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Sy Montgomery and Warren Carlyle – Octopuses

[00:00:00] Michael Hawk: When it comes to understanding nature, it often seems like the ocean surface that undulating reflective layer of water is more like an impenetrable curtain than just a layer of water. There’s just so much that we don’t know about and are too quick to dismiss all because we can’t easily observe what’s going on down there. Thankfully octopus is, are having a Renaissance in popular culture.

[00:00:21] And as a result, they serve as sort of an ambassador to the oceans. And this is a no small part due to the efforts of my guests today. Sy Montgomery and Warren Carlyle. Sy is the author of soul of the octopus and the new book secrets of the octopus among her many, many works. And Warren Carlyle is the founder of Octonation, a nonprofit octopus fan club boasting over a million members.

[00:00:44] Can you believe it? And they have information on and photos and videos of nearly every octopus species on earth.

[00:00:50] Today we discussed just how incredible octopus is are. And I admit standard words like amazing and incredible.

[00:00:57] Just seem to fall short when discussing these creatures. They can contort and fit through tiny holes, change their color and texture and a blink of an eye. They can reason some can even use tools and they’re incredibly strong.

[00:01:09] They range in size from a kernel of corn to 300 pounds.

[00:01:13] Plus. We cover a range of topics, but we delve deepest into exploring their intelligence,

[00:01:18] This coupled with their distinctive lifestyle, physiology and abilities often leaves us humans astounded. Sy and Warren have a new book secrets of the octopus released on March 19th this year. And they’re contributing to an exciting three part national geographic TV series coming out on earth day.

[00:01:36] So be sure to keep an eye out for that. You can find Sy at symontgomery.com and check out Warren’s efforts at octonation.com and @octonation on most social media platforms. And I have other links to how you can connect with both of these guests in the show notes. So get ready for a jaw dropping and mind-bending discussion about octopus is with Sy Montgomery and Warren Carlyle.

[00:01:59] Sy and Warren, thank you both so much for joining me today.

[00:02:03] Sy Montgomery: We are thrilled to be with you. Thanks for having us.

[00:02:06] Warren Carlyle: Love talking octopuses.

[00:02:08] Michael Hawk: And actually I’m going to start right with that. It is octopuses, not octopi. Is that, correct?

[00:02:13] Sy Montgomery: That is correct. Actually, if, if you want to be in with all the OctoNerds, you want to say octopuses. And the reason is that octopus is a Greek word and ending with an I as a plural is a Latin ending.

[00:02:27] Michael Hawk: Great. As someone who likes etymology that tickles my brain anyway. , as I said, welcome to both of you. We’re talking octopuses today partly because you have a great new book that I’ve been able to preview coming out here in just a couple of weeks from when we’re recording today.

[00:02:45] And I guess I want to find out how both of you Embarked on this journey of the octopus. So Sy, I’m going to start with you. You have a really diverse background and career yet in recent years, it seems like the octopus has been the focus of your of your fancy. So can you tell me how that happened?

[00:03:05] Sy Montgomery: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I’ve written a about animals all over the world, from tree kangaroos to snow leopards, from the great apes to tarantulas. And in 2011, I felt eager to write about octopuses for several reasons, and one was, I wanted to examine the issue of consciousness. In philosophy, this is considered one of the hard problems.

[00:03:33] So I started in March of 2011 by visiting New England Aquarium and asking to see if I could meet their octopus Athena, a giant Pacific octopus. I was going to write an article for a magazine to start with, but in my heart I hoped it might turn into a book, but I had no idea what to expect. And Scott Dowd the aquarist there, opened the lid of Athena’s tank, and I saw this beautiful 40 pound creature emerge from her lair, turn bright red with excitement, and I watched her silvery eyes lock into my face, and she came over and started reaching up toward me with her beautiful white suckers. So, I plunged my hands and arms into the 47 degree water, which was very freezing, and soon found my skin covered with their beautiful, white, soft suckers.

[00:04:31] And it was clear to me that this animal, who was so distantly related to us, the last time we shared a common ancestor was half a billion years ago when everyone was a tube. That this creature was just as interested in me as I was in her. And that was the beginning of my octopus journey that resulted in my first book on octopus called Soul of an Octopus. It was an exploration of consciousness through my relationships with these animals. Well, a couple of years ago, National Geographic was researching and putting out some amazing films and books. One was Secrets of the Whales and what was the, what was the

[00:05:18] Warren Carlyle: Elephants.

[00:05:20] Sy Montgomery: Right, Secrets of the Elephants.

[00:05:22] Oh my gosh, they were fantastic books and films, but they wanted to do one called Secrets of the Octopus. And because my book, The Soul of an Octopus, had been a surprise bestseller and a surprise finalist for the National Book Award, they asked me if I would write it. And I was thrilled to discover that there was so much new science, that had been done on octopus since the Soul of an Octopus was published in 2015. But I had kept abreast of a lot of this, thanks to my now dear friend, the Octoking founder of the OctoNation, the biggest octopus fan club in the world, whose journey had begun when he was a kid but we intersected in 2015, when Soul of an Octopus was first put out.

[00:06:13] Warren Carlyle: With me it began when I was seven years old. I saw an octopus for the first time. And as Sy mentioned, there’s just this experience that you get. And I remember for me as a child neurodivergent was autistic, had ADHD, and I didn’t talk much. And I would make flashcards for things that I was interested in.

[00:06:30] And so I remember discovering the octopus and looking in its eye. And at the time I was obsessed with the idea of aliens. I had an alien bedspread, I had alien posters. And I remember when I saw it, I just thought, well, if that thing, that is the most alien looking thing I’ve ever seen in my life, and I remember looking into its eyes and it was almost like looking into a universe or something like that, some distant, galaxy far, far away.

[00:06:55] And I remember running to the library after that and asking the librarian if she had any books on octopuses. And she was like, no, we don’t have any. And I thought, wow, that’s strange. You have books for every other animal in this library and not for the octopus. So after school, I tell my mom, I want to go to the library.

