![]() Photo © Tia StrombeckHow could that be? It’s hard to find an animal more unlike a human than an octopus. ![]() ![]() ![]() This bore out what scant experience I had already had like many who visit octopuses in public aquaria, I’ve often had the feeling the octopus I was watching was watching me back, with an interest as keen as my own. Most fascinating of all, I had read that octopuses are smart. It can weigh as much as a man and stretch as long as a car, yet can pour its baggy, boneless body through an opening the size of an orange. Here is an animal that has venom like a snake, a beak like a parrot, and ink like an old-fashioned pen. I knew little about octopuses-not even that the correct plural is not octopi, as I had always believed (it turns out you can’t put a Latin ending-i-on a word derived from the Greek, like octopus). Her name was Athena, but I didn’t know that then. I had a date with a giant Pacific octopus. On a rare, warm day in mid-March, when back in New Hampshire the snow was melting into mud, and in Boston, everyone else was strolling along the harbor or sitting on benches licking ice cream cones, I quit the blessed sunlight for the moist, dim sanctuary of the New England Aquarium. A Surprising Exploration Into the Wonder of Consciousness ![]()
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