The Octopus Scientists by Sy Montgomery

Author:Sy Montgomery
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

An octopus uses the webbing between its arms to keep prey from getting away, throwing the webbing over the prey like a blanket to prevent escape.

Chapter 5

Preserved pufferfish. Former flounders. Ex-eels. As we sit at the table in CRIOBE’s collections room each night, the specimens seem to stare down at us from where they float in formalin or coil in glass jars. They’re perched atop tall wooden cases filled with 126 drawers of shells, crab carapaces, and small stoppered vials of marine creatures—a library filled not with books but with bodies. Tens of thousands of specimens surround us as we struggle with the giant jigsaw puzzle of figuring out what our octopuses ate—a puzzle with some of the pieces missing.

“That Cleo, she really ate!” David says. He’s looking at a dozen items collected from her den. He selects just one to start.

“Would you agree,” he asks Jennifer, “that this is a fragment of a cowrie shell?”

Normally a cowrie would be easy to identify: these shiny, egg-shaped shells, the former home of marine snails, sport slitlike openings on the bottom and beautiful designs on top. They’re used for money in West Africa, as a badge of rank in Fiji, and a way to consult spirits and predict the future in India. The problem is, we’ve only got a piece of the shell—and it’s all we’ve got to try to figure out which one of the twenty species of cowrie known to be in Moorea’s waters (there are more than two hundred in the ocean) this one is.

“What we’re doing here is very different detective work” from what we do in the water, Jennifer explains. “Identifying all these shells is an absorbing task.” On the table in front of us are piles of books from CRIOBE’s library, with titles such as Shells of the Western Pacific in Color and Crustacea of New Caledonia. Others are in French: Les Récifs Coraliens de Tahiti et ses Îles.

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