“This is one of the reasons why the communications of cephalopods are so difficult to crack: They don’t have a grammar or vocabulary. Everything is either local—learned on the fly over a short life span—or instinctive. Plus, they mix communications between colors, patterns, texture, and gesture. That would be a bit like communicating using speech, Morse code, and sign language at the same time, and having to understand all of them simultaneously in order to make sense of any of them.

“The bigger complication is that they use their primary, mixed method of communication—skin pattern, texture, and coloration, which they employ in a simple way to warn one another off or express a feeling—for a lot of other things as well: camouflage, the confusion of predators, fight-or-flight responses, and so on. And because they are not producing light from their surface, but rather reflecting ambient light from the environment, the colors they are producing shift in different light conditions—so if the cuttlefish were using color to communicate, they may be saying, “Hey, Bob,” in bright light, but it may sound a lot like, “Watch fob,” when a shadow crosses overhead. It would be like humans talking with their mouths full while using a language that has a different grammar indoors and outdoors, and trying to whistle and hide from a bear while carrying on the conversation.”

“Kind of hard,” Evrim said.

“Yeah.” Ha laughed. “Kind of hard. This octopus would have to overcome that. It would need to find a way to communicate that was digital—I mean digital like our number system or our alphabet. If the animal you brought me here to study has done that—has exapted a structure or function to use for communication—then we might have something.”

“We might have something, Ha,” Evrim said. “Let’s watch the video from the submersible. This was what we saw a month ago…”

Chapter 9

We are shaped and limited by our skeletons. Jointed, defined, structured. We create a world of relationships that mirrors that shape: a world of rigid boundaries and binaries. A world of control and response, master and servant. In our world, as in our nervous systems, hierarchy rules.

—Dr. Ha Nguyen, How Oceans Think

9

THE YELLOWFINS CAME DOWN into the hopper from the processing floor above, their heads sliced off, their guts torn out. Some spilled over the side of the hopper before they could be sorted on the rack and slotted into their freezing blocks.

Already the floor of the flash-freezing factory room was slick with their slime. The air was full of the toxin in their stink—a histamine that got into Eiko’s throat and lungs, made it hard to breathe, made him gag and wobble over his task. The Sea Wolf was having a problem in this room with drainage. A puck-shaped maintenance bot labored at a blocked sump. Fish slime and seawater pooled around Eiko’s ankles.