Unusual animals & their strange relationships

How often have we heard something new, different and not like us described as “alien”?  With little experience or practice at accepting life forms different from our own, we may have said it ourselves.   Anything “not-us” can be mysterious and/or intimidating.  One cure is getting to know that seeming “alien,” then often befriending or even protecting it.

At first, I puzzled over the subtitle of Sy Montgomery’s 2015 best seller, The Soul of an Octopus – “A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness,” but once I started reading and looking at the color illustrations, I got it.  And I marveled at Montgomery’s eager acceptance of this highly unusual being (to me, to us!) and her desire to interact with it and its own unique consciousness.

 “I wanted to meet the octopus.  I wanted to touch an alternate reality.  I wanted to explore a different kind of consciousness. . . ,” she wrote.  Different indeed: octopuses are invertebrates (no spine) and they live in open oceans, where most animals on this planet – usually also invertebrates -- live.   

In no way do they resemble human beings!

The octopus’s basic body plan includes 2 eyes, a mantle (containing its organs), a funnel (or siphon) and at least 8 arms – or, as Montgomery describes it:

an animal with venom like a snake, a beak like a parrot, and ink like an old-fashioned pen.  It can weigh as much as a man and stretch as long as a car, yet it can pour its baggy, boneless body through an opening the size of an orange.  It can change color and shape.  It can taste with its skin.  Most fascinating of all, I had read that octopuses are smart.

. . . their body organization goes body, head, limbs.  Their mouths are in their armpits . . . They breathe water.  Their appendages are covered with dexterous, grasping suckers, a structure for which no mammal has an equivalent.    

Would you like to see eye-to-eye with an octopus?  Or feed a treat to one?  First, you’d have to locate its eye(s) and then you’d have to find out where, what and how it eats.

Montgomery did much more than that.  Over time spent visiting them in aquariums and talking with specialists, she became a friend and admirer of a few (named) octopuses, starting with “Athena.”  She communicating with them in ways clearly indicating 2-way relationships existed.  And she mourned her octopus friends when they died. 

More on octopuses

Judging by frequent media stories about them, these cephalopods seem to be coming into their own.  A primary example: the rights of octopuses in research.  Acknowledged to be notably intelligent, octopuses are now thought to deserve the same protections (and respect!) other animals are given by scientists.  https://tinyurl.com/mr3jsjc3   

True confession

“Salted slug”: No, that’s not a menu item!  Rather, it’s a description of a deliberately murdered creature who threatened the pansies I love.  After a twilight sighting of the villain approaching them, I grabbed a salt cellar and poured its contents on the slithering beast. 

Next morning I was confronted by a salty corpse on the driveway – and the need to remove and clean that area.  (Ugh! And yet comparable to the beer-in-a-shallow-bowl approach, requiring somehow disposing of drowned gastropods).   

Even though slugs are reputed to have ecological value, I’m an unrepentant recidivist.  And I’d do the same with a house fly, a tick or a mosquito.

(Blogger’s note:  My dispatch of the slug occurred despite the relation between octopuses (which fascinate me) and slugs (which don't!), both in the Phylum Mollusca: invertebrate animals without spines.  For more details, look into these 2 classes: cephalopods and gastropods.)  

                                                   

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