[00:00:00] Speaker A: In the swirling currents of our oceans, nature's ultimate shapeshifters thrive. Masters of disguise, octopuses embody the wild magic of the sea. Today, we're plunging into their world, where every tentacle tells a story of survival, adaptation, and wonder.
Welcome to Rewadology, the nature podcast that explores the human side of conservation, travel, and rewilding the planet. I am your host, Brooke Mitchell, conservation biologist and adventure traveler.
Today I am joined by David Schiel, PhD, an acclaimed professor of marine biology and author of many things under a Rock, the mysteries of octopuses. David has dedicated 25 years to studying these incredible cephalopods. We dive deep into so many aspects of octopuses lives, including their behavior, intelligence, social lives, conservation status, cultural significance, especially in alaskan indigenous communities, and the scientific questions he and his team are working on. Today, we explore why he felt inspired to turn his decades of work into a book. And I asked him several questions based.
[00:01:19] Speaker B: On my top takeaways, I can pretty much promise that you will walk away.
[00:01:24] Speaker A: From this conversation with a newfound appreciation.
[00:01:27] Speaker B: For these eight legged creatures under the sea.
[00:01:30] Speaker A: Before I forget, if you're loving what you're hearing, don't be shy. Hit that subscribe button, leave us a review, and share this episode with your ocean loving pals. Every little bit helps spread the conservation love. All right, enough for me. Let's dive into the magical and mysterious world of octopuses with the one and only David Schiele.
Well, hi, David. Thank you so much for sitting down.
[00:01:57] Speaker B: With me, you know, all the way from Alaska and your very, very busy time. But we have so much to cover, and I am so grateful and honored to be speaking with you today. So I have to ask this question first before we get into anything deeper or all of your knowledge of everything you could have studied, why did you choose octopuses?
[00:02:25] Speaker C: Well, I just kind of fell into it, I guess you could say.
I mean, probably the immediate reason that I kept going, as opposed to why I started, was that they're just captivating animal. And so I work at a university that focuses on undergraduate education, and they wanted projects that undergraduates would be interested in working with. And so I had already done a tiny bit of work with the octopuses, and it seemed like that would be a reasonable one up here in Alaska to help keep undergraduates interested.
Yeah, originally I got started on it because I was living in Cordova at the time. Cordova, Alaska, on Prince William Sound. And that's one of the towns that was not in the path of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, but heavily impacted by it. It was one of the main harbors where fisheries harvest went to. And so I worked in Cordova, and people there, Alaska natives, harvest octopuses as part of their subsistence harvest, their sort of native cultural foods from the land and the water. And so there was some interest within the native communities about the octopus population and whether it had been harmed by the oil spill. And so I wrote a proposal to look into that some years after the oil spill itself.
[00:04:03] Speaker B: And so. And the reason why we sat down, we're sitting down today is I've had the privilege of reading your phenomenal book. Like many things under rock, the mysteries of octopuses. Like, wow, I feel so much more educated about this incredibly unique group of animals that I just didn't. I just wasn't even aware or knew of exactly the mysteries of, like, the title of this is perfect. So what about them makes them so unique? Why are they so different when we look at them, fundamentally, biologically, behaviorally, like, why are they so. Yeah, why are they so unique when it comes to our living animal kingdom world?
[00:04:50] Speaker C: Yeah. Well, I think that people tend to have a particular view of the animal kingdom, right. And part of that view is the closer it is to us, the more interesting it is. Right? So, like, chimpanzees are fascinating because they have societies, you know, they recognize one another. They form. Form friendships, they form enemies. They fight. They fight battles, which are somewhat like wars. They use tools, and they're our nearest. Some of our nearest living relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos. And so, you know, that's fascinating. And so if we accept that, that's, you know, sort of the basic attitude that people have about animals.
One of the interesting things about that is just the flip side of it. Like, if animals that are closely related to us are interesting, then does that mean animals that are distantly related to us are boring? Is that really kind of the flip side of that? And so I think when we go to something like, that's not even. It's not a mammal, so no furs, no lactation, no nursing mothers.
But then it's not even a bird or a fish which have spinal cords. It's an invertebrate animal whose body layout is very distant to our own evolutionarily.
And so I think what makes the animal so interesting to us octopuses, is that we kind of don't expect them to be interesting, but then we find out they're just as complicated and intriguing and, you know, specialized in their own way as any other animal, including as the chimpanzees and so it's fascinating to see not so much how weird and different octopuses are, but how often they confound our expectations, which is kind of a problem with our expectations, rather than a property of the octopuses.
They've got some amazing capacities, but part of what makes them amazing, only part, but part of what makes them amazing is we just don't think we're going to see that kind of thing in an invertebrate.
[00:07:18] Speaker B: And. Yeah, exactly. Which I would love to get more into, like, their biology and what makes them so different. So I'm sure by this point, after researching them for 25 years, you know, you've had this beautiful career with them. You've written a book, you've talked to lots of people.