[00:07:10] I need to see if there are any books on octopuses. And anything that I could find was an encyclopedia that talked about maybe the giant Pacific octopus or maybe the common octopus. Yet I had like seen other pictures of ones that look differently. I’m like, where are all these species at? They weren’t in one place, but I didn’t really know what to do with my obsession. So when people would ask me, just like, you get asked, what’s your favorite color? Every now and then. People would say, what’s your favorite animal? And I’d say the octopus. And they’re like, why? I’m like, I don’t really know why I’m just drawn to it. It wasn’t until 2015 that, Soul of an Octopus came out and I picked it up cause I remember they’re like a new octopus book is coming out. so I grabbed it. And in the first couple of pages, Sy mentions how the octopus throughout history has just been this maligned animal. It’s been perceived as a monster. It’s been perceived like all these misconceptions, these misnomers about this animal. And I thought that’s not fair because what I connected with when I was younger was not what, what she was referencing.

[00:08:08] So I remember getting the inspiration at the time to change this now. If it hasn’t been changed since I was seven we need to figure out something. And so I created Octonation and I had no background in being able to do it, but I started writing about these creatures.

[00:08:23] And in a very similar way that Sy spoke about these creatures in her book, you just heard her speak about them. There’s something so enchanting when Sy talks that just makes you want to listen. And I thought, how can I transfer that, but for all the different species of octopuses? So I started profiling them. And then all of a sudden the post started going viral. People started saying, this is the first time I’ve ever even seen this animal. And the rest is history. We have over a million members in this past year. Our educational content was seen by over a half a billion people.

[00:08:54] Michael Hawk: I, I love this story because it, one of the things that I advocate for is that everybody can help the environment in their own way. And, and more, and when I looked at your LinkedIn profile and I was preparing for this, I, I saw that you’re listed as a talent manager and brand strategist.

[00:09:09] So, I’m curious with the success of OctoNation, how much of that is because the octopus is just such an amazing creature. And how much of that is you applying this brand strategy background that you have to this endeavor. And

[00:09:23] Warren Carlyle: Yeah. So while I was working in New York, I was an intern for a celebrity fashion photographer, and I ended up becoming his studio manager after around four to six months after working with him. Because I had this ability, and I credit it to my neurodivergence, of just being able to find connections and being able to universalize information to different constituents.

[00:09:43] So I would go to these meetings, and I would know, okay, you’re looking for this from this brand, this brand is looking for this. And I’d say, why don’t we create this campaign? And so I was able to just, create these campaigns at scale and see them run. And then finally I realized I could do this by myself.

[00:09:58] I could create my own brand management agency and went off on my own and started working with clients and found out very quickly that in the span of three to six months, I could, literally changed people’s lives. So I started working, once the Soul of an Octopus came out, I took on the octopus as my client.

[00:10:16] And I started looking at how do I connect underwater photographers? How do I connect tattoo artists? How do I connect artists from all over the world? How do I connect academics? And in one place? And what campaigns would I need to create? And how could I reach out to them to let them know that Octonation is a resource for them?

[00:10:32] And so I just very strategically started building what I didn’t know was going to turn into a non profit organization. But going back to what you said about how has it helped me, I just looked at how do people currently perceive this animal in culture and media. What, what is, what are people’s misconceptions about it?

[00:10:50] And then I started creating campaigns to combat those or sort of illuminate how, how those things weren’t true. Like there were so many people that thought octopuses had teeth and they’re suckers and that they would bite them or that they were these, I guess throughout, history and film and all this stuff, there’s all of these things that we had to undo, now that we had access to the internet. And so I just chipped away and now we’re nine years later, and I don’t believe that people feel that same way about this creature as evidenced by all of the books and the documentaries and everything that’s coming out is just received with such fanfare that it’s really fun to see.

[00:11:27] Sy Montgomery: We are right now in the golden age of octopus research and octopus appreciation because when I started out in 2011, I’d already written, oh gosh, over 30 books and I had lots of friends who were gonna tell me if there was even like, oh look, I found a mong with an octopus on it. But after 2015, which is when my book came out and when OctoNation was founded, oh my gosh, a huge explosion, not only of like cool tattoos and gorgeous artwork and neat stuff for your house with octopuses on it, but the research on octopus was getting the play it really deserved.

[00:12:08] And I think one of the things that happened, and I want to credit my friend Athena here, who is long gone. I have her beak in my office, she was the first octopus that I met, but she and the other ones who I got to get to know at New England Aquarium became my friends, and showed me that if we have a soul, so does an octopus.

[00:12:30] They’re individuals who think and feel and know, and they learn things. They recognize individual people. They enjoy playing like we do. They enjoy gentle touch as we do. And just getting to know individual octopuses and knowing that they were happy to see me, that they would look up through the water, recognize my face. This has been tested, by the way, in scientific laboratories. Octopuses do recognize individual humans just by looking at them through the water. Showing that these animals have thoughts and memories and feelings, I think, really helped change the public’s attitude toward them. Their similarities to us are fascinating.

[00:13:16] Their differences are equally fascinating. So there’s every reason, to love and celebrate octopus for their superpowers and for our shared powers as well.

[00:13:29] Michael Hawk: I was going to ask you Sy with this backdrop of the misconceptions and the way octopuses have traditionally been portrayed in TV, what, makes octopuses so unique? So I think you’re already going down that path of answering that question, but I want to open it up a little bit more to you.

[00:13:47] And give us the ode to uniqueness of an octopus. Like what, else really just draws people in?

[00:13:53] Sy Montgomery: Well, just like Warren said, you would have to go to outer space or science fiction to find a creature more unlike us. These animals can pour their boneless, flexible bodies through an opening that’s smaller than an orange. Even if they weigh 40 or 50 pounds, they can just flow through anything they taste with all of their skin. They have three hearts. They have blue blood, they have strength that’s incredible. Each of their suckers, a three and a half inch sucker on a giant Pacific octopus can lift 35 pounds. And they have 200 suckers on each of their eight arms. So they’re tremendously strong animals. All octopuses are venomous, also.

