Tracing the Lines
International Anthem
Ruth Goller by Pedro Velasco
TRACING THE LINES
NO. 3
Sub-Aquatic Space: Ruth Goller talks
to Octopus Expert Jenny Hofmeister
This is a curiosity piece. Ruth Goller is very interested in octopuses – how they move, how they eat, how they live – so we found her an octopus expert to speak with. This is what they talked about.
Ruth Goller:
How on earth do you become an octopus expert? How did you get there?
Jenny Hofmeister:
I'm in California, and I grew up here. I grew up in the northern part of our state. My family is a bit of an ocean family. We have a lot of sailors. My dad used to dive for abalone, which it's a type of sea snail. A lot of people are familiar with their shells. They have really beautiful shells. So they'll show in jewelry and stuff, like a mother of pearl kind of bluish, greenish, rainbow-y. But they're also…tasty. [laughing] As a species the abalone has been really important for coastal California for forever. So I think it was about when I was in grade school that I realized I wanted to do marine science in some capacity. I think a lot of little kids are like "I wanna be a marine biologist!" and I just kept going. I never lost that. I went to university at UCLA, and I just started taking courses and learning more, and the courses about invertebrates – things without backbones, that internal skeleton – were what I liked. And I'm like this is cool. These guys are cool. They have weird adaptations. They're just weird. Right? A lot of the weirdos that we see on our planet are the inverts. Cephalopods, the group that includes octopuses, are also weird. Again, just this kind of innate attraction and curiosity about them because they're cool and strange.
RG:
Was it a visual thing for you as well? The way they move?
JH:
Oh yeah. I think they're the most beautiful animals on the planet.
Ruth Goller:
Oh, me too.
JH:
Their skin, the texture of it, and the way it changes. Even when they're not trying to camouflage and they're just there. They're beautiful. [shifting gears] I knew I wanted to go on to get an advanced degree, and so when I was looking for PhD programs I looked for places that specialized in octopus behavior and ecology and found one at University of California Berkeley. My focus for that research was octopus, and specifically octopus in California. Where are they moving? How are they moving? What are they eating? How are they avoiding predation? Not a whole lot of scientists are focusing on California species of octopus. A lot of people want to go to the tropics, understandably. The tropics are nice. I'm a scuba diver too. In California, the water temperature is around 10 Celsius. So it's cold. It's a different type of water experience than I think a lot of people want to deal with, [both laughing] but I love California ecosystems. I love the kelp forests. I love the species. So I'm fine dealing with the cold.
RG:
Yeah. I totally understand. I love California as well. The climate there is just perfect for, well, definitely human beings, but for a lot of animals as well, I imagine. Amazing. What is, for you as a specialist, the most interesting thing? Something incredible about octopuses that people just don't know about?
JH:
I think what intrigues me the most is their flexibility, and not just physically. Physically, they have a lot of flexibility. They can squish into tiny holes. They really only have one hard part in their whole body, and that's their beak, their mouth part in the middle of their arms, all tucked in. So pretty much anywhere where that hard part can fit, they can fit.
RG:
How big is the beak, for that species in California?
JH:
For the species I work with, maximum, they get to be maybe one and a half, two kilograms. And then the beak would be, for the biggest of the species I work with, maybe a centimeter, a centimeter and a half. So it's not very big.
RG:
Wow. They can squeeze through there?
JH:
Mmhm. It makes it really hard to keep them in aquariums because they can escape. [both laughing] When I was doing my research at the station on Catalina Island I wasn't allowed to keep octopuses inside the lab building because they kept escaping and going into the pipes of the building and clogging up the whole system.
RG:
[elated] Really?!
JH:
So I could only keep them in outdoor tanks so that if they escaped they weren't going to cause problems. Anybody who works with octopus usually has some kind of crazy octopus escape story. Once I came down the hallway of my lab and there was an octopus just in the middle of the hallway.
RG:
On the floor?
JH:
Yeah! Just outside, trying to make a break for it. They’re really curious. So they'll just try things out.
