Very enjoyable but far from perfect. One of the Nature and Environment book group folks said she’d made the mistake of listening to the audiobook and did a very funny impression of the author (who reads it herself) being dramatic about everything: “And THEN I picked up my GLASSES and they were AMAZING!” Also, we were shocked by the poor captive octopuses who live in a pickle barrel, which Montgomery touches on but doesn’t fully engage with.
The bottom right corner of each page makes a little flip-book of an octopus moving, which is cool.
I’ve always loved octopuses but learned a lot that was new to me:
- they taste people’s skin with their suckers
- the females have estrogen (and in fact, lots of hormones are cross-species, like oxytocin—I had no idea!)
- Tennyson’s “The Kraken” is about an octopus (did I ever read it? and me such a Tennyson fan!)
- octopuses can change the texture of their skin as well as its color
- a hagfish can “fill seven buckets with slime” in minutes (which led me to learn much more about the amazing genus Myxini–that name! the only animal with a skull but no vertebral column; they can tie themselves into a knot for leverage or slime exudation! they can eat with their skin!!!)
An octopus presented with a difficult puzzle for the first time often undergoes several rapid changes in color, like a person who frowns, bites his lip, and furrows his brow when trying to solve a problem. A nervous octopus takes special care to disguise its head and especially its eyes, and can create a variety of spots, bars, and squiggles to confuse a predator. … Another disguise is known as the eyebar display, in which an octopus makes a thick, dark line extend at the outer edge of the eye from either end of each slit pupil, masking the roundness that is typical of an eye.
I strongly identified with this quote: “A bite from a fish or an octopus is proof we are willing, even eager, to literally give ourselves (even tiny, actual pieces) to the animals here [at the aquarium], in order to touch the wild” because it reminded me of feeding stingrays on a trip to the Florida Keys. It was an amazing experience—the rays swarmed me as I sat in the shallows with their food, like muscle pancakes shouldering each other aside—but the trainer warned me to keep my hand flat with the food because “they’ll accidentally bite you, and it feels like getting your finger slammed in a door” (because the ray’s teeth are like flat cement plates smashing together). I did get bitten and that’s exactly what it felt like. I wouldn’t have tried to make it happen on purpose, but I’m glad it did because it was so alien and cool.
- “an area pocked with nooks and crannies into which an octopus could melt as easily as butter into an English muffin”
- diving is “like being an invisible time-traveler to another planet”
- “The ocean, for me, is what LSD was to Timothy Leary. He claimed the hallucinogen is to reality what a microscope is to biology, affording a perception of reality that was not before accessible.”
Above the surface, we move and think like wiggly children, or like teens who twitch away at their computer-phones, multitasking but never focusing. But the ocean forces you to move more slowly, more purposefully, and yet more pliantly. By entering it, you are bathed in a grace and power you don’t experience in air. To dive beneath the surface feels like entering the Earth’s vast, dreaming subconscious. Submitting to its depth, its currents, its pressure, is both humbling and freeing.
Narada the ascetic and Vishnu:
When Vishnu became thirsty, he asked Narada to fetch him some water. Narada went to a house and there met a woman so beautiful he forgot what he came for. He married the woman; together they farmed the land, raised cattle, and had three children. Then came a violent monsoon. Floods threatened to carry away the village’s houses, the cattle, the people. Narada took his wife by the hand, his children by the other. But the waters were too strong and they were lost. Narada was swept beneath the waves. Washed up on shore, he opened his eyes… to see there, still waiting for his drink of water, Vishnu—the got who is often picture as sleeping on a fathomless ocean as his dreams bubble forth to create the universe.