her from the egg to the end, interspersed with various human perspectives.

The two episodes of the series hit all the main points. The weirdly wonderful anatomy. The venom that’s mostly harmless to humans but can paralyze and kill prey. The shape- and color-changing superpower. The ink. And particularly the intelligence, as represented in the opening sequence by Paul, the octopus who accurately predicted the winner of eight out of eight World Cup soccer games in 2010. Loser Argentina was so teed off that it threatened to turn him into a paella—complete with recipe. Then there’s the New Zealand octopus who staged a spectacular jailbreak from its aquarium. And the ones (plural) who have been observed to carry jellyfish spines as weapons.

But most of all, because we’re humans and that’s where our minds tend to go, we’re shown what to us is the great tragedy of octopus life: its short lifespan and its terminal reproductive cycle. Octopuses have no parental input. No raising, no nurture. Nobody teaches them how to octopus. Every one that survives attrition and predators to become an adult gets there on its own, with whatever knowledge or instinct is built in. It’s the diametrical opposite of humans with their long childhood and extensive parental and societal education.

Jenny observes that each arm of an octopus has its own brain; it has, in a phrase, nine minds. It also has taste receptors on the arms. When an octopus navigates across the ocean floor, it’s literally tasting every step. “Imagine the human tongue. Turn that into an animal.”

She wonders what that must be like. I think maybe there’s a distant correlation between an octopus tasting its floor and a dog’s nose mapping the world around it. They’re both super-senses by human standards, capabilities we can only begin to imagine.

Piero Amodio, like Jenny, is one of relatively few scientists who are willing or able to study octopuses in their native habitat. His particular interest is an even greater rarity: the larger Pacific striped octopus, which supposedly forms social groups. “It’s a kind of unicorn of octopuses,” he says, originally discovered in the 1970s by Arcadia Rodaniche. These octopuses lived in a colony off the coast of Nicaragua, and seemed to practice pair bonding and share food, behaviors which are not at all typical of octopuses in the wild.

Other scientists at the time were skeptical, but lab studies have supported some of Rodaniche’s findings. Octopuses in captivity have shared dens and food, and even had sex body to body instead of at arms’ length. It’s not impossible that a species of wild octopus may have done the things Rodaniche claims.

Piero sets out to find the supposed new species and its colony—“an underwater octopus Brigadoon.” A zebra-striped octopus has turned up in a fisherman’s net since Rodaniche’s expedition, so they do seem to be out there. Piero searches for it off the coast of Mexico, near Isla Magdalena.

It’s not the only example of apparent social gathering among a normally solitary species. There’s a place in Australia called “Octopolis” where octopuses appear to tolerate each other. They’ve been observed sharing small dens. But there’s been no study of their social structure, if any. Piero is inclined to think it’s not so much a fully functional city as a party town. Weekenders checking in for some fun in the, so to speak, sun.

His goal off Isla Magdalena is to find a colony and set up a longterm study. That doesn’t happen on this expedition. But that’s science. You don’t always find what you’re looking for. You just have to keep trying.

Maybe Piero doesn’t find his unicorn, but the giant Pacific octopus occupies front and center in the series, and there’s plenty of evidence and some amazing footage. When it hatches it’s minuscule, a tiny dot with arms, but it grows incredibly fast. At maturity it can weigh 400 pounds with a 27-foot arm span (says the series; it can get even bigger, supposedly, though on the average it’s more like 7-14 feet and under 100 pounds). We see it through Luis’ eyes and camera, “cruising the abyssal plain. It’s us and the animal 130 feet deep in the middle of the night.”

Octopus sex gets a big chunk of screen time, with diagrams and dramatizations, and an excerpt from Jacques Cousteau’s Les amours de la pieuvre, “The Love Life of the Octopus.” In the great man’s words, “The little male on the left, white from fear, reacts to the invitation of the female.” And then it gets technical.

The third right arm is the sex arm, Jenny tells us. Doris, our everyoctopus, stores the sperm of multiple males she meets. If she doesn’t want to mate with them, she eats them. (Which explains the part about fear.)

“Sex can be challenging,” Piero agrees.

So can being both predator and prey. We meet Giorgos as he pounds the hell out of an octopus that is about to become dinner. He represents the Greek octopus fishery, which is big business, but it’s in trouble because of overfishing.