RG:
So sometimes you see them walking on land. I’ve seen this video where it was properly walking with two tentacles like that [miming]. How long can they survive outside water?
JH:
Longer than you'd think. At least 30 minutes. It’s because they have gills, and the way that gills work is that as long as they're moist then they can still do gas exchange. They can still get O2 from the air. It's not as efficient as if they were in the water, but they're not holding their breath. They’re still getting a little bit of oxygen from those gills. They can survive quite a bit. Especially the shallower ones – the ones that come into tide pools. It's very common, especially at low tide, for them to crawl across from tide pool to tide pool and look for food and check things out. So, physically they're very flexible because they're just a giant squishy bag with one tiny little hard part in the middle. And that level of flexibility gives them some options for existence. And then they also are really behaviorally flexible. Variability is natural, right? We are variable as humans. Every species is variable. We need variability for evolution to work, for natural selection to work. And so, as scientists, when we're trying to figure out patterns we need to have a big enough sample of a population to account for that variability. So the more variable a species is, the bigger the sample size we need. If we were trying to figure out a general trend or assumption about humans, we would need 10 million people to really get an idea of what the average is.
Octopuses are also incredibly variable, and so one octopus will be hiding all the time and never want to do anything. Another octopus is super gregarious and wants to crawl around and say hi to you when you walk by their tank. That applies to the wild as well, and in trying to look at their behavior and figure out okay, well why do octopuses do this? Why are they more active at nighttime versus daytime over here, but they're more active in daytime and not nighttime over here? You need to have a big sample size. You need to observe a lot of them, and that's challenging with an animal that is the best camouflager on the planet.
So I spent a lot of my time just trying to find them. [both laughing] It’s not easy! This is really hard to study, unfortunately, but they seem to be able to take in multiple different pieces of information from their environment and use that to make decisions, similar to what humans do. But in the absence of the ability to read their minds, I just have to try to form hypotheses and figure out the most reasonable explanation. I am an ecologist and I really like studying predator-prey interactions. Octopuses are kind of right in the middle of the food web. They're a really important predator species for smaller animals like crabs and snails and clams and mussels, but they're also a really important prey species for bigger predators, higher above them in the food web, like bigger fish and seals and sea lions, and sharks and eels. So they have all sorts of information that they're interpreting and using to make decisions about where to go: how hungry they are, how long the food is going to take to find, to process, and to eat, while also not getting eaten themselves. And so there's just a lot happening and they seem to be able to use that information and to change their behavior, which seems pretty obvious to us as humans, but in the animal kingdom it's a rare thing.
Jenny Hofmeister by Kory Gozjack
RG:
How do they know who is a predator and who isn't? I mean the size maybe doesn't matter so much, right? Because sometimes they come right up to humans, which are much bigger than them, and they don't think they are predators. They’re just curious. So how do they know? Or how do they decide which creature is a predator and which creature isn’t?
JH:
Some of it is innate. Some of it is that they've evolved with these species for millions of years, and so they just have it built in their system that that is danger. Like, Moray eels are a very common predator. So they're always going to avoid moray eels. They also seem to have good memory and they can learn if something is or is not a threat based on their experiences. They don't live for very long. Most species only live about a year or two.
RG:
So learning has to happen really fast.
JH:
Really fast. They learn fast. Everything's fast. Some octopuses that I've collected from the wild are initially much more cautious, hiding. They're not sure what a threat is yet. But then as I interact with them more, they learn. Oh, that's not going to eat me. I don't have to worry about that. Or that structure is a good hiding hole. I'm going to go over there. And so when they're put in a novel environment, they are initially cautious again, probably pretty similar to us, right? I dunno what the threat is. I dunno who's out to get me. And once they have a working memory of what is or is not a threat, then they can move on with their life. So my guess is that those amazing videos where they approach humans or interact with humans are probably octopuses that have interacted with other humans in the past, maybe received food from another human. Some type of treat. Some type of benefit. They're kind of like dogs, right? They're very food motivated.