What, from your opinion, what is the most misunderstood or underappreciated aspect, octopuses that you think that you've encountered over and over?
[00:07:52] Speaker C: You know, I get two or three, really commonly, I get two or three questions about octopuses that are, you know, just by the fact that those are the questions that are out there might represent some, something that is misunderstood about octopuses, one is simply, what's the correct plural? And we're using it. We're talking about them. Octopuses.
You know, some people use other plurals, and depending on your take, they all have interesting histories, but most people just want to know which one's correct, which is, in my mind, it's octopuses. The es, octo and pus both have roots in ancient greek language, greek language. And so the plural that we use in English that has roots in the Greek is the es plural octopuses. And so for that, that kind of works as a package of how we bring greek language into American English.
Another question that's really common, maybe, is how big do they get? I work on a species called the giant Pacific octopus, and so we can imagine that a giant octopus must be pretty big. And it is. In the octopus world, they routinely do reach sizes around 100 pounds or so. And there are some records bigger than 100 pounds that as you get bigger, I think if you look closely at the records, they sort of become increasingly questionable. There's one that's pretty solid at 156 pounds, and then there's some that are above that, that I'm still not certain that we can rely on them, but they're definitely out there. People see them.
[00:09:55] Speaker B: Wow. Yeah. 100 pounds. That's absolutely incredible.
[00:10:00] Speaker C: Yeah. And over. So that can be as big as a person.
[00:10:04] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. So next, I would love for us, let's dive into, like, the natural history of octopuses, because a lot of us listening might not actually understand what they are. So maybe could you just give us, like, an octopus 101, what qualifies as them? What are some fundamental aspects that, that makes an octopus an octopus? And is there anything that we should be aware of that, almost back to my previous question, that shouldn't be associated with them? But, yeah, just give us an octopus 101. I would love to learn from you about what these amazing creatures are.
[00:10:54] Speaker C: Yeah.
Octopuses are cephalopods, which is another group that maybe people are still learning about. So within the cephalopods, you have sort of the squid, cuttlefish, bobtailed squid, things like that, octopuses and the nautilus also, as well as some extinct forms. And the cephalopods, as the whole group, they're one of the major branches of the mollusks.
The mollusks include things like bivalves, clams and scallops, the gastropods, which are snails and garden slugs and nudibranchs, sea slugs. And the chitin is another major group of the mollusks.
And so the cephalopods are one of those big groups of the mollusks, and they're exclusively marine, so they only live in the oceans.
And what sets the octopuses apart from the other ones, probably most simply, is that they have eight arms, whereas squids and cuttlefishes, for example, they have eight arms plus two tentacles.
And so it's that absence of tentacles that defines the.
The group of octopuses. There are a few other things, but that's an important distinction.
The tentacles are these sort of appendages that are very specialized for capturing prey. So in a squid or cuttlefish, the pair of tentacles will sort of shoot out and grab the prey. They might be preying on fish or something like that. That has a very fast escape velocity, so they have to sort of grab it before it has a chance to respond. And then the eight arms of the squids, or cuttlefish, those are used to handle the prey. And the octopuses forage on the bottom, mostly. So they're mostly bottom feeding animals. And so they don't need that rapid fish catching, if you will, prey handling apparatus. They don't need those extra two appendages, and so they do their capture as well as their handling with their arms.
[00:13:19] Speaker B: Yeah, that is super interesting. And one. And another aspect about them that you wrote quite extensively about was their social life, because I just. Maybe my ignorance previously, I didn't realize that there was, you know, these, like, truly social octopuses. Could you maybe talk a little bit more about that? Their social life? Are there solitary ones? Are there more social ones?
How do they interact with each other?
[00:13:55] Speaker C: There are about 300 species of what we consider shallow water octopuses, not deep sea.
More than 300 species that live on the sort of the coastal shelf, the ocean shelf.
That's a lot of diversity. 300 species means that different optical species are doing different things. And there are a few species, several of which that I wrote about in many things under a rock where we find octopuses interacting. And they kind of have this reputation as being completely solitary animals. Partly that comes from the fact that they do often live solitary lives, but it also comes from the fact that the bigger ones are known to eat the smaller ones sometimes. So they can be cannibalistic. And that can happen particularly, I don't know, in a particularly spectacular manner, when a smaller male is trying to convince a larger to court a larger female and get her to mate with him. And so if the female is hungry and not in a mood to mate, she might eat the male rather than mate with him. So we have this sort of background idea of octopuses as mostly solitary and kind of hostile to each other, potentially cannibalistic. And so in the last, I don't know, maybe 20 years or so, people have gradually found more and more of these examples of octopuses that have these interesting non, I don't wanna call them completely nonviolent, but much less hostile than we expected, social lives. They're not based on the mother offspring bond, like in chimpanzees, in humans, in african lions, even in parrots, for example.
A lot of what happens socially is built on the mother offspring bond because all of those animals really care for their young as their young are developing and learning and growing up.
