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March is Women's History Month!

In 'Soul Of An Octopus,' An Invertebrate Steals Our Hearts

Dieter Hawlan
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iStockphoto

Once a month, The New York Times Book Review includes animals as a category in its best-selling books list. This past Sunday, an invertebrate cracked the top group.

Coming in 10th — after books about birds, dogs, wolves, sheep and elephants — was Sy Montgomery's The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration in the Wonder of Consciousness.

I'll be cheering for Montgomery's book to climb even higher in the ranks. As I wrote here at 13.7 last month, after a morning at my local aquarium, I have fallen hard for all things octopus. Montgomery offers a unique window into octopus behavior and intelligence through elegant descriptions — both science-based and emotional — of her extended encounters with octopuses while going behind the scenes at Boston's New England Aquarium and diving in Polynesian waters.

The aptly-named giant Pacific octopus Octavia comes alive in the book (as do other octopuses) with a unique personality that responds to Montgomery in poignant ways, as I described in my review for the Times Literary Supplement last week:

Octopuses' rapid color changes delight Montgomery. No wonder, because the animals control these at will through their chromatophores, cells filled with pigments that may cause vivid reds, starburst patterns or stripes. (If you have seen the movie Jurassic World — 13.7's Marcelo Gleiser wrote about the film here Wednesday — you will know that chromatophores from a cuttlefish, a relative of the octopus, play a central role in a behavior by the fictional, lab-engineered dinosaur Indominus rex that I won't reveal here.) This behavior is learned, as is the amazingly fun-to-watch, coconut-carrying, tool-using behavior of wild veined octopuses.

Whereas most octopuses are solitary, except for mating and the females' egg-tending, individuals of the Pacific striped octopus species may live in groups of up to 40.

It's clear that octopus intelligence isn't focused only on things like finding food and escaping predators, but we still have a fantastic amount more to learn in the wild about these unusually complex invertebrates.

I ended my TLS review with three questions that, since meeting an octopus and then reading The Soul of an Octopus, I can't shake out of my brain:


Barbara J. King, an anthropology professor at the College of William and Mary, often writes about human evolution, primate behavior and the cognition and emotion of animals. Barbara's most recent book on animals is titled How Animals Grieve. You can keep up with what she is thinking on Twitter: @bjkingape.

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Barbara J. King is a contributor to the NPR blog 13.7: Cosmos & Culture. She is a Chancellor Professor of Anthropology at the College of William and Mary. With a long-standing research interest in primate behavior and human evolution, King has studied baboon foraging in Kenya and gorilla and bonobo communication at captive facilities in the United States.