RG:
If you work with them, do you think they would bond with you specifically or do they just see a human, and then if another human comes in for the first time, would they be comfortable with that person exactly the same way as with you? Or is it you specifically?
JH:
I think it depends on the octopus. [both laughing] There’s some evidence that they have personalities like we do. Some are more shy, some are more outgoing. They do seem to be able to recognize individual humans.
RG:
Okay, so they're able to do that. Wow.
JH:
Especially in an aquarium where it's the same people every day. There's lots of stories like oh, they really like this one staff member, but they don't like their coworker for whatever reason. They'll squirt water at them. [Ruth laughing] They can be sassy.
It's very easy to anthropomorphize and to kind of put our own human emotions on them. We might feel that bond and that love almost between them, but they probably just want food. [both laughing] They're not social animals. They don't form big social groups. Having social connection is not important for them in the wild. It's not part of their existence. And so any positive association that they may have with an individual is probably just like I know that one gives me food. That one doesn't give me food, but that one gives me food. I like that one better.
RG:
Okay. Yeah, yeah. They don't hang out together in groups between themselves? They're on their own most of the time?
JH:
With a few anomalies. There's this one collection of octopuses that has gotten a lot of press in the last few years in Australia. They’ve dubbed it Octopolis. It's a really big community of octopuses that are all living together, and it's been a really interesting opportunity to study what types of social behavior they may have or how they might interact with each other. Our understanding has been that octopuses are what we call asocial. They're not antisocial – they don't avoid each other – and they're not social in that they need to gather and be together. They don't really care.
RG:
[laughing] I love them. That’s how I am.
JH:
Yeah, right? Asocial! You can be here, you can not be here. Whatever. I'm in my corner doing my thing, whatever.
RG:
I'm cool.
JH:
And that's always fun in science when you have this one idea about how a species or a group of animals acts, and then you find the rule breaking group. Oh, what's going on over here? But it's really hard to study in a rigid, quantitative way. We have our own biases and that’s one of the hardest things about science. And honestly, one of the hardest things as a scientist working with octopuses is that it's so easy to try to impart my own experiences and perspective on what they're doing. When you design experiments, especially with behavior, you have to be really conscious of eliminating your own human bias as much as you can, and that’s hard. So with a lot of these exciting things about octopuses that we talk about, like personality or decision making, there's still so much that's unknown because it's really hard to design an experiment to actually test those questions that we have. But it’s really fun to talk about, so we just keep talking about it.
RG:
So they do have a brain, obviously, as well?
JH:
Yes. They have a very complex nervous system. Very advanced. And so they do have one centralized brain that's in their head bits, but they also have neurons that are spread out throughout their entire body, way more so than other animals. On a very basic level, you can say they actually have nine brains. The main, centralized brain, and each arm. Each of the eight arms can act as its own brain as well.
RG:
Oh my god.
JH:
Not in the sense that each arm has a little cluster, but each arm kind of has its own little network of neurons that can talk to each other without asking the main brain. I think of it like a reflex. So if you hit your knee with the little weird triangle thing at the doctor's office and your knee bounces, your brain is not telling your knee to do that, right? It's just doing that. Take that and multiply it by a bajillion, and that's what each arm is doing. Even without being connected to the main brain at all, an individual arm can do really simple things like look for food. That is food. Bring food to mouth. That is something sharp. Don't touch. It's part of their defense mechanism. It's part of how they've evolved to avoid getting eaten entirely. Okay, don't eat all of me, just eat my arm. Because they can grow their arm back,
RG:
Right! Yeah, yeah!
JH:
I rarely find an octopus that has all eight arms completely intact.
RG:
Really!
JH:
Rarely. It's a super common thing. So for something to be that common, we would expect that evolutionarily they've evolved things to reduce the overall impact and trauma of that event.
RG:
Do you ever find an octopus with more tentacles than eight?
JH:
I've never found one with more than eight. I did find one with seven once.
RG:
Like, naturally with seven?