And so there's a lot of pair bonding behaviors that can be used to strengthen the mother offspring bond, but then can also be used and are recognized all across the species because everyone was an offspring at one point. To sort of have parallels in other kinds of relationships. Octopuses don't have that. The mothers lay their eggs, they take care of their eggs very diligently, but when the eggs hatch, at that point, the mothers almost always die. There are a couple of exceptions, but for the most part, octopuses don't have this mother offspring set of behaviors on which they could build any sort of sociality. So we see a very different kind of social interaction with octopuses that seems to be based more on getting to know your neighbor.
And so I worked in a location in Australia in Jervis Bay with gloomy octopuses. And there's some particular conditions there that allowed many dens to be located in one very small area.
And that area, that small area is in the middle of a lot of octopus food. It's in the middle of a scalloped bed. So it's easy to find food, it's hard to find shelter, and the only shelter you can find is right next to other octopuses.
And so now you've got to cope with your neighbors.
A lot of what we see in octopus interactions is something brings them together, and then they sort of have to evolve or develop, I should say, or learn ways to cope with one another. And they do it in all the same sort of ways that you would see birds and mammals coping with one another, or a lot of the same sort of ways. They signal to each other they may have chemical sensing. No one's very sure about that. A little bit like smelling.
They defend their own den.
They probably, but we're not certain yet, learn to recognize other individuals and come to know what to expect about them.
And so I think these sort of neighborly social behaviors are rooted not so much, like I said, in, as they are for mammals in parent offspring behavioral sequences, but maybe more rooted in dealing with other species in their lives. So if we think about what an animal needs to do to survive, an animal needs to be able to recognize its own food. It's got to recognize its prey, and then it also has to be able to distinguish that from its predators. Things that are risky and dangerous.
It has to be able to recognize threats.
And then a lot of what goes on in the world is neither edible nor dangerous. And so there's this middle category that every animal has to learn to recognize, which is things that might bear looking at again, but are not immediately a threat or an opportunity.
So in doing that, pretty much all animals have to, in their brains, they have to be able to have categories.
They have to sort things into types, tasty, risky, or neutral.
And for almost every animal that I've ever looked at, there's categories of tasty, right? It might be a fish that's going to flee very quickly versus a crab that's going to scamper away versus a scallop that's going to swim rather clumsily away.
You need different ways to attack those. Those all might be possible food, but you're going to chase them or pounce on them in different ways. And so not only do you have to recognize sort of three categories, animals have to recognize a lot of different categories.
Well, what else can fall into categories?
Other members of your own species.
Is it a potential mate? Is it a potential rival?
Is it somebody you don't need to worry about? And so I think that's what the octopuses are doing in these places where they interact a lot, is they're drawing on this ability that they already have in their brains to categorize things, and they're applying it to their own species and saying, okay, this octopus is my mate, that octopus is my rival, and that octopus is my annoying neighbor who always shoves her den cleaning over into my den.
Yeah.
[00:21:31] Speaker B: So it seems to me the underlying theme here with what you just talked about is Octopus's intelligence. And I know you, you wrote, that's one of the things that just really opened my mind, reading your book. And then also there seems to be more and more documentaries just explaining how intelligent these creatures are. And I would love to go into that a little further. How exactly do you, as a researcher and scientist, measure intelligence? Have you done any interesting, like, experiments where just to figure out how we would, quote unquote, rate their intelligence? And if so, what might those be? Or has it been on the field? And what can you conclude about octopuses intelligence levels?
[00:22:19] Speaker C: Yeah, one of the interesting things about working with intelligence as an animal, my field of study is behavioral ecology. I study animal behavior. And so when you're dealing with intelligence from the perspective of a behaviorist who studies multiple different species, is that you have to ask yourself, is the question you're trying to ask to measure intelligence a question that your study animal can understand?
So if we're going to talk about human intelligence, we can maybe make an IQ test. And if we make that IQ test carefully, it will measure something about the ability of that individual to manipulate information, solve problems, have background knowledge, etcetera. But we are looking for specific things. We're drawing on specific kinds of background knowledge. We're drawing on your skill at solving particular kinds of problems. And we're doing it all, of course, with words, and animals don't have words.
And so one of the things that is probably a truism in the field of animal intelligence is every species that we have with us today is intelligent enough to do what it needs to do, right? So in some ways, when we talk about animal intelligence, we're really asking, what can they do? That animal that we, as humans think is really smart, because they all do really smart things. They're all smart enough to survive, or we wouldn't have them in the world with us.
[00:24:06] Speaker B: Right, right.
[00:24:07] Speaker C: So when it comes to sort of measuring how smart an octopus is, this is one of those questions that gets asked all the time that doesn't have a firm answer.
But here's some of the cool things octopuses can do. They do something called one shot learning, which is they learn very quickly from an experience. They have one experience, and that's what they learn from. Okay, either this object is interesting and it's manipulable, and I can explore it some more, or maybe I learned that it's very hazardous and I should stay away from it.