[00:14:42] And yet, these animals with tremendous strength, with superpowers, with bodies so unlike ours, you can still be friends with someone like this. And that is what blows my mind.

[00:14:56] Michael Hawk: Yeah, it is. They’re just so amazingly different that they, they draw you in from the camouflage to this flexibility. I wanted to ask you like a week or two ago, I saw this viral video of an octopus where it extended all of its arms or all of its legs. Arms or legs? I don’t know. Is that, is either?

[00:15:15] Sy Montgomery: Arms.

[00:15:16] Michael Hawk: arms?

[00:15:17] Sy Montgomery: Yeah, it’s arms. Although sometimes they walk around on their arms like their legs. Sometimes they walk on the bottom of the ocean looking like a weary commuter. They just, it’s so funny.

[00:15:27] Michael Hawk: so it extended all of its arms and suddenly instead of being tubular, it, they flattened out. And slowly flattened out, got wider and wider. And then they all merged together, almost like a balloon. It was like a balloon with an octopus head. Did, are you, did you see this video? Are you familiar with this behavior?

[00:15:50] Sy Montgomery: have seen that video and I’ve seen them go through little tiny openings. They can get through just about any space. The only hard part of their body really is their beak. And that’s another thing about them. Their mouths are located in their armpits, and so many cartoons show the octopus with a big smiley face on its mantle.

[00:16:12] That’s not even its head. They don’t even go like we do. We go, head, torso, limbs. They go torso, and then the little part with their eyes in it is their head, and then their beak, like a parrot, their mouth is located in their armpits, and then they have their arms. These animals can change color in less time than it takes to blink an eye.

[00:16:34] They can change shape, they can change the texture of their skin, and it’s all under their conscious control. So, imagine, I have trouble multitasking. But they have no trouble multitasking at all. And all the time they’re observing their surroundings with eyes that have no blind spot. They can see all the way around, and think of all the information that they are taking in through their senses about the real world that we live in, but do not perceive.

[00:17:06] Their eyes can see, for example, polarized light. Our eyes cannot. But what’s amazing too about their eyes is that they’re able to adopt all these colors and patterns without having color vision in their eyes. So there’s still a lot of mysteries about how they have all these super powers.

[00:17:24] Warren Carlyle: And I wanted to touch on the video that you mentioned, because that’s my territory. From the standpoint of the cool thing, the coolest thing about being the founder of the largest octopus fan club is that that means that we have the largest network of underwater photographers and videographers in the world.

[00:17:40] And so we get to see footage instead of them sending their footage to, I don’t know, BBC or National Geographic. They send all their footage to OctoNation because that they, they know that we will immediately, showcase it to, millions of people all around the world and that their footage has the potential to go viral and get licensed.

[00:17:58] And so just this past week, we saw the frilled pygmy octopus for the first time in, 10 or 15 years and it’s on our Instagram account. And in the video that you mentioned is actually a, it’s called a big eyed jellyhead and it’s a deep sea species. And what you’re referring to is their deep webbing, which looks just like a circus tent.

[00:18:18] they can throw their arms out and extend this webbing that starts at where they’re kind of like, it’s called like an interbrachial web or their arm crown. And it starts there and it just goes to almost to the tips of the arms and they create this parachute and it’s a way for them to make sure that the prey doesn’t get away and that they can keep it in one area.

[00:18:39] And there’s a lot of different species of octopuses. There’s over 300. There’s many species that have deep webbing, like the Caribbean reef octopus that looks like the gown of Cinderella’s dress, it has this iridescent webbing. It’s gorgeous if you want to Google it and look at it. We feature a lot of these species in Octopedia, which is our comprehensive field guide of octopus species online, written in a very fun and informative way.

[00:19:02] I didn’t want it to be like kind of like a dry encyclopedia. I wanted to say things like, an octopus has horizontal pupils. So imagine two panoramic cameras on the sides of your head; they don’t have a blind spot. And so I write everything with, languaging that somebody could immediately go and tell a friend, Hey, I just learned this.

[00:19:21] Did you know that an octopus has a tongue like a cat? And, just, talk in a way that people, they could inspire somebody else, most likely they’re not going to say, did you know that they live 20 meters down into in this tidal subterranean, there’s all these things that, stop people from talking about these animals.

[00:19:38] And I wanted to make sure that I was equipping them with exactly what they would need, to go and immediately talk about this animal that they had just learned about.

[00:19:46] Sy Montgomery: This was why I think the best thing I ever did for National Geographic, this iconic organization that I’ve just worshipped since I was a kid, was when they asked me to write this thing, the first thing out of my mouth was, well, you’ve got to get Warren Carlyle involved. And he is the one who wrote the octoprofiles at the end of the book, highlighting some of these amazing species.

[00:20:10] Every octopus can do amazing things. Every octopus can change color and shape very quickly and pour their bodies through tiny openings and every octopus is gobsmackingly strange and wonderful, but some of them look like they’re covered in hair. Others use tools with great expertise.

[00:20:29] Others can mimic a flounder, a fish a bunch of sea snakes. Some can mimic the weather, and Warren writes about this so engagingly in the back of The Secrets of the Octopus. And I think that’s some of the best part of the whole book. Plus the photography, which actually Warren was a huge, huge help getting together these pictures that have never been seen before, except on Octonation.

[00:20:57] Michael Hawk: Yeah, and before we get into the photography, because I do want to ask about that, that really stood out to me in the book, I want to continue down this path of the diversity of the octopus and all these different species. it’s just like, my mind is getting blown already and, just in these first few minutes of, talking because yeah, I’m seeing the challenge that you have in communicating about octopuses, because As you said, their body plans are totally different than what most people are familiar with.

[00:21:25] Their lifestyles are totally different. But it’s also really fertile ground. And it seems like Warren has found good ways to connect people. So, okay, back to diversity. We, talked a bit about how many species there are, but like what range of habitats do they occupy? And, , I’d love to paint a picture of the roles they play in those habitats too.

