My Octopus (and Cuttlefish and Squid) Teachers: Interning in the Computational Neuroethology Unit at OIST
Squid were my biggest fear growing up, and I can pinpoint the origin of that phobia. As a child, my parents took me to the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City, and I was captivated by the Hall of Ocean Life. The hall is expansive and, much like in the ocean, you enter from above. Visitors walk in from the second floor, where they are greeted by a life-sized model of a blue whale hanging in an arched pose from the ceiling. Despite the pelagic theme of the open hall, most of the exhibits are well-lit and hint at a context of land that anchors one in the scenarios. A group (excuse me, a herd) of walruses flash toothy smiles as they lounge on sea ice in one panorama, with cliffs visible in the distance. In another, a colorful coral reef teems with marine life as painted islands above again suggest the familiarity of land. But something changes at the back of the hall. There, one exhibit is completely dark, simulating the visual conditions of an environment whose inaccessibility is accentuated by its foreignness to all things human: the deep ocean. I’ll never forget the first time I saw that exhibit: at first, I thought its darkness signaled that it was empty. Then, as my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I started to make out a giant eye staring at me. As if that wasn’t horrific enough, this eye was connected to a series of impossibly long tentacles wrapped tightly around something. This “something” was a sperm whale. To my five-year-old mind, it might as well have been the cousin of the hero of the entire hall: the blue whale greeting visitors. That meant that the squid was the villain. The concept of squid as terrifying monsters that awaited whales and children alike in the darkest parts of the ocean was seared into my mind.
If you had told me then that in twenty years, I would travel to the opposite side of the world to research squid and other cephalopods (albeit much smaller species), I probably would have burst into tears. It wasn’t until halfway through my Bachelor’s degree, when I was majoring in neuroscience and read The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness by Sy Montgomery and Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith, that I realized that cephalopods are incredibly interesting from a neuroscience perspective. They are neuroscientifically complex invertebrates that share certain cognitive skills with vertebrates like humans even though they evolved completely independently. For example, cuttlefish have been shown to practice self control for delayed gratification, octopuses can use visual learning to navigate through mazes, and squid can communicate using body pattern signals. After learning these things, I convinced myself that fear by another name is curiosity. And that knowledge is power. And that I would never, ever meet a giant squid in real life.
After three years of fruitless searching for funded opportunities to research cephalopod neuroscience and behavior, I found the Computational Neuroethology Unit at OIST led by Professor Sam Reiter. He told me about the OIST research internship program, which provides early career scientists from around the world the unique opportunity to conduct research in one of OIST’s labs (called “units”) for 3-6 months, with flight and housing support and a daily stipend. I applied, was accepted, and arrived in early June. I was deeply impressed by OIST when I arrived: it is a scientist’s dream. Embedded in lush subtropical jungle, OIST campus looks like something from the future. Its buildings, tunnels, multi-floor windows, and general design epitomize growth and innovation. Within OIST, the facilities and labs are some of the nicest I have ever encountered. Each corridor seems chock full of robots, laser rooms, cleanrooms, gloveboxes, and other technology I can’t even begin to describe. It would be a great setting for the next James Bond movie.
OIST is also an ocean lover’s dream: the university is built just above the East China Sea, and its various walkways and terraces optimize views of the sparkling water beckoning from below and beyond. Even better: within twenty minutes of walking, you can be in the water. Coming from Oregon in the United States, where I have to put a wetsuit on just to go swimming, I still can’t believe how warm and calm the Pacific Ocean is here. Particularly in the safe enclave of Tancha, swimming in the ocean feels like taking a bath. But the true gems here are the stunning coral reefs surrounding the island, bursting with color and providing rich habitats to the fish, sharks, turtles, nudibranchs, seahorses, manta rays, octopus, cuttlefish, and other species that live among them. Every time I have gone swimming or scuba diving, the ocean has showcased its immense diversity and shown me the wonders of marine ecology firsthand.
The unit in which I am interning, the Computational Neuroethology Unit (CNU), researches cephalopod neuroscience and ethology (animal behavior) by utilizing computational analyses and novel technologies. Currently, the unit is conducting several research projects, including sleep in octopuses, collective behavior in squid, camouflaging in cuttlefish, and others. One of the many benefits of working at OIST is its focus on interdisciplinary research. Here in the CNU, Professor Reiter has assembled a team of scientists that specialize in diverse fields but come together to collaborate on cephalopod research from multiple perspectives. In our weekly lab meetings, you never know whether you’ll be sitting next to the brain anatomist, the field researcher, the theoretical mathematician, or the behavioral biologist. Professor Reiter says that cephalopod research inspires “questions at the interface between traditional disciplines,” so having researchers that come from different backgrounds enables the lab to combine topics in innovative ways.
