No intelligent animal is as antisocial as the octopus. It wanders the ocean alone, more inclined to cannibalize its own kind than band together with them, doomed to a senescent death after a haphazard sexual encounter.

The octopus is the “tribeless, lawless, hearthless one,” denounced by Homer. This solitude, along with her tragically short life span, presents an insurmountable barrier to the octopus’s emergence into culture.

But this book asks the question: What if? What if a species of octopus emerged that attained longevity, intergenerational exchange, sociality? What if, unknown to us, a species already has? Then what?

—Dr. Ha Nguyen, How Oceans Think

8

“IT’S NOT ABOUT INTELLIGENCE,” Ha said. “We’ve seen tons of signs of octopus intelligence. Creativity, multi-step problem solving, compound tool use, evidence of theory of mind, long-term learning, and a high degree of individuation. There are so many stories—all of them true: octopuses climbing out of their habitats at night, wandering the corridors of aquariums, eating fish from other tanks, then returning and closing their own lids. Octopuses escaping to the sea through the pump systems of their habitats, octopuses squirting jets of water at annoying lights until they cause an electrical short and put them out, octopuses recognizing people’s faces, opening jars to extract food, remembering how to guide their arms through mazes. We know all of this. And they are not only intelligent—they are also highly individual. They have personalities. It’s one of the things we recognize in them. In an aquarium, it’s often only the dolphins, otters, and octopuses that get named by volunteers. Two mammals, which is understandable, as they are species relatively close to our own—and a cephalopod, a species so different from us that our last common ancestor was five hundred million years ago. Why? People name octopuses because, no matter how different they are from us, we recognize something in them. Something we have in common. Even people who don’t study them are aware of this, on some level. There’s something special about them—we’ve known that for a long time now.”

Ha and Evrim were back at the hotel, in the middle of her tour of one of the prefab lab units by the swampy hotel pool. The other unit, Ha had learned, belonged to Altantsetseg: it was a mobile command center full of piloting interfaces that allowed her to take over control of her small army of automated patrol gunships watching the archipelago, or their suicide quadcopters. That only scratched the surface, Ha knew, of what would be stored in that unit.

The unit Ha and Evrim were standing in was the lab. A lot of biological equipment, DNA analyzers, 3D bioprinters, dissection tables Ha wanted nothing to do with.

She wasn’t that type of scientist. She liked her creatures whole. Communicating. Yes, there were things the DNA could tell us, dissections to investigate structures. All of that. But it wasn’t for her.