[00:21:46] Warren Carlyle: So octopuses, they live in every single ocean. They’re along every coastline in the world. And depending on where they live, they have a unique superpower or adaptation that allows them to be masters of that given environment. So even in the Antarctic ocean, you have the Antarctic octopus that has antifreeze proteins in its skin that allow it to survive these sub zero temperatures almost.

[00:22:10] Next to the deep, underwater volcanoes where seawater meets magma, you have the hot water volcano octopus or the volcano octopus. And they live next to 150, 60, degree hydrothermal vents that are blowing toxic plumes all into the water. Then you have, your tropical species like the Maori octopus in New Zealand and Australia that are the largest octopus in the Southern Hemisphere.

[00:22:35] There are these incredible creatures. There’s this one, my, one of my favorite photos is of a Maori octopus that is going after this legion of snow crab. And it’s just going after it almost like it’s a seafood buffet. And so, yeah, they exist everywhere. There’s just no freshwater species. So it’s important to know that there, no freshwater species that we know of yet.

[00:22:57] I don’t know. It might happen. They’re evolving pretty quickly. But yeah, that was one of the things that I was most interested in in even open water species, ones that never touch the ocean floor, that survive their whole entire lives floating through the open ocean. You have the blanket octopus, which is featured in our book, Secrets of the Octopus.

[00:23:16] Who has a six foot, sometimes seven foot, iridescent cape that looks like a floating rainbow through the ocean. And what’s really fascinating about that species is that her counterpart, her boyfriend, the male blanket octopus, only grows the size of her pupil. He’s smaller than an acorn, and he actually has the ability to ride on the bells of jellies, and just use them to, um, as, protection, using their stinging tentacles as protection.

[00:23:41] So the more and more you get into each one of them, you can, you can tell my fascination. They’re endlessly fascinating and they all have each individual lives. And so when somebody says all octopuses can do this or do that, I’m always just like, well, even Sy, she had mentioned all octopuses can change color.

[00:23:58] They have discovered a species it’s been around probably forever called the sand octopus that actually lives in an environment where it doesn’t really need to change colors. So, over hundreds of millions of years, it really lost the ability to change colors all that much. What it does, is is it almost swan dives into a sand, it, it blasts itself almost a foot underground, it secretes a mucus that reinforces the walls, the sandy walls, so that they don’t cave in, and then creates a ventilation shaft with one of its arms, almost like a chimney, and it burrows underground.

[00:24:32] And so everywhere you go in the ocean there just seems to be an octopus there that has just managed to figure it out. So the way I explain it to kids is almost like that are into Pokemon. It’s just like, Pokemon exists, they’re in our seas and they’re octopuses.

[00:24:46] Michael Hawk: That, that octopus that, where the male is only the size of an acorn. What is the smallest octopus?

[00:24:52] Warren Carlyle: Yeah. So there’s the one that we know of right now is the star sucker pygmy octopus, and they grow about smaller than your pinky fingernail. But they look just like an octopus except miniature. What’s funny about that species is similar to the hairy octopus, which is one of my favorite, kind of like, underdog octopus species. If you google hairy octopus, we’re the first page that pops up online. They will jump into ocean currents, almost like a rideshare and they’ll just use ocean currents to get where they need to go. And their goal is to not look like an octopus at all. So they just look like blowing debris in the ocean.

[00:25:27] And they’re actually one of the hardest octopuses to spot because they actually grow the size of, your fingernail as well. And I call them, or the, the nation calls them tube octopus because they’re just these little pom pom looking octopuses that sprout hair like papilla and look seriously like algae.

[00:25:44] they’re fun to look at if you want to check them out.

[00:25:47] Sy Montgomery: That’s so great. And you know what? I’m talking to you, man. You’re learning. Yeah, I’m learning stuff on this podcast. This is an awesome podcast.

[00:25:56] Michael Hawk: was going to say, I can already tell I’m going to need to source a few photos to put in the show notes. And of course I’ll link to all the different the Octonation pages and everything else that we talk about too. Are there any octopuses that are communal or are they generally all solitary?

[00:26:14] Sy Montgomery: Aha. See, this is one of the secrets of the octopus that was most exciting for me to write about. Because it was thought for a long time that most species were solitary and only got together for either mating or cannibalism, and occasionally both. It was a bit of a problem because your dinner date turns out to be a dinner date, and I’ve actually gone to a Valentine’s Day celebration in which octopuses met, and it’s a bit fraught because there’s a lot going on.

[00:26:44] You don’t want one to eat the other in front of the public. In fact, that’s one reason why they never, they don’t hold it anymore. But turns out that many octopuses are in fact communal, and sometimes they’re communal under certain circumstances and not others. For example, in Australia, there’s a species called the gloomy octopus, and he’s not really gloomy.

[00:27:08] He has just really big eyes and looks quite soulful. Well, this animal used to seem to be solitary, but some divers discovered an area that’s now called Octopolis. Because so many octopuses gather there together, it’s like an octopus metropolis. They’ve since discovered a second area where dozens of octopuses appear to be living in very close proximity, and they call that Octatlantis.

[00:27:41] But that’s not the only species that’s found living communally. And it may be that species we thought were solitary are not, including the famous giant Pacific octopus. The one that I went to the octopus blind date, at which you’ve got to worry that they do eat each other. It’s been observed in the wild and in captivity that sometimes they do it.

[00:28:07] The males are, are generally pretty careful about that. And some of them do this thing called distance mating, in which they’ll actually stay in their, den. and just send out their specialized mating arm or ligula and try to mate at a distance because if the female bites it off, fortunately he can grow one back.

[00:28:27] Michael Hawk: Well, actually I want, I want to go down that thread about growing body parts back. So that’s, that’s a unique superpower of all octopuses. Some octopuses, tell me a bit more about that.

[00:28:38] Warren Carlyle: Yeah, so with octopus and regeneration, what’s fascinating about them is they can grow back, unlike like a lizard that kind of grows back a little nub the octopus from the outer nerve bundles to everything grows back the arm as good as new. You wouldn’t know after looking at it. And what’s really interesting is there’s some species called like the banded string-arm octopus, that if you look at some photographs of their arms, they actually have these planes.