JH:
Yes, it was weird. It might've been bitten off very, very close to the center of the arms and the mouth. Usually if you see them there's just a little nubbin left, and you might even see it starting to grow back. So there's a little tiny arm poking out over the bigger arm. But this one was seven arms and no evidence of where an eighth arm would have been. It was strange.
RG:
Wow. It’s very rare that you would see that, right?
JH:
Yeah. Very rare. Very rare.
RG:
I work with rescue cats, and often when we find a colony and they interbreed a lot, they have malformations. They have ears missing or more thumbs – like double thumbs, triple thumbs. So it's got nothing to do with that?
JH:
As far as we know. One of the best and most frustrating things about science is just when you think you figured out something, someone comes in to break the rule. So I'm going to be like no, they totally don't do that, and watch, in two years there's going to be some paper that comes out about octopus and genetic malformations, and I'm going to be wrong. [laughing] But that's just part of it. And again, the majority of my experience and expertise is in California species of octopus. And so there are other octopus weirdos throughout the world, like the Larger Pacific Striped Octopus or LPSO. They seem to be actually social. They seem to make mating pairs, and a male and female will stay together for a year. We've never observed them in the wild before. All of our observations are in the lab. They’re caught sometimes for the aquarium trade. This is a totally different tangent, but they're beautiful.
RG:
I’m a musician, so I’m interested in this: have they got ears? How do they hear anything? Do they respond to music? Have you done any kind of experiments with how music may affect their behavior or state of mind or happiness or something like that?
JH:
You might be sad by the answer, but they don't really hear.
•
RG:
Oh my god. Wow. Okay. So none of that. They can't feel music or pulses or…?
JH:
They can feel, certainly. So, of all the senses, the most important ones for them are touch, smell, and vision. They do have incredible eyes. Their eyes are actually really similar to ours. The shape and the lens and just the whole structure of it looks remarkably similar. It's very interesting. Vision is super important to them for avoiding predation. We call them chemo-tactile hunters, which means they use taste and touch to determine what is and is not food. They actually have taste buds covering all of the suckers of their arms. So they're tasting everything they're touching.
RG:
Oh my god! [laughing]
JH:
What if you had taste buds on the bottom of your feet and you were tasting everything that you walked on like that? [both laughing] And so they use that for hunting.
RG:
But first they see something, right? So they see another thing, and because of experience, they make the decision, that may be something I can eat. And then they would touch it and confirm that?
JH:
If you ever see a video of them hunting, their eyes are usually up, and then you see their arms go into different holes and find things. So they're usually using their eyes to watch for predators and things that might be a threat. And then all of their hunting is done through taste and touch as they're feeling. Because a lot of what they eat is tucked in holes and cracks and crevices, like crabs and abalone.
They do have a balance mechanism. It's called a statocyst, which is similar to our inner ear in that it tells them which way is up and which way is down. Even in the water where you are a lot more floaty, they still need to know which way’s up and which way's down. So they have that, and they are certainly sensitive to water movement and vibrations. If something big swims by then maybe they'll squish down. But in looking at the range of sound that they can detect, it's an incredibly narrow range. I forget what the exact numbers are. Humans can hear between 20 to 20,000 Hz? And dogs can hear up to…40,000 Hz?
RG:
It's a lot. [laughing]
JH:
It's a lot. There's a range that we can't hear. That's what dog whistles are, right? The dog whistle is making a sound at a range that human ears do not have the capacity to detect, even if we wanted to. Octopuses, their range is like 20 to a hundred hertz. It's super tiny, super low. So based on that, we think that sound, as we understand it, as we are interpreting it and interacting with it, is not an important sense for them because they don't have the physical structures to be able to hear a huge range of sound.
RG:
That's really interesting. Their camouflage is super interesting to me as well. Is this something that they can control? Or is it something that just happens to them because they're so intertwined with their environment? Do they swim around and think oh, this is red, I must go red? Or is it just something that happens? Like a heartbeat?