And there’s an ethical quandary. Here we’re introduced to the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, a 2012 manifesto that acknowledges that some species show “evidence of near human-like levels of consciousness.” Among the animals listed are African grey parrots, orcas, magpies, great apes, and octopuses—the last through the pioneering studies of the inventor of the modern aquarium, Jeanne Villepreux-Power.

Her experiments, and others in almost two centuries since, have found that octopuses “can use tools, navigate mazes, plan ahead, and recognize humans, which demonstrate their complex cognitive abilities.” Does that mean they’re intelligent? That’s a tricky question.

Piero points out that humans tend to project our own thinking and behavior on the animals we study. We anthropomorphize. (Hence, in fact, naming our everyoctopus Doris and her featured lover Mike.) We have to learn to acknowledge that animals have different priorities. “They perceive the world in a different way. And their way of thinking will also be quite different from us.”

Piero draws an analogy to a primate’s baring of teeth. A human may interpret that as a smile, when in fact it’s a form of antagonistic display. And that’s an animal that shares 99% of its DNA with us.

Writer Sabrina Imbler begs to differ. They want to connect their audience with the animals they write about. Anthropomorphism for them is not a bad thing. They may be an alien intelligence, but they can do the same things we do, like solve a puzzle or escape from a tank. Imbler uses animals as a reflection of their personal feelings and experience.

I have thoughts about this, but that’s a whole other article, and needs some more sources. We’ll get to those in future articles. Meanwhile, back on the beach, here’s a freaky-cool fact: Octopuses can survive out of water for up to an hour.

Cue random passerby discovering this up close and personal. EEK!

Fisherman Giorgos has a different angle on it all. Even as he acknowledges and respects the intelligence of the octopus, his livelihood depends on hunting and eating it. It’s about predator and prey, and economic survival.

I don’t think the octopus would feel much different about it. Octopuses eat anything they can get their arms on, including each other. Giorgos’ fishery actually helps scientists learn more about octopus population, varieties, and behavior.

In spite of the severe decline in numbers in Greek waters, Jenny believes the species is “fairly resilient to climate change.” A warming planet means hatchlings growing faster and reproducing more quickly. Ergo, more octopuses.

The diversity of octopus species—around 300 worldwide—is a key to its resilience. More diversity means more types of food available, and a higher chance of survival.

The symbol of it all, our animated Doris, comes to the end of her life as the second episode draws to its end. Giorgos too is looking at an ending, the slow demise of the Greek octopus fishery. He’s learned that the sea has to be protected in order to keep it, and us, alive.

Imbler meanwhile is finding personal connections with the octopus’ story. They’ve read a newspaper article about a deep-sea octopus who brooded over her eggs for four and a half years. This gives rise to a wide range of feelings about human motherhood and the nature of sacrifice, as reflected in their own mother’s immigrant journey to the U.S. They muse about the octopus, and by extension about their mother: “I wanted to know if she ever regretted it.”

As the mother octopus dies, her eggs begin to hatch. The narrator starts to rhapsodize about what she must be feeling, but Jenny says whoa, stop. We have no idea. We can’t imagine. The mother dies, but that’s normal. That’s how she’s evolved. She’s meant to do that.

Tracy Morgan has his own take on the octopus’ lifespan. She gets a lot done in her four years. She’s born, grows up, finds a home, produces a family.

The planet, he goes on to say, is like the human body. It’s mostly water. We have to protect it. We have to care about it.

It all adds up to this: Everything is connected. Octopuses aren’t aliens. They’re descended from the same distant ancestor as humans. They belong to this planet just as much as we do.

Jenny shares a quotation that has stayed with her through her explorations of the octopus and its environment: “In the end, we will conserve only what we love. We will love only what we understand. And we will understand only what we are taught.” She doesn’t name the source, but it’s an excerpt from a speech delivered in 1968 by Senegalese environmentalist Baba Dioum.

The final lesson, and the ultimate point, is that we don’t have to make an octopus seem more human in order to care about him. What we need is what Jenny calls “radical empathy”: the ability to connect with creatures that are profoundly different from ourselves. That’s how we protect our future.

Because, she says, not entirely in jest, “They’re going to slowly take over the planet, become our overlords, and we just have to accept that.”