[00:29:04] It’s almost like a perforated, almost like a journal, a piece of journal paper that you can tear off at the edges. They have these biological tear strips that if something is going to attack them, they can just break their arm off and that’s just, how they’re supposed to do it. So that the predator can go attack that wriggly worm and the octopus can get away and protect, all of its bodily organs and its mantle and stuff like that.

[00:29:25] But yeah, , they can grow those arms back as good as new. It also depends on like their age. If a male has already mated. He immediately starts a process called senescence, which is a dementia or Alzheimer’s like state, where they’ve lived out their purpose, the males, they have that one blaze of glory.

[00:29:41] so they go, they start to forget how to change colors. They’ll start swimming into the water column and get eaten. And that’s their life cycle. But the arms if, that happens prior to it, they will, start to grow back. So it’s really, really fascinating. But again, different species, you can’t say all octopuses because there are some that they all will regenerate their arms, but they all have such different types of ways about going about doing everything.

[00:30:07] Sy Montgomery: And an interesting thing about the severed arm is, at least in the species that I know about, once that arm is severed, say a mean Shark bites it off. That arm can continue to do stuff, for a while, which is amazing to me. And this is because most of their neurons are not located in their brain, but in their arms,

[00:30:30] Warren Carlyle: Yeah, they’ll, they’ll pretend as if they’re feeding like a, It’s almost like a zombie arm, like they’re feeding a mouth that’s not there. And what they call that in the arms is satellite brains. You’ll see some of them, people like octopuses, have nine brains. Some scientists would be like, no, those clusters of nerves are called ganglia.

[00:30:47] But what I’ve decided that they’re called the satellite brains and they can communicate with one another and they can make decisions without the use of the central brain, almost like an autonomous car, going on a drive by itself talking to the, to the main chip and the computer.

[00:31:02] Some arms, they’ve noticed have different personalities. Like you’ll have some arms that, depending on maybe their experiences will be shy. Some will be the, the hunting arm. It’s, this is a really cool area of research that people that if they’re interested in this and that are listening, this is really ripe for study right now.

[00:31:23] And so it’s like, again, Sy Syd, this is the golden age of octopus research. And as Octonation grows, there is space for you to share your research with everybody and get everybody excited about it.

[00:31:35] Michael Hawk: Oh my gosh, I was just anthropomorphizing the, eight different satellite brains and eight different arms and one being the shy arm and one being like each, each having a specialty that’s could make for some interesting cartoons or comedy or something too. And it

[00:31:49] Warren Carlyle: For sure.

[00:31:50] Michael Hawk: of I, a book I just fell in love with a couple of years ago was Ed Yong’s

[00:31:55] Sy Montgomery: an immense

[00:31:56] world.

[00:31:56] Michael Hawk: world.

[00:31:57] Thank you. And he talked a little bit about how some insects and some other animals have these neuron clusters away from their brain and it potentially gives them faster reaction time and quicker sensory capabilities and all these different things. So, it’s interesting to see these parallels cropping up as we talk

[00:32:15] Warren Carlyle: What’s really interesting too is some more things that I learned even while researching for the book is that apparently, very similar to how bees use the world’s magnetism to orient themselves and find, where home is and things like that, There’s a species of octopus, a gorgeous species, called the day octopus, and apparently that octopus can look and remember certain mile markers, or certain markers around the reef, and also utilizes the magnetism of the world in order to orient itself in the ocean and find its way back to its specific den.

[00:32:50] We’ve seen this species time and time again. Sometimes when it gets back to its den, because as you know, real estate in the ocean is always up for grabs. Sometimes when it gets back to its den, it has an eel poking its head out. And you’ll see it will take all of its arms and move them behind its head, flatten its suckers, almost as if it’s an octopus shield, and it will force that eel out of its home.

[00:33:13] So that the eel can’t bite any of its suckers. It doesn’t create any sort of way that the eel could kind of like get in and bite it. It flattens its arms completely and it’s just so amazing to see how they’ve managed to figure all this stuff out. So the more and more that we get footage, the more and more behaviors that we get to see, the more and more remarkable we find that this creature is.

[00:33:34] Sy Montgomery: Octopuses, because they lost the ancestral shell, they are related, to clams and snails, who are not smart in the way that we recognize smarts. But when they lost that ancestral shell, it freed them up to pursue all kinds of prey, but it also made them a delicious packet of unprotected protein.

[00:33:55] So what the octopus had to do what all of these species have to figure out. is how do I evade all of these predators, which are changing throughout my life because they hatch out the size of a grain of rice and large species like the giant Pacific octopus can get to, 300 pounds, which I think is the largest ever measured.

[00:34:15] So your predators are changing throughout your life, and they include birds, and mammals, and all kinds of fish, and fishermen as well. But they also have to figure out, all different kinds of prey, which also changes throughout their life, because when you’re the size of a grain of rice, you’re going to be eating different things than when you’re 300 pounds.

[00:34:37] So they have so many different adaptations to escape from all of these predators and to pursue all of these different kind of prey items in the amazingly complex world of the ocean. And so, , they may use camouflage, they may shoot ink, they may pour themselves into a small opening, but they also are thinking.

[00:35:02] Like, I’m going to try something to evade this shark, and that’s not the same thing that I’m going to use necessarily to evade this moray eel. So this has sculpted this amazing variety of pursuit abilities and escape abilities, and you can sometimes see them trying one thing and, oop, that doesn’t work, I’m going to try this other thing, oop, that doesn’t work, now I’m going to do this.

[00:35:29] Michael Hawk: Yeah, it’s like a creative evasion that they have, the way to evade predation. And, hearing that story of the octopus basically reducing its attack surface to evict the eel, it reminded me, you mentioned camouflage is one of the ways that they can evade. And I I think it was you, Sy, telling a story about how an octopus can use camouflage in a unique way, not just hiding, but it can trick a predator into thinking maybe a bigger fish is swimming by.

[00:36:02] Do you know the story I’m talking about, and can you elaborate?

