A Surprising Exploration Into the Wonder of Consciousness the Soul of an Octopus (Hardback) - Common by Sy Montgomery

Author:Sy Montgomery [Montgomery, Sy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B00ZNNLI6E
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2015-09-15T04:00:00+00:00

When I return to the aquarium, I find the last fish have been evacuated from the GOT. Aquarium engineers pulled the plug on the 200,000-gallon tank at 10 a.m., October 2, draining it at the rate of one inch per minute. Finally, divers could use ladders to reach the lower water level and catch the speedy tarpon, permits, and jacks in nets. While I was diving in Dublin Lake, Bill was on the crew that worked from 3 to 9 p.m. over the weekend, moving the eight four-foot-long, 40-pound tarpon. “They’re big. They’re hard,” he said. “That’s why they left them till last.”

Every move is fraught with drama and danger. In September, a team of four divers, three veterinary staffers, a thirteen-member bucket brigade, one curator, and a handful of volunteers worked together to move the two three-foot-long blacknose sharks, a male and a female, from the GOT.

For weeks, divers had been acclimating the sharks to the nets, holding the nets in the water so the animals would not fear them. The team had successfully moved the bonnethead sharks the day before; but the blacknose sharks are more sensitive, explained curator Dan Laughlin, and might freak out. A frightened shark is nearly impossible to catch, which is why Dan had briefed everyone not just on plan A but, in case that didn’t work, plans B, C, and D. (Plans B and C involved crowding the sharks by cutting off their usual swimming areas with nets or partitions; D meant waiting till the tank was nearly drained.) Worse than frightening a shark is injuring one, and this can happen easily if the shark thrashes against the sharp edge of a coral sculpture. “Don’t strike,” Dan warned the two divers armed with big scoop nets, “unless you’re sure you’re going to get them.”

The plan was simple: The two netters, one of whom I recognized as Myrtle’s friend, Sherrie Floyd, another, Quincy husbandry aquarist Monika Schmuck, would face each other, standing on opposite coral sculptures, in the center of which was a deep trough. A third diver, hovering in the water of the trough, would tempt the sharks with a herring on a pole. Once the treat captured a shark’s attention, the diver would swing the pole toward the familiar net—into which everyone hoped the shark would eagerly swim.

At first the sharks seemed uninterested in the herring. They made one pass, then two, around the pole. Then a third. But the team had made sure the sharks were hungry. At the fourth pass, the female blacknose swam right into Sherrie’s net. Sherrie scooped it up in one fluid motion and handed it to another staffer on dry land, who ferried the shark to the tank—which had been filled with salt water by the bucket brigade, assisted by a single pump—already waiting in the elevator.

The second shark, everyone thought, would be harder to catch. But just two passes later, the male was in Monika’s net. Because he was larger than the female, and strong

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