So that's kind of interesting. They don't necessarily need a lot of lead time to learn, and that can make it really challenging when you're getting to know an octopus, for example, or trying to develop a new experiment with an octopus, because if the first trial goes differently than you had hoped, or the first encounter is a little rougher than you had imagined, then that octopus may not want to have much to do with you anymore, or not much to do with the experimental apparatus. They're also very good at figuring out, what else can we do with this thing?
How can I break it?
Is the major octopus question. If you think about it, their food that they have to get into to stay alive often comes encased in a very hard shell.
Like, imagine a big butter clam, you know, like a four inch clam, tightly clamped shut. And if I give that to you and say, can you open this? You're going to have a hard time, particularly if I ask you to open it with just your hands. The major thing you use without a tool, without a knife or a hammer or a rock or something, pretty hard to open. If I give it to an octopus, that octopus is not going to give up for a long time, and that octopus is going to use a lot of different methods in its toolkit to get into the octopus, into the clam. And I wrote about this in many things under a rock. I wrote about how, you know, they can try pulling it apart, sort of brute strength. Maybe that works, maybe it doesn't. And then they can try drilling through it with the radula and the salivary papillae. And then if that doesn't work, they can also just try chipping at the edge with the beak by kind of biting at it. And so they have this repertoire and this flexibility to try one thing after another after another. So imagine if you're trying to teach an octopus trick, like reach into the tube, pull the cord, and then you can open a door and get at the crab over here, for example, they can learn that trick, but they're not done yet. They might also want to know what happens if I pull harder at that cord. What happens if I bite more at that tube? And so many, many times when you're trying to do an experiment with an octopus, they're busy finding ways to break the tool, you know, and see what happens. See what happens when it comes apart.
[00:27:35] Speaker B: Oh, that's super fun.
I just. I had a flash of memory through my mind when you were saying that, especially just how, you know, like, for some reason, some octopuses have that just that one shot memory of. Didn't you write about where there was this one octopus that really liked, is it your daughter? But for some reason didn't like you would shoot water at you? Am I remembering right?
[00:28:00] Speaker C: That's two different octopuses, but you are remembering.
[00:28:02] Speaker B: Oh, okay.
[00:28:03] Speaker C: There was one octopus. It was one that we kept in the lab and in the aquarium. In the lab, I do behavioral research, and so we're trying to get the most natural behavior out of the most healthy octopuses we can. And I have a team of students that takes care of the octopuses, and so we needed periodically to weigh octopuses. And so one time, I was showing the students how to get the octopus into a mesh bag so that we could then pull the mesh bag up, weigh it, and then put it back into the water. It only takes a few seconds, but some octopuses react pretty vehemently to being coaxed into the. The mesh bag. They don't like it. And this octopus didn't really want to go into the bag, and so I kind of had to do a little jiggling and a little pushing of arms and things to get it in the bag. And then we did the weighing, and we released her. But ever after that, she did not like me, and so she was perfectly happy to play with the other caretakers, but if I walked into the lab, she would squirt water out of the tank and try to hit me in the face with it.
Yeah. So, you know, I wasn't always popular.
[00:29:26] Speaker B: Yeah.
Oh, that's so funny.
And I would also love to learn more about, just on this intelligence idea of, like, outwitting rivals or predators.
[00:29:43] Speaker A: How.
[00:29:43] Speaker B: How do they do that?
That they're, like, taking in their surroundings and able to, like, it's just. Just reading your stories here of just how they just disappear. Like, you could be watching them, and somehow they just completely disappear. I would love to learn more about that behavior and how they either come to that conclusion or how it works, just all of those things. Could you just teach me more about that outwitting camouflage behavior that they have?
[00:30:14] Speaker C: Yeah. So the octopuses are really good at a number of different things, but notably hiding in plain sight, their skin, the camouflage that they can put on their skin is very dramatically successful in the sense that sometimes you can be looking right at an octopus and totally miss it, unless you catch, for example, the rows of suckers, the edges of the suckers, or the eye itself. They use a number of different tricks to do this. The first is they use skin patterning, so they're changing the color of their skin in different blocks, not sort of all at once. But they can be uniform. They can be uniform dark or uniform pale. But then they can also put on sort of a very blocky, contrasty kind of body pattern in which they might have a pale stripe down the mantle and then dark patches on either side of it, and then banding down the arms, for example, that really breaks up the body outline, and it makes it hard to follow the edges of the octopus, because our eye, the vertebrate eye, is drawn to the edges of dark and light. And so if the oculus changes where those edges are, by making different parts of its skin dark and different parts light, it changes where our eye looks and it changes how we follow form so that we just can lose the octopus entirely against the background. And the other thing the octopus can do is they can pick out a particular object in the environment and adopt sort of the.