[00:36:06] Sy Montgomery: Yeah, absolutely. Probably one of the champions at this is a species called the mimic octopus. And we think of camouflage as just a way to blend into the background. Octopuses, generally, are great at this, but their camouflage ability doesn’t just mean becoming invisible. Because in some habitats, becoming invisible is not an option.

[00:36:31] In some habitats, like the places that the mimic octopus lives all you have to do is just not look like an octopus. So instead, the mimic can look like a poisonous flatfish. In other instances, it can spread out its arms and look like poisonous snakes, poisonous sea snakes. It can do, more than a dozen different imitations of other creatures.

[00:36:59] There’s other octopuses that can even mimic the weather. There’s a display that’s, that’s known, I, I know that the blue or day octopus does this, called the passing cloud display. And what it can do is look like a cloud is passing across it, like a cloud might float across the moon. This will divert their prey’s attention, perhaps, from them to think that something even scarier is passing overhead when it’s really just the octopus pretending, oh, it’s just, it’s just a cloud going by.

[00:37:32] So if they can confuse you into thinking that they are something other than an octopus, sometimes that’s more, even more effective than looking like, oh, I’m just a piece of this coral.

[00:37:44] Michael Hawk: Yeah, just a moment of confusion is probably enough to escape a dangerous situation.

[00:37:49] Sy Montgomery: Yeah, and they also can shoot ink. And many people think that the ink is just like, the Batmobile. When it shoots away, it can just shoot out a bunch of fog or something. That’s not how their ink usually works. And I was inked once. I was inked in New England Aquarium with a little red octopus.

[00:38:09] And we, we both were pretty alarmed. All octopuses that I know of are venomous, and you don’t really want to be bitten by one, and so this little octopus had glommed onto my hand, and her beak was right there. I, I didn’t want to be bitten, and so once she glommed on, I wanted her off. And I shook my hand and she shot away from me and shot out a blob of ink.

[00:38:33] Well, the blob of ink is actually called a pseudomorph. And it’s not just a spray of stuff. It looks like an octopus in front of your eyes. It even grows arms like an octopus and you can’t help, but look at the pseudomorph while the octopus itself just shot away. She changed color. She became like this kind of beige color that did not hold my attention. And even though I very much wanted to focus on what the octopus was doing, I couldn’t help but look at the pseudomorph. And this ink is very complex chemically. In some species, they even think that the ink contains a drug. that its predator will imbibe and think it has already eaten the octopus.

[00:39:22] Michael Hawk: Wow, that’s like Layered defenses. It’s yeah, my mind’s blown again. we started to get into the intelligence realm and how the world an octopus lives in and perceives is totally different. So I had a listener question actually that I wanted to acknowledge. And that was, how do we talk about animal intelligence without a full understanding of their brain and sensory capabilities?

[00:39:47] So when we talk about an octopus being intelligent, how do you wrap your head around that discussion?

[00:39:55] Sy Montgomery: Well, generally, when humans talk about intelligence, we talk about the aspects of our intelligence that we value. For instance, problem solving, okay? And some of the measures by which we recognize intelligence are those that we see in big brained, long lived animals, like elephants, like apes. Like whales.

[00:40:18] All of these, and humans as well, are big brained, long lived animals, and we admire that they can solve all kinds of problems, that they have long memories that they enjoy things like playing and these are things that we don’t expect to see in short lived animals like octopus, and yet they’re there.

[00:40:40] Octopuses love to play and they often play with the same toys our children do. They like to play with Mr. Potato Head, they love to play with Legos, and they like to play with people, at least the ones that I knew liked to play with me. They love to explore. So all of these things are kinds of intelligence that we recognize.

[00:41:02] But an octopus could well ask of a human, how, how fast can your severed arm change into a different color? And when we say none, they might conclude that we’re absolute idiots. So your listener is very wise to point out that there’s different kinds of intelligence and some that we may not recognize, some that we may not appreciate.

[00:41:24] But nonetheless, really important and valuable. And maybe octopuses will show us some of these.

[00:41:30] Warren Carlyle: One of the coolest things that I think about octopus intelligence is, our eyes are made out of a protein called opsin, and they found that all throughout the octopus’s body, they have a protein called opsin, and so they can actually change contrasts of their skin to match the kind of ambient light in the ocean.

[00:41:50] And again, that’s the kind of intelligence that, that we’re, we, we’d love to be able to figure out as far as their chromatophores are concerned too, they have all these layers of muscles called, muscular hydrostats, octopuses don’t have bones, but they have these muscular hydrostats, sometimes we can call them like a water skeleton, if you want to simplify it to the really, really like octonation terms.

[00:42:13] And they can create almost like these 3D, very similar to our tongues, or an elephant’s trunk an octopus, they can create branched structures. And so, like the algae octopus can flex its skin. And then create a branch and then create branches off of that branch to match its environment.

[00:42:33] And again, these, all these different types of intelligences that it worked perfectly for them and in their environment that we’re just beginning to really understand. Going back to the cool thing about Octonation and getting a lot of footage, is what seems to go viral over and over again on Octonation is an interaction between humans and octopuses in the wild.

[00:42:55] There was this clip of this woman who would go, I believe it’s in Bonaire, she would go and she would go to this spot and there was an octopus that she called Egbert. And it got to a while where Egbert started hunting with her, almost. Saying, hey, can you pick this up so that I can see what’s under here?

[00:43:13] Or, hey, let’s go over here. And, hey, can you help me over here? I think there’s something over here. And it was just this fascinating thing to see where he felt so comfortable with her to understand, okay, this is my hunting buddy. This is what we do. This is a routine for me. And I have, two German shepherds.

[00:43:31] And I say this all the time with my first interaction with an octopus. There’s something about, looking into even your, your pet’s eyes or your dog’s eyes and knowing, Hey, they need to go out or Hey, they need to eat or, Hey, something’s not right. I think they’re sick. It’s very similar. I find with the octopus’s gaze, you can figure out kind of like what’s going on or what do you need?

[00:43:50] And and they can tell you.

