I’d been meaning to read this book since it came out in 2015, so when I found out that someone I know from work had chosen this for the first read of the new nonfiction book club he’s starting, I immediately put a hold on it at the library. (I love book clubs for either prompting me to try a book or genre I never would have picked up on my own, or else for pushing something I’d been vaguely meaning to check out to the top of my TBR list.) Though the book’s subtitle is “A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness” (and though consciousness is definitely touched on a bit), this is less a deep dive (ha ha) into philosophical or scientific questions of consciousness and more a story about the author’s experiences interacting with octopuses at the New England Aquarium and on dive trips to Cozumel and Mooréa. Not that I minded that: I loved the behind-the-scenes-at-the-aquarium aspect of this book, perhaps especially because the aquarium in question was probably the first aquarium I went to as a child: I definitely have fond memories of the Giant Ocean Tank and Myrtle the turtle.
There are octopus facts aplenty throughout the book: I didn’t know that octopuses have three hearts, or that “octopuses have a dominant eye, as people have dominant hands,” or that “octopuses can taste with their entire bodies” (though their sense of taste is “most exquisitely developed in their suckers”), or that “three fifths of octopuses’ neurons are not in the brain but in the arms,” or that octopus “chemoreceptors can pick up chemical information from a distance of at least 30 yards.” I hadn’t really thought about the texture of octopuses before (slimey: the author describes their slime as “sort of a cross between drool and snot. But in a nice way”); I knew they could change shape, color, and texture, but it was cool to read more about the details of that.
Over the course of the book, the author spends time with four different octopuses at the New England Aquarium (Athena, Octavia, Kali, and Karma) and with the aquarists and volunteers who take care of them. I liked reading about the efforts by staff and volunteers to keep octopuses stimulated/appropriately occupied, and the human-octopus interactions are often sweet and sometimes funny, like when Montgomery writes about a keeper dousing an octopus with fresh water to get her back in her tank, after which the octopus promptly douses the keeper with salt water in apparent retaliation. And I liked reading about the aquarium’s other creatures, from electric eels to arowanas to penguins to morays. The way that Montgomery writes about the many details of the aquarium—including some that the public doesn’t normally see—made me think of a Frederick Wiseman film, in a good way. I’d never really thought about all the tanks and spaces that are out of public view, or the logistical challenges of figuring out which creatures will live in which tanks, or what to do with new arrivals (speaking of new arrivals, the part where the author goes to the airport with aquarium staff to pick up one new arrival, which touches on the challenges of shipping live aquatic animals, was super interesting). And it was wild to think about the complexity of something like the Giant Ocean Tank renovation, which required temporarily relocating “four hundred and fifty animals of one hundred species,” amounting to “more than half the animals in the aquarium.” This book did not make me want to take up scuba diving, but it definitely made me want to visit the New England Aquarium again when I’m next in Boston, to revisit my childhood memories of that spiral ramp and to spend some time watching an octopus.
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