Not necessarily the exact color pattern of that object, but put on the same size of color spots, the same granularity, if you will. And so if you've got a gravel bed and the gravel pieces are, you know, a half inch in diameter, the octopus will put on a sort of a model pattern in which the patches of dark and light are approximately the same size, whereas over a bed of very, very fine gravel that was very, very small, like sand or just big, coarse sand, the same octopus might go to a uniform color that matches the average intensity of the gravel. And so what happens is with that sort of just color change alone, you lose the octopus against the background, but they can also change their body texture, the texture of their skin. And so, like, if you've ever seen kelp in the Pacific Ocean, like North Pacific coast, California, Washington, Oregon, Alaska, it's very wavy. And the octopuses up here erect these folds in their mantle that run along the length of the mantle, that have waves in them, and they look like the edge of a kelp blade.
[00:33:34] Speaker B: Amazing.
[00:33:35] Speaker C: Yeah. In the tropics, the octopuses will erect these little bumps in papillae that catch the sunlight. The water is much clearer there, and there's a lot more sunlight. In the tropics, they erect these papillae that catch the light in the same way that the coral heads catch the light. And so when they are sitting on a coral a couple of feet distant from you, they look like the edge of the coral. And then the third thing they can do, so they have color patterns, they have skin texture, and then they have body posture. So they can put their arms up this way and that and look like different things. And so some of them will mimic just a little clump of algae that's broken loose on the bottom, and it's just rolling along the bottom in the waves. And an octopus will put its arms up so that it kind of looks like a clump of algae, and then just sort of walk along the bottom at the same pace as the waves.
[00:34:33] Speaker B: And can they see colors like us? Like, if somebody. If another octopus is looking at that kelp and they become the same color or texture, are they also seeing it like we do, or do they have a different way that they view the world?
[00:34:47] Speaker C: Yeah, they don't see. They do not see color, at least as far as we can tell. There are a couple of theories out there that suggest ways they might see color, but no one's ever established those. And the way an octopus behaves, they don't behave like they can see color.
But what they do is they fool the vertebrate eye. They fool the eye of their predator or the human eye or a camera. They fool us into thinking that they know the color of things, but they're actually only matching background intensity, lightness or darkness, and particle size. Right. The thing I talked about, whether there's big, big patches of light and dark, then they'll have a very disruptive patch pattern on small patches of light and dark.
Then they'll have a very mottled pattern on or very, very fine patches of light and dark, like in sand. Then they'll just match the average. So they're seeing that intensity and that particle size. And then Ri, which is very color based, Ri reads that as color matching, even though they're probably not color matching at all. There is one other trick that the octopus can do with color, which is sometimes it can reflect it. So they have a layer of cells called leukophores that disperse the average wavelength of light.
Anyway, they have a layer of cells that will reflect or disperse some of the available light. And so if they're in an area like an eelgrass bed, where the predominant light is green, because the incoming light is the only wavelength that isn't being absorbed by the grass is green light, and then that green light is being reflected out. And so anything that's down in there is basically seeing green light. The octopus, rather than absorbing that green light, can open up this layer of cells that's more reflective and reflect green light, not like a mirror or the scales of a fish, but nevertheless, it will tend to look green under those circumstances and be a little harder to spot.
[00:37:17] Speaker B: Wow, they're just.
They're just absolutely incredible. Like, reading all of. I mean, we wouldn't have time today to go through every single, like, amazing adaptation that they have, because they do have quite a lot. Like, I just felt every single page of your book, I was like, I'm learning something new. Every single page, every word, which is just incredible, just how much you've learned about them. And I did want to make a shift here.
So one big part of your book and how you actually started out quite a lot. There's a big cultural aspect to octopuses that I wasn't aware of that you beautifully went into depth in, especially when it came to, like, indigenous cultures and indigenous stories. So why did you feel like it was important to include these stories from indigenous cultures up in Alaska and other areas? And maybe could you share some of those? What are these stories and culturally that the octopuses played in these cultures for what, millennia? A very long time. But, yeah, I would love to learn more about them.
[00:38:28] Speaker C: When I started studying octopuses, I didn't know anything about them either.
And so I did a lot of reading. I knew science. I knew how to do science at that point, but I didn't know anything about octopuses. And so I had to do a lot of reading about them. And one of the first concerns that I ran into, my plan was to put a team of divers underwater and capture octopuses. We wanted to count them, but we also wanted to know how big they were, and we also wanted to be able to assess their health and see whether they were healthy or whether they had unusual growths or any sort of problems like that. And so we needed to put divers underwater and capture octopuses.
And as I've already mentioned, the species that I was working with first was the giant Pacific octopus, which is the largest species of octopus in the world, and they can get well over 100 pounds. And there are records that I'm not sure. Less well documented that are much larger. And so one of the first concerns I had was just how big can these octopuses get?
And so if you start reading stories about looking for how big can an octopus get, you immediately launch yourself into the realm of b grade horror movies, giant monsters, and all kinds of legends and stories in all different cultures about sea monsters. And so one of the tasks I had to do very early on in my studies was separate fact from legend.
And I was doing all of this in Cordova, which is at the site of the last native IAC village.
And I was also there at the time that the last native ex speaker alive lived in Cordova. And so this preservation of native culture, this sharing and passing on of Alaska native culture, was very much in the minds of everyone who worked in that world. At the same time as I was trying to sort of separate out, you know, monster stories and legend from scientific fact.
