Wow.  This woman loves octopuses, and the sea and its creatures in general.  Her enthusiasm is contagious.  She not only fills this book with facts about sea life and descriptions of the personalities of the octopuses she knows, but also just the general comaraderie of being an aquarium groupie.  She makes me want to go and hang out with fishes more often.  There’s so much that we’re still learning about our fellow creatures, so much to be explored.  This is just a thoroughly enjoyable read that has rekindled my love for the world below the water line.

I’ve also added a new word to my vocabulary:  CEPHALOPARTY!  Evidently this is the appropriate word for the aquarium’s equivalent of a gathering around the water cooler, except that as these co-workers chat, they’re all holding hands with the same octopus.

But to get to the main point:  octopuses are incredibly smart.  There’s a lot of stories that attest to their ingenuity, either in escaping their enclosures or playing with toys.  It wasn’t that long ago that we figured out that these animals need something to do in their tanks.  They are impressive multi-taskers, with brains that are distributed along their arms as well as in the central body.  The arms, in a sense, can think for themselves, and can separately explore different people at a cephaloparty or carry out different tasks.  The ability to camouflage also seems to be a distributed task, but with one detail that blew me away:  octopuses only have one kind of cone (i.e. rods and cones) in their eyes, so they are completely color blind.  BUT they can still match color with their skin.  How do they produce and match colors they can’t see?  Clearly there’s a lot we don’t know about these guys.

So octopuses are smart (by the way, early in the book, Montgomery clarifies that octopi is actually not a word).  But Montgomery doesn’t stop there.  She’s exploring the consciousness of octopuses.  Their personalities.  Octopusalities?  Individual characteristics, I guess.  We as a species are more likely to believe that apes, who appear and act most like us, have consciousness, but not sea creatures.  We often claim that fish can’t feel pain, and it’s not clear where we get that idea.  I just finished a novel set in Maine that took care to assure us that the lobsters being steamed to death feel nothing, and it’s not actually clear that’s the case.  If octopuses recognize individual humans and have different relationships with them (as they certainly seem to do in this book), what other complexities are we missing in the marine world, simply because these creatures look so different from us and communicate so differently?

These questions are definitely worth asking and endeavoring to answer, even though they get closer to moral arguments than science at times.  Separating morality from science, though, has never been a good idea.
I got a copy of this book from the publisher through NetGalley for an honest review.