Time Sept. 2–9, 2019Science
of white half shells, each about the size of a quarter,
and each filled with a dollop of pink paste—a mix of
squid and crab. Workers assemble these shell-paste
combinations by hand and put them into the octo-
pus tanks: three shells in the morning, three in the
afternoon and a few more in between for each young
octopus. The lab can go through thousands of shells
a day. The babies, as Rosas put it, are “voracious.”
The shells are labor-intensive and expensive, but
highly nutritious. Once on the diet, the octopuses
grow exponentially. Born weighing only 100 mg,
after a month Octopus maya are already 10 times that
size. Rosas stops growing them after a few months,
when they weigh 1 to 2 kg; or 10,000 to 20,000 times
their birth weight.
Rosas says his survival rate hovers around 60%
to 70%; double Iglesias’ from the early 2000s. As
his octopuses mature, he moves them to larger tanks
elsewhere in the lab. Peering down into one of these
tanks, I saw an octopus no bigger than my palm pok-
ing out of the shell it had chosen to occupy. In its
clutches was another, smaller, octopus. “If you don’t
feed them well,” Rosas said, “they will prefer their
half brother.” Rosas tries to combat cannibalism with
ample food and space. But his facility is at capacity,
and funding is hard to come by. Rosas has long toiled
on the low-cost road. In the late 2000s, he approached
a local women’s cooperative and offered a trade: if
they helped raise his octopus babies to adolescence,
they could sell them and keep the proceeds. Four
women agreed. One, Silvia Canul, says her husband
Antonio Cobb, a local fisherman, was against the idea
at first. “He thought I was wasting my time,” she says.
The co-op cropped its first batch of octopuses
in 2012. Chefs quickly scooped up the 200-g
juveniles— whose tenderness is coveted—for
80 pesos apiece, four times market price for
wild-caught adults. With the proceeds, Canul
bought a pedal-powered cargo tricycle. When
Cobb saw the new bike, he developed a sudden
interest in the cooperative. He now works at
Rosas’ lab too. The learning curve was steep: the
simplest-sounding tasks, like figuring out the
sex of an octopus, require inordinate patience.
Handling the octopuses is difficult too, since
they like to latch on to human arms and hands
with their suckers. Initially Canul had to soak the
octopuses in a rubbing alcohol solution to make
them “drunk” and more controllable. Now she’s
getting better. The trick, she says, is to keep them
submerged in the water. But neither Canul nor
Cobb has a solution for inking. “Straight to the
face,” he grumbles. “You look at them and they ink.”
humans have long been captivated by the octo-
pus. The Minoans, a seafaring Mediterranean civili-
zation, celebrated the creatures on vases and frescos.
Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder gushed about their
clever method of wedging open mussel shells with
pebbles in order to get to the food inside. In recent
years, come octopuses have become Internet celebri-
ties, like Paul, an ostensibly clairvoyant vulgaris, who
accurately “predicted” the results of all of Germany’s
soccer games during the 2010 World Cup.
We know octopuses display behaviors that sug-
gest high levels of intelligence. Studies have shown
that octopuses seem capable of recognizing other
members of their species as individuals. They are
also known to be associative learners, meaning they
can link new behaviors or responses to certain stim-
uli. “If an animal is shown a lever that results in a
food reward, the animal will learn to press the lever
and will do so progressively more rapidly and ef-
ficiently,” writes neuroscientist Eric Kandel in his
2016 book Reductionism in Art and Brain Science. In
the lab, some octopuses have even been able to learn
these kinds of responses after just one try.
Peter Tse, a neuroscientist at Dartmouth College
in New Hampshire, has been experimenting with
mirrors to explore the octopus brain. When he first
puts an octopus in front of one, they either run away
or try to attack it, he says. Pretty quickly, though,
they realize it isn’t another octopus. “Some will sit
in front of the mirror and groom,” says Tse. They
also seem to be able to use the mirror as a tool. Tse
found that, with practice, the octopuses can recog-
nize that a reflection of a crab in the mirror is just a
reflection— and can use the mirror to find the crab
elsewhere in the tank. That, he says, implies that they
have “pretty complicated three-dimensional repre-
sentation of their tank.”^
A lab-grown baby
Octopus maya
takes shelter under
a shell in its tank