OIST also has a state-of-the-art Marine Science Station (MSS) that houses two species each of octopus, squid, and cuttlefish. I would have been thrilled to get to work with even one cephalopod species, let alone six! The Marine Station is run by an incredible team of researchers, technicians, postdocs, and other cephalopod and marine science experts. One such expert is Keishu Asada, a technician in the CNU and member of the cephalopod team. I had actually followed Keishu on Twitter before I had even heard of OIST, because he takes captivating videos and photos of the marine life that can be found around Okinawa (like all of those seen in this article). He told me that his favorite cephalopod encounter was when he followed a cuttlefish along a “green road” of Halimeda algae, which led him to two rare octopuses he had never seen before (Amphioctopus mototi). He went back to visit these octopuses several times and they often reached out to interact with toys and other things he would bring them, like mirrors and bird skulls. You can see a video of one of them interacting with the mirror below. I love this story because it sounds like a marine version of The Wizard of Oz, except with a green algae road replacing the yellow brick road, a cuttlefish instead of a scarecrow, and two curious octopuses instead of one fraudulent wizard.
I’ve learned a lot from Keishu and others in the CNU about octopuses, cuttlefish, and squid, and will share some of the experiences that I’ll carry with me long after this internship ends:
Octopus
Many people I talked to about this internship before coming to OIST asked me the same question: “Have you seen My Octopus Teacher?” The Oscar-winning documentary from 2020 catapulted octopuses into the international collective consciousness. It’s easy to understand why: with their eight graceful arms, distinct yet transient physical forms, and otherworldly abilities to shapeshift and camouflage, these cephalopods represent the best of charismatic megafauna (large animals that have popular appeal or symbolic value to humans). I was most excited to work with the octopuses upon arriving. My first day at OIST, I immediately wanted to go visit the MSS to see the cephalopods. Much like the filmmakers behind My Octopus Teacher, I secretly hoped to gain the octopuses’ trust over time. Sadly for me, the two species currently housed at the MSS, Octopus laqueus and Octopus incella, are not nearly as curious about humans as the larger species such as the giant Pacific octopus (Enteroctopus dofleini). Additionally, they are nocturnal, so when I visited that first day, they were all fast asleep in their little octopus houses, made of upside down clay flower pots. The few times that I’ve interacted with them, I’ve offered my finger a few inches away from them, with the hopes that they will reach out to taste me with their chemosensor-packed suckers. Instead they either ignore me or shrink away, so I’ve stopped. The one sign I’ve gotten that they can be curious about humans is that every now and then, I’ve seen a pair of eyes peeking out from the hole in the middle of the flower pot, watching me surreptitiously. Any time I move closer, they instantly dart back into the pot, feigning apathy or sleep.
My favorite experiences with the octopuses so far have been the ones when I was helping Keishu determine whether they were ready to mate. For the past 2 years, OIST MSS has been able to successfully breed Octopus incella in the lab, a rare feat. First, we had to determine the sexes of the octopuses. To do this, Keishu taught me to look closely at the third arm down on the right side. In females, this arm is the same as all the others and has suckers that extend all the way to the tip. In males, however, this arm is called the hectocotylus and ends in a spade-shaped structure called a ligula that delivers sperm to the female. When mating, Octopus incella females accept the hectocotylus of males into their mantles, where sperm transfer takes place. After coaxing the octopus out of their homes, Keishu and I tried to closely examine that third arm. Eventually, I got the hang of both coaxing out octopuses and of trying to examine their arms for signs of genitalia. We then put males and females together in the same tank and recorded their behaviors. Because the octopuses are quite shy, we had to hide while watching them – octopus voyeurs, you could say. It was unclear to me how the octopuses recognized each other, but they did so quickly because within a few minutes, most either started mating or fighting. The mating was amazing: in one case, the female reached over and dragged the flowerpot containing the male over to her, at which point he obligingly extended his hectocotylus into her pot. These two were at it for hours until we finally had to break up the encounter. I certainly never expected to be an octopus matchmaker, much less a “hectocotylus block!”
Cuttlefish
Cuttlefish are now my favorite cephalopods. If you’ve never seen one before, they look a bit like squid oriented horizontally with their eight arms and two tentacles hanging loosely in front of their eyes. For this reason, they look a bit like elephants with ten trunks (or maybe that’s just me).
Unlike octopuses, which have no cartilage or bones and can assume any shape they want to, cuttlefish have a hard internal structure called a cuttlebone that helps them maintain buoyancy. Perhaps because of this, the cuttlefish I’ve seen at the MSS are content to, quite literally, just hang out. In contrast with the octopuses that hide in their flowerpots and the squid that are always swimming around, the cuttlefish mostly hover at various depths in their tanks and gaze calmly out at passersby. They’re not totally motionless: the translucent fins surrounding their mantles oscillate in delicate undulations that remind me of fairies. With their gossamer wings and apparent contentment to simply observe the world around them, they seem to possess infinite wisdom. They remind me of the classic image of a sage that sits atop a mountain and offers advice. If cuttlefish could talk, I bet they’d have some interesting things to say.