And you know what? That's not really how indigenous people see the world. You don't really see a sharp distinction between legend and fact. They represent their understanding of the world in story, and they keep it going through generations by keeping those stories alive. And so telling stories is part of, as I understand it, how indigenous culture survives.
And, of course, storytelling is fairly universal, but this sharp distinction between established scientific fact and legend is not universal.
And so one of the reasons that the Alaska native stories are in my book, many things under a rock, is because I wanted to sort of honor the way things unfolded in my actual career, which is that I was trying to sort these things out as I was learning and studying octopuses.
And I also wanted to keep some of that failure to make a distinction alive in the areas where it seemed to me that particularly even from a scientific perspective, we couldn't really nail down the facts just yet.
And so you see that pretty strongly in the chapter where I sort of ask, how big are these animals? And as I said, this was pretty important for me to decide, because we were going to ask divers to handle them, and we needed to know how to, you know, if you're going to ask diver, if you're going to ask a person to go underwater on life support equipment, scuba equipment, and capture a wild animal that weighs 100 pounds, you better know what you're doing, right? I wouldn't ask someone to go and wrestle 100 pound cat or 100 pound dog, you know? And so we really wanted to make sure that we were being safe and that we knew what we were doing.
And I've also mentioned that the largest size of the giant Pacific octopus, easily above 100 pounds. But there are higher records that shade very gradually from science into legend, and there's no sharp barrier where you could say that one's perfectly well established and the next one is completely legend.
It's like they get increasingly less well documented as the size goes up, and pretty soon you're like, well, that might be true, or it might have been storytelling.
And so I kind of liked that perspective, and that's why the book has a lot of that indigenous perspective in there. Some preservation of storytelling where I had permission to use the stories, some preservation of ideology in the sense that maybe the stories are telling us something about the world, even if it isn't a matter of fact, scientific piece of knowledge, and also preservation of sort of the way this unfolded for me as a developing scientist trying to figure out how to do this.
Yeah.
[00:44:45] Speaker B: And after having those conversations and learning these stories and, like, as you wrote in your book, like, actually meeting with these people from these cultures, did it change your perspective at all? Were you fundamentally different, at least with your perspective on octopuses, after having these experiences?
[00:45:05] Speaker C: Well, I think in some ways, I was kind of open to that message in the sense that I've always enjoyed the quirky and the things that are a little bit outside of the norm. But, yeah, you know, I. I learned a lot from working with Alaska natives, and, you know, this. It's. It's easy to learn from people if you keep your mind open to what they're trying to say and why they have the perspective that they are presenting to you. And I think that's very true of encounters between cultures as well.
You know, that if we keep our minds open to what the other culture is trying to say and why they have the perspective they do, then maybe we have a lot to learn still.
[00:45:58] Speaker B: Yeah. And definitely those stories, they changed me. Like, I thought they were just absolutely beautiful to have such pretty stories about a species that I knew nothing about. So I definitely appreciated reading about them.
And also, I think a next big looming question that I think that we all want to learn more about is the conservation of octopuses.
I think we all are pretty aware that they play a vital part in our marine ecosystem, food web, and even people eat them as well.
As you said, there's over 300 species, so it's kind of hard to have a blanket statement, but maybe could you at least talk a little bit about what is the conservation status of this group of animals? How are they faring? How are they not faring? Have you seen things change in your career, just. Yeah. What's going on today with octopuses?
[00:46:55] Speaker C: Yeah, well, several of the big challenges to octopuses are the same to everything in the ocean right now, which is that we have.
Climate change is warming up our oceans. As the oceans warm up, and as we put more CO2 into the atmosphere, that carbon dioxide goes into the oceans. And when carbon dioxide dissolves in salt water, it makes carbolic acid.
That means that the oceans are gradually becoming more acidic.
And as that happens, it really changes.
It impacts the physiology of a lot of different kinds of marine life. And we're already seeing this in some of the most extreme examples where animals that grow shells, which are dependent on depositing calcium carbonate, which is that depositing of calcium carbonate, and it's dissolving. It's depositing or dissolving into the water is very dependent on the ph of the water.
And so in areas where we get unusual warming events or unusual acidification events, we're already seeing that animals that have to grow those shells are not doing very well. And so far, the accounts that I've read about that have been sort of local, short term events.
But we're pushing that. We're pushing the oceans closer and closer to that edge where those things become not just local, but regional or maybe eventually global.
Octopuses don't do very much with deposition of calcium carbonate. They eat animals that do that. Right. Crabs, clams, all have those hard shells, the five ounce shells. The clams are more calcium carbonate. The crab shells are different, but they still have some deposition of calcium in them. And then coral reefs and habitats, a lot of the habitats that octopuses use are made of calcium carbonate. And so even though octopuses themselves don't deposit shells, they're dependent on habitats and prey animals that do. And then as the oceans warm up, one of the things we see is that shifts the balance of how nutrients are distributed in the ocean and how productive the oceans are. And so when cold water can come up from the bottom of the ocean and cool the surface, that's when we see the most mixing of the highest nutrients, the greatest productivity, and global climate change. Global warming can interfere with that, that circulation of nutrients. For example. I think we're seeing fewer and fewer giant Pacific octopuses up here in Alaska in the shallow water, in part because it's been so warm lately.
