ON AN UNSEASONABLY WARM day in the middle
of March, I traveled from New Hampshire to the moist, dim sanctuary of
the New England Aquarium, hoping to touch an alternate reality. I came
to meet Athena, the aquarium’s forty-pound, five-foot-long,
two-and-a-half-year-old giant Pacific octopus.For me, it was a momentous occasion. I have always loved octopuses.
No sci-fi alien is so startlingly strange. Here is someone who, even if
she grows to one hundred pounds and stretches more than eight feet long,
could still squeeze her boneless body through an opening the size of an
orange; an animal whose eight arms are covered with thousands of
suckers that taste as well as feel; a mollusk with a beak like a parrot
and venom like a snake and a tongue covered with teeth; a creature who
can shape-shift, change color, and squirt ink. But most intriguing of
all, recent research indicates that octopuses are remarkably
intelligent. ~ con’td