JH:
That is a great question. I don't know if science knows, confidently, the answer to that yet. We think that a lot of it is active control. And it's not just color, it's also the texture of their skin that they can change. They have different types of cells in their skin called leucophores, iridophores, and chromatophores. Each one of those is responsible for a different component of the color change, but in addition to that, which is controlling the color change, they also have really intricate musculature around their body so they can change the texture of their skin and make what is called papillae – these little weird sticky-out bits – to look like coral or algae. So it seems to be very active.
RG:
So your best guess is that they can control that?
JH:
Yes, because they also have a pretty consistent series of events in trying to avoid predation. Phase one is just hiding a hole. If they're out and about or moving around, phase two is camouflage. They're constantly moving across different types of environments and textures, and they'll change their color and their texture as they're moving through these environments. Once they know they're spotted, and that the camouflage isn't working, then they'll spread out all of their arms and make themselves look as big and as scary as possible. And then if that doesn't work, then they ink and swim away real fast.
RG:
Run! That's the last resort. [laughing]
JH:
It's more like throw something at the predator! Run! Then once they think that they're not in visual range of the predator, then you'll see them kind of hunker down and camouflage to see if that'll work.
RG:
So intelligent, such intelligent creatures.
JH:
They have the capacity to take in all this information, so I would be surprised if they weren't making active decisions. Taking in all this information and using it to decide where to go and what to do. Because it's too complex. What they're doing is too complex to not have some type of active – not necessarily conscious – but active decision making process with all of the different bits of information.
RG:
I was hoping you were going to say that.
JH:
Yeah! There is a whole other group of scientists… Scientists, we love to debate. We love to disagree with each other, but it's all part of the scientific process, really. And there's a whole debate right now happening about octopus and cephalopod consciousness. Do they have consciousness? But the problem is that we don't even really have a good definition of consciousness. Scientists disagree about what it even means and what it means for a human versus an animal. And so I think that debate is going to go on forever. But at the end of the day, they are capable of incredibly complex things and they have the brain structure to accommodate these really complex behaviors. And so I would be surprised if they weren't actively making decisions.
RG:
Right. Sentient and conscious beings.
I’d like to make a music video [with octopuses] somehow, because the way I write, it’s very spacious. Water is a big subject for me, as an inspiration. I'm a big swimmer and I love creatures, and I love the idea that it's a different universe down there. And especially octopuses being able to get out of the water and suddenly being in this other level where we live, and being able to go between those two things – I find that concept super interesting. So I would love to do a music video just with an octopus and just film, write to it, and write to their movements. I think it'd be absolutely amazing.
JH:
I love that idea. Yeah, I'm seeing my own vision in my head of how that would look and feel, and I love that.
RG:
Yeah! I mean – I'm thinking about this as we speak – use their movements. So not I write music and then use their images, but watch them and write to what they are doing. I think that'd be so great.
JH:
I'd love that. Yeah. Fun fact that I didn't mention – my last fact of the day – is that because they don't have a skeletal structure, their movement, it's called hydrostatic movement… essentially their arms move by fluid changing pressure and position within their body, and they move in the way that our tongue moves. There's been some cool research to look at the parallels between their movement and our own tongue movement. Our tongue is moving, and then as soon as you become conscious of your tongue moving, then it gets all weird. But our tongue doesn't have a skeletal structure, so how does our tongue move? It's that same type of movement. It's fluids moving in, through, and out the musculature of our tongue. So there's a lot of parallels between how our tongue functions and how an octopus moves.
RG:
That makes a lot of sense! Because also we have taste in our tongue as well, and they have the taste thing. So basically they have like eight tongues, right?
JH:
Yeah. They’re a giant tongue. They’re a giant tongue with a brain. [both laughing] With nine brains!
Tracing The Lines is a creative exploration of International Anthem Recording Co. and the community that surrounds it.
Issue #3 is available.
This third annual installment explores the concept of Space as it relates to that community and the world as a whole—spaces that humans inhabit, spaces where humans create, spaces where humans meet & live, etc.