As the waters warm up, we might see fewer giant Pacific octopuses. In the areas where I study. I think we're already seeing that we might also see more common octopuses in. In England, for example, in the North Atlantic, pushing further north into the English Channel as things warm up, because the conditions at the south part of their range might be getting too warm, but the conditions at the north part of their range, it might be previously it had been too cold, and now they're moving up into those warmer areas. So we're going to see some shifts in where the population is at a maximum. And then the other big thing for octopuses, well, two other big things. One is pollution.
We throw bottles, for example, into the ocean. We put a lot of construction material into the ocean. Octopuses can use those to make dens, and they seem to like some of our trash. They love to use beer bottles as barriers or beer bottles as dens, depending on how big they are.
And so, it's sad to say, but there are some areas near big cities where trash from boaters is one of the most visible signs of human pollution to scuba divers on the bottom of the ocean. You come across areas where people like to party on the surface, and they throw their beer bottles over the side thinking, well, it'll sink and it won't be seen anymore, and it won't be by the boaters, but the scuba divers will see it. And in those areas, often you can find octopuses because they can use those as dens.
So that was one of the other two big ones. And then the other big one is fishing. We get a lot of harvest. We harvest octopus predators that might cause octopus numbers to increase. But if you harvest octopuses themselves, it's very easy to suppress octopus populations by harvesting. They can't grow as fast as we can catch them. And so in some areas, you see depressed populations. The good news there is if you stop fishing locally temporarily for short periods of time, a few months, the octopuses will start to come back. And so, you know, I wrote in many things under a rock. I wrote about Villandriaque, the management system that was put in place by people in Madagascar to try and preserve their octopus fisheries by rotating closures. And so this idea of just giving the ocean a break, giving the octopuses a break, and let's have a period, if you fish a lot in one area, then take a break and don't fish for a while in that area and fish somewhere else. And then when you come back, the area that was previously rested will be reinvigorated and better able to support harvest again.
[00:53:18] Speaker B: And is there anything that has happened recently or trends that you are excited about or hopeful for marine conservation, or octopuses, I guess, specifically octopuses, or if not, like marine conservation in general?
[00:53:35] Speaker C: Well, I think generally people are very excited right now about octopuses. Weirdly enough, social media has allowed people to share little arcane things that they might see that they're excited about, and those things can suddenly bloom into a worldwide interest. And so the few of us who over the last couple of decades have been interested in octopuses has expanded into a worldwide interest in octopuses right now. And so I think that speaks very positively for people that we find the rest of the world very interesting, including octopuses. And I think it speaks well for octopuses that they are continually captivating. They're very fascinating to watch because they don't move the same way humans move, but they have these big eyes that we can kind of identify with, so we feel like we can make a connection with them. And they're just perpetually interesting to watch. They're graceful, they're changeable, very changeable, and they're very active, and they do interesting things. So when octopuses are up and running about, it's very captivating. And I think that speaks very well now to this moment right now in history that we have a lot of interest in octopuses. We find them endlessly engaging and we love them. And so I think we're seeing a lot of sort of movement to make sure that they have places to live and that their habitats and environments are healthy.
[00:55:21] Speaker B: I mean, you're completely right. Just the number of fascinating documentaries I've seen about octopuses, it's just like out of nowhere, they're on everybody's radar when, as before, they just weren't. I mean, maybe some people, if you would go to, like, an asian market or a restaurant, there'd be, like, octopus on the menu. But outside of that, there really wasn't much exposure to them.
But you're right. I've definitely started to notice a trend as well, which is very exciting because they're so important for our oceans. And since you're at the forefront of octopus research, what do you think is on the horizon? Are there particular questions that you're asking or other labs are asking that will help us understand these animals better and maybe even have better conservation? I just. Yeah. What questions are you currently asking about these incredible animals?
[00:56:22] Speaker C: Well, I think one of the important things to do is get more cameras underwater looking at octopus behavior in ways that is undisturbed by the research.
One of the things that we, if you read many things on the rock, one of the things you notice is that a lot of the stuff that we know about octopuses, that's so captivating and interesting is kind of new. And I think the reason for that is that for most of the planet, we don't encounter octopuses every day. You might see birds every day, but you don't see an octopus every day. And it's only now that aquarium technology that can bring a little piece of the ocean into the land, and camera technology that can take the ability to record video material underwater, that those two technologies have been developing so rapidly over the last couple of decades. I mean, look at GoPros. They've been around 15 or 20 years, and they've completely changed how much video we can record. And we can take those right underwater now, and those kinds of changes in underwater photography, underwater sampling, and in aquarium technology to bring bits of the ocean into places that are far from the coast.