[00:43:51] Sy Montgomery: I’ve, known people who kept home octopuses who did exactly that, Warren. Nancy King used to hunt with her home octopus. She would point out where the prey was. She would point with her finger, which is something that wolves do not understand. But dogs do, octopuses do, and one of the most exciting things I reported in the last section of Secrets of the Octopus was how there are species of octopus that do hunt with other species of animals, including fish. There’s one kind that a fish will come to an octopus, do a headstand, a special signal, saying, guess what, I’ve got an idea, let’s go hunting. The octopus recognizes that signal and says, okay, let’s go together. Then the fish leads the octopus to the area with prey that the fish can’t reach, but the octopus with this bendy, almost liquid arms can reach.

[00:44:50] And in that way, both species benefit from this cooperative venture.

[00:44:54] Michael Hawk: Yeah, absolutely. There’d have to be a mutual benefit for that to play out the way you described and the, the story of Egbert in in Bonaire is, is really interesting. Because it’s almost like Egbert trained the woman to become the partner, to become the hunting partner, which is again just, it’s, I, I was, I’ve been thinking here, as you talk about these, capabilities, just how challenging it is for us as people to understand.

[00:45:18] And I don’t know if I have the right words for it, but I’m sitting here thinking about how some of these capabilities where the octopus can change colors or whatever the behavior is, it’s really easy for people to dismiss that as some sort of inherent trait. And I think when you let your mind open up a little bit more to the fact that the octopus’s perspective, when they look at us and they say, you can’t change colors, you don’t have the neuromuscular capability, you don’t have the brain power to, to force your body to do these things.

[00:45:53] Like it is a totally different world. And I think for me, anyway, that helps position what can be dismissed as a, sign of a different sort of intelligence.

[00:46:02] I

[00:46:02] Warren Carlyle: Cool thing about Octonation is sometimes I’ll ask our members, what do they think, because we have over a million people, so, the cool thing about having that ability to say, Hey, this is what I’m seeing. Am I crazy? What do you, what do you all see? And then we get hundreds, sometimes thousands of comments from people all of the world saying, no, I see it too.

[00:46:23] Or, Hey, I think this is what’s going on. Or, Hey, I’m actually a scientist that’s doing research on this. You know, If people want to send me their footage so that I can, I can put all this stuff together. I’d love, to see your footage on this. What’s really fascinating I believe, I’m trying to remember his last name, I know his first name’s Trevor, but he found that an octopus, because they are, related to snails, clams, other mollusks, I always used to think, man, if they have to hold a certain shape for a long period of time, I imagine like, me having to sit in a squat formation for like 30 minutes, right?

[00:46:56] I’m like, if an octopus has to hold shape and color and texture as a shark like swarms on by for maybe 15 minutes at a time, is that octopus not sweating like the equivalent of us sweating? And so I remember posing this question in a very kind of like comedic way and got reached out to and said, actually very similar to like how a clam.

[00:47:18] can use a chemical to make their clams shut, there’s like this specialized mollusk musculature that octopuses most likely have, where it’s almost like a lock and key. When they’re in that formation, it’s actually no problem for them at all to hold that. It’s, it’s just chemically locked. And then when they want to release it, they release another chemical.

[00:47:40] And it immediately goes flat, and they have these specialized muscles that are responsible for elongating the skin on its body, and it happens in the blink of an eye. And so it was just something that I learned that I would not have known that. I would have just known to comment on, man, like I’m watching this octopus hold the shape for a long time.

[00:47:58] Is it not tired? Is it going to like, at the last minute be like, okay, I can’t hold this anymore. And it’s like, do a deep breath and just like be eaten by the shark. And as it turns out, no, they actually aren’t sweating at all. That’s just me as a human. And that’s intelligence, right? That’s a, that’s a form of biological intelligence.

[00:48:17] Sy Montgomery: think that knowing animals like this is helping to broaden our human appreciation for intelligence. I think this is one of the great things that octopuses can teach us, that, this world is so much bigger than we can perceive. with our senses. There’s, there’s a quote from Thales of Miletus, the pre Socratic Greek philosopher.

[00:48:39] ” The, the universe is alive and has fire in it, and it’s full of gods”. Octopuses teach us this. That the world is far more alive than we dare imagine, that it’s incandescent. with life and ability and beauty and mystery and it is holy. Full of gods. I think when we apprehend our world through the powers of some of these other creatures, we can’t help but love our world more.

[00:49:11] They help turn us into disciples for the, for the ocean. They turn us into octo heroes. And I think this was part of what Warren is doing with Octonation. This is what we hoped to do with Secrets of the Octopus and earlier Soul of the Octopus and the two books I’ve written for kids on octopus to make us all into heroes of our environment because we love it so much.

[00:49:42] Michael Hawk: So the book Secrets of the Octopus, I note it is coming out on March 19th. And I think by the, by the time we air this episode, it will have been out. So people should be able to find it where I’m assuming anywhere.

[00:49:54] Sy Montgomery: Yeah, you should be able to get it at most bookstores you can get it on Amazon, you can get an order online. and your local independent bookstore, if it doesn’t have it, the owner will easily be able to order it for you.

[00:50:05] Warren Carlyle: for sure. And it’s, if you want a domain name, it’s secretsoftheoctopus. com.

[00:50:09] Michael Hawk: Perfect. And we hinted earlier about the spectacular photography in the book. And I, I’m just curious, like what was the process behind getting these images? Where did they come from? How did he do it?

[00:50:22] Warren Carlyle: Yeah, so the images, what’s really cool about the opportunity of Octonation is we have the largest network of underwater photographers. And so I did a call, for photos and turn them over to the person who did Kathy Moran, who’s an incredible woman who has worked with National Geographic pretty much her whole entire life.

[00:50:42] And she was so surprised at how many people reached out with their photos. And it just shows you how important National Geographic is to a lot of underwater photographers, and for the opportunity to be featured in the book. So some of their photos are featured towards the end.

[00:50:58] What’s really cool about that is they’re just photos that don’t exist on any stock websites. They don’t exist anywhere online. Except for the book.

[00:51:06] Michael Hawk: So are, are these photos generally in the wild?