To Keishu’s and my delight, a group of the cuttlefish did seem curious when we were mating octopuses and turned to watch the events unfold. Otherwise, I have rarely seen them react to anything. Occasionally they will raise their arms in a protective position, or change to a slightly darker color; otherwise, they seem pretty indifferent. Of course, this doesn’t mean they’re dull. Quite the opposite: cuttlefish rival octopuses in their mastery of camouflage and predator avoidance. Natacha Roux, a postdoc in the lab, recently showed us a few photos with camouflaged cuttlefish in them and in half of the photos, even after she’d pointed out where the cuttlefish were, I still couldn’t see them. How well can you do? There are two cuttlefish in the photo below.
Squid
Because of my memories from the American Natural History Museum, I was most nervous to interact with the squid. Now, they are the cephalopods in whose research I am most involved. The squid at the MSS do have large eyes, it’s true, but instead of being gaping and white like on the giant squid, their eyes are an iridescent green color that is striking when compared to their translucent bodies. Individually, they remind me of white opals: as they swim through the water, their clear bodies flash different colors depending on the angle at which light hits them. These squid are very social and tend to swim together in the same rhythm, so watching a group of them is a bit like looking up into one of those crystal suncatchers swaying in the wind. Unfortunately, the squid frighten easily, and almost every time I walk past their tanks too quickly, they turn dark and jet away, sometimes inking in the process. Odette becomes Odile, if you will (the white swan and black swan from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake ballet). The tides have certainly turned from my being so terrified of squid growing up.
Squid are commonly thought to be less clever than octopus and cuttlefish. This initially confused me, because they are the most social of the three cephalopods at MSS. I would’ve expected the most social to also be the most intelligent. Few things seem to require as high a level of intelligence as knowing how to read other people’s signals and respond appropriately to them. In fact, many humans I know aren’t very good at it. But this probably exhibits a fallacy: intelligence in terrestrial vertebrates versus in marine invertebrates has been shaped by vastly different evolutionary pressures. What is necessary or complex to humans may not be in our very distant cephalopod relations, with whom our last common ancestor was around 600 million years ago. And to cephalopods, signs of intelligence might have less to do with social skills and more to do with the ability to hide among the ocean’s plethora of textures and colors from predators and prey. Still, research has demonstrated that squid are capable of some pretty impressive social communication via body pattern signaling that can be broken into distinct grammatical units. Most of my internship has been spent working with staff scientist Makoto Hiroi to investigate social behaviors in squid, so you could say that while at OIST, I’ve been learning two languages: Japanese and the language of squid.
A few years ago, I moved to New York City as a newly-fledged adult, and one of the first stops on my list was the American Museum of Natural History to again confront my old fear, the giant squid exhibit. When I arrived, I noticed that the subjects of the exhibit were much better illuminated and seemed much closer to viewers than they had when I was a kid. These factors made the exhibit less terrifying, and also highlighted details I had not previously noticed. My attention was once again arrested by that wide eye, the stuff of nightmares, peering out at me. But as I looked closer, I noticed the sharp teeth of the sperm whale puncturing the soft, vulnerable flesh of the squid. I became aware of the massive size of the sperm whale relative to the squid. Last, I observed the positions of the squid’s tentacles: they were not tightly wrapped around the whale like I had thought, in an effort to squeeze it to death. Instead, they were splayed along the whale’s side, as if the squid was trying in vain to push away and extract its limbs from the whale’s mouth. Something about that pose struck a chord with me, as a lost new college graduate entering the workforce in a city that overwhelmed me, learning to navigate new stressors whose grips I couldn’t escape. I’m not sure if it was more the product of the exhibit’s renovations, or the stage of life I was in at the time. Whatever the cause, I met the squid’s gaze that day and understood that it was not trying to scare anyone, because it was afraid itself. Not only was I no longer terrified of this squid, but now I identified with it.
Likewise, researching cephalopods offers a unique window into convergent evolution and the surprising ways in which humans and cephalopods are alike. For example, the structures of our eyes have independently evolved over 600 million years to be strikingly similar. Researchers at the CNU are uncovering even more connections between humans and cephalopods, because such comparisons can teach us a lot about natural selection and why some traits emerge and endure even in very different species and environments. I am grateful to have made my first foray into cephalopod research while at OIST, and will always feel a connection to both real and monster-sized exhibits of cephalopods. I’d like to think that when we look at each other, they feel one too. Whether this recognition hearkens back to hazy genetic memories of our shared ancestry, or simply to a mutual acknowledgment of survival in a world of sperm whales and adulthood, is anyone’s guess.
Written by Theodora Mautz
Photos and Videos by Keishu Asada