Those two things together are allowing us to see octopuses in ways that we haven't ever seen them before.
And so scientists are increasingly able to get to octopuses that we never would have seen before and get at behaviors that we never would have seen before and capacities and abilities of the octopuses that we haven't seen before. And I think we have more to learn about what our octopus is really doing underwater and where that leads us, I don't know. It might lead us to re understand how social behavior has evolved in the animal world and give us a better understanding of how humans and human nations, for example, can relate to one another. It might lead us to understand better how the ocean supports the ecology across the entire planet.
It might lead us to new medical techniques with gene manipulation that we can learn how to do, because we can see how octopus physiology is able to edit their own genetic machinery. And so we don't really know what we're going to learn, but the signs are that we're going to learn all kinds of interesting things, from camouflage to social behavior to physiology.
[00:59:32] Speaker B: Wow. So it sounds like your work is not ending anytime soon as long as there's funding, right?
That's always the big question, right? In our field, it's like, just who's supplying the money? Where's it coming from?
[00:59:49] Speaker C: Well, you know, I do want to point out that, you know, if your listeners are interested in octopuses, you mentioned briefly my daughter Laurel. She was with me making PBS, Octopus making contact, and the same documentary, video documentary about octopuses. The same documentary is released by the BBC under the title the Octopus in the House. And then, as you mentioned, there's the book many things under a rock, which is now out in paperback. And there will be a young reader's edition out early next year under the same title.
[01:00:33] Speaker B: Oh, yes. That's so exciting. And I'll make sure I have all of those links in the show notes, because that just sounds fantastic to both read and also watch your work. And that's so cool. It's with your daughter, too, you know, that's just, like, it has to feel so good.
[01:00:47] Speaker C: It's really nice. Your daughter Laurel was, in addition to being in the documentary with me, she is the artist who drew the artwork, many things under a rock. And she will be. There are a few new drawings, not a whole new set, but a few new drawings that will be released with the young Readers edition. For people who like her artwork. It was a real pleasure to work with Laurel as an artist on the book because Laurel grew up with octopuses. I mean, she was born after we were already doing the work on the Octopus project. And so she grew up with octopuses. And so it was fascinating to ask her to draw them for me because with most artists, they have amazing technical skills. Much better artists than I am or will ever be. But I would have to guide them and provide a whole lot of guidance about how to represent movement and tension in the octopus body, because they had never spent the time watching an octopus. But with Laurel, we would just talk about the scene in the book, and she would be able to draw the octopus the way it actually would be without a lot of coaching, because she'd grown up with octopuses and had seen them her whole life.
[01:02:13] Speaker B: Wow, that's so cool. Yeah, the. There's so much that I got out of her, her images as well. Like the one where the tentacle is, like, trying not going in the tube, where it's like, no, no, I'm not just. It's just. It's like, ah. It's just visually, it's like, I completely understand what she was going for. Like, that's like, when I was picturing it in my mind, like, it was spot on. Yeah. So I definitely. I love her artwork throughout the book. And so. So just how cool and rewarding. And also, too, I just want to take a moment if people want to learn more about your work or learn more about octopus themselves, because some of us really love to just geek out on these kinds of things. Where can people go to maybe more, get a more scientific background on.
Yeah. On octopuses.
[01:03:04] Speaker C: I do maintain a webpage, alaskaoctopus.com, that has links to most of my scientific papers about octopuses and links to other news coverage of that work. If you don't want to read the scientific papers, but you'd like to know the basics of what happened and why it was interesting. All of that is represented there.
People can also go to some of the octonation, for example, runs a lot of good octopus information. Octonation is the world's largest Octopus fan club, I think is their tagline.
[01:03:48] Speaker B: Well, yeah.
[01:03:49] Speaker C: And then there are two octopus books in addition to many things under a rock that I'm always happy to recommend by my dear friend Simont Gumrie, the soul of an octopus, the soul of the Octopus by Simon Montgomery, and then Peter Godfrey Smith's book other minds, the deep origins of consciousness.
And both of those are great reads.
[01:04:22] Speaker B: Yes, those sound amazing. Yeah, I will definitely make sure that all of those links are in the show notes for anybody that might want to read more. And of course I will have all the links to many things under a rock, both hardback. I have the hardback version, but it's really cool. They also have the paperback out now too, so if anybody wants to read more.
Again, it's both. It's the cultural side. It's also deep in the science as well as your journey with the octopus too. So again, David, thank you so much. For one, writing this book, teaching, teaching me so much about this amazing group of animals, and then teaching everybody listening. I sure appreciate your time.
[01:05:00] Speaker C: Well, thank you for having me on Rewild re wildology. I really appreciate it.
[01:05:07] Speaker A: Thank you for joining me on this wild adventure today. I hope you've been inspired by the incredible stories, insights, and knowledge shared in this episode.
[01:05:18] Speaker B: Learned more about what you heard?
[01:05:20] Speaker A: Be sure to check out the show
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