[00:51:10] Warren Carlyle: Yeah. So for the most part, I think the majority of the photos are in the wild. I mean, There’s some that were taken by Joel I believe in his style, which is typically very up close in captivity of certain species that he’s gotten to photograph. But the majority are taken in the wild and I’m glad that I got to be part of this process too, because there are some photos that people aren’t aware of. There’s a style of photography where people or photographers will forcefully remove an octopus from their den, throw it on the surface of the water and then film it in slow motion going down.

[00:51:45] They turn into viral clips and they appear all over, the internet. And we tried to make it very known that, Hey, if you see an octopus that’s free floating in the water column, it’s a floating protein bar. It has no desire to be in the water column. If it’s, a, seafloor dwelling species.

[00:52:02] And so we’ve really done a good job at educating people. So just understanding when you’re looking at an octopus photo, how can you tell whether or not it was taken in a respectful way? And I can say that in all the photos in the book that that have Octonation seal of approval.

[00:52:17] Michael Hawk: That’s great, great additional line of education . And how can people get involved with Octonation?

[00:52:23] Warren Carlyle: Yeah, so we have a lot of different ways. You can go on Instagram and look at Octonation if you want to see some of the clips from all over the world. We have our website, octonation. com, which is really fun because I work with a team of science writers and get to give work to people that are researching and studying cephalopods and give it like an Octonation twist when it comes to its tone.

[00:52:43] And then if you’re on Facebook, you can always go to OctopusFanClub. com and you can join in there and see octopus art from all over the world, tattoos. You name it. We have all sorts of octopus goodies in that, Facebook group.

[00:52:57] Michael Hawk: Yeah, I’m excited to check that out. I didn’t stumble upon that in my research. I’ve been considering a variety of different potential tattoos actually, and, maybe you’ve sold me over on an octopus. So I,

[00:53:08] Warren Carlyle: Nice. If you search that group, if you just type in tattoo in the search bar, in in our Octonation Facebook group, you’ll see thousands of tattoos to be inspired

[00:53:17] Michael Hawk: Oh no.

[00:53:17] Warren Carlyle: or we should, we should say ink inspired by

[00:53:20] Sy Montgomery: ink-spired. That’s great.

[00:53:22] Michael Hawk: and I understand that you have, that there’s a corresponding TV series or TV show that’s coming out as well? Tell me about that.

[00:53:29] Sy Montgomery: Yes. National Geographic has created a three part TV series that will air on Disney, which now owns National Geographic, starting Earth Day. And like the book, it is in three parts, focusing on camouflage, intelligence, and sociality. And the filmmaker, Adam Geiger, spent weeks and weeks and weeks underwater getting to know individual octopuses well enough so that he could follow them through the ocean. And in some cases, they knew him well enough to just come and sit in his hand. And he got the most incredible footage. You’ll meet some of the great scientists who are learning more about these animals. In particular Alex Schnell, who is a fantastic Australian researcher, and she’s one of the hosts of the show, who reappears and shares her insights and her excitement about these animals throughout the series, as well as a bunch of other wonderful scientists, all of whom I interviewed in the book In the Secrets of the Octopus.

[00:54:39] Michael Hawk: How exciting. I’ll do my best to promote both of these and I’m going to be watching too, when that, when that series comes out.

[00:54:46] Sy Montgomery: Oh, it’s an awesome film. Oh my gosh, Michael, you will love it. It’s just, it’s wonderful. And I’m so glad that Warren mentioned, being respectful when we photograph or film these animals, the respect that Adam Geiger and his team showed to these animals. Sometimes, photographers and filmmakers are in such a hurry.

[00:55:08] to, get the shot, that they’ll harass the animals, and we do not want that, and Adam just exemplifies the proper, respectful, even reverential way that we need to approach these thinking, feeling animals if we are to tell their true life story, and he does this.

[00:55:28] Michael Hawk: all right. So before we wrap up Sy, is there, Are there any other projects or any other websites or resources that you’d like to point people towards?

[00:55:38] Sy Montgomery: Well, folks are so welcome to visit me at my website, www. symontgomery.com. There’s a news section, there’s pictures, there’s information, reviews, and excerpts from all my 38 books. So come and visit.

[00:55:51] Warren Carlyle: We also have, on her website, she has an events tab. Me and Sy are gonna be going to a lot of different places together we have, Aquarium of the Pacific that’s happening on April 3rd, so definitely something I think your listeners could sign up for if they’re in, California, it’s at Long Beach.

[00:56:07] Sy Montgomery: And also Mystic Connecticut

[00:56:09] coming up.

[00:56:10] Michael Hawk: Great. And, and Warren, any, anything else from your perspective, any other resources, websites, social media locations you want to point people towards?

[00:56:21] Warren Carlyle: they can find us OctoNation if they just google us. I think the last thing I want to end with is just, I’m so excited about this TV series coming out. I was telling Sy, this is like our Olympics, our World Series, our, our Renaissance, or, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. Like, this is our moment and I think I’ve met a lot of the team that’s involved.

[00:56:42] A lot of them are members of Octonation. And what really excites me is that these people are not just filmmakers, but they’re cephalopod enthusiasts. Like they are truly people that are interested in this animal, which means that they’re open for opportunities all opportunities after this and projects after this.

[00:57:01] And so I think once, this series premieres, I think what we’re going to see is an explosion of individual documentaries, maybe just one about the coconut octopus, following it through its life. Maybe one just simply about the blanket octopus. There’s so much content and so many storylines that I really think that once we enamor them with this TV series, it’s only a matter of time before, we, we get more work.

[00:57:26] So I’m, I’m super excited about this team and everybody involved.

[00:57:30] Michael Hawk: and Warren, this has really been a lot of fun today. I’m excited to continue my journey now and learning more about the octopus and all the different species and diversities and everything else in the series. So thank you both so much. I really appreciate the work that you’re both doing.

[00:57:47] Sy Montgomery: Boy, it’s been a joy to talk with you. You’re, you’re a kindred spirit, Michael.

[00:57:52] Michael Hawk: And one more thing special. Thanks to Kat Hill for editing help this week.