Octomom

Introducing the deep sea hero

0:00Hey, it's Latif. I would like to pull up from the watery depths a story of perseverance. It's a story of focus. It's a story of one little creature fighting, fighting to the extreme extent of every fiber of its being for the future of its progeny. Part of the thing I love about it is it's so far from anything you're reading about otherwise in the news.

0:31It feels almost like it's as far as you can get on planet Earth from your own personal drama, and it helps remind you how much more is out there that has nothing to do with you. That's Octomom, originally broadcast in 2020, but just as timeless as ever today. Hope you enjoy. Wait, you're listening. You're listening to Radiolab.

1:01Radiolab. From WNYC.

1:07Rewind.

1:09Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. This is Radiolab and Danny McEwan. Yes. Well, what do you got for me? Well, first of all, Robert, let me just get the levels on you. Okay, I'm here. We've got Robert. Robert! Maybe you can tell, tell, uh, tell, tell. I'm sitting in on this one with Annie just because. As many of you know, he retired from Radiolab not too long ago, but I brought him out of retirement and back into the studio to sit in with me on this interview. We just sometimes pile on when it looks like it's going to be a candy fun thing to do. And second of all, I have a hero and a story that, I don't know, I just feel like it's exactly the kind of story that we all need right now at this moment.

1:52Okay, let's go.

A robot sub in Monterey Canyon

1:54Okay, uh, so let's start with our main character. Excuse me. This is our hero? Oh, no, no, no, no. No, well, our main storyteller, I guess. My name is Bruce Robeson, reaching out to you from KAZU in Monterey, California, California State University, Monterey Bay. Whoa. Oh, you got it all in there. Hey, no, that was very well done. So Bruce is a deep sea explorer. I am a Southern California beach kid who just kept going out deeper and deeper. These days he works at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.

2:26And basically he and his team, they'll go out on a boat with a little remote sub that they drop into the water with a camera and see what they can see. It's really exciting because there are all of these cool animals. I'm just curious, like, did you just go out onto the ocean and then look down? Oh! Or did, how does it begin, this story? Well, one day.

2:49This is back in April of 2007. We're on a ship called Western Flyer. They're on one of their runs checking out sea life, and they're just off the coast over this giant underwater canyon, the Monterey Canyon. Pretty much the same scale and scope as the Grand Canyon in Arizona. There's an underwater Grand Canyon in Monterey Bay? That's right. Oh. And on this day, Bruce and his team dropped a little robot sub down into the water. A little less than a mile down.

3:20Which doesn't seem like a lot. But imagine going down the length of the Empire State Building.

3:29And then go down another Empire State Building. Oh my God. And then go down another Empire State Building. And then go down, like, maybe a few more floors. Like, maybe ten more floors of that Empire State Building. That's, that makes me a little bit dizzy. The darkness is overwhelming. You can look up and say, well, maybe the surface is up that way. But the last little photons have given up.

4:01And yet, it is punctuated by sparkles and twinkles and flashes all around. The majority of animals that live there make their own light.

4:20And you can hear scritches and squeaks and thumps around you. Right.

4:31Oh, Bruce, I'm noticing that your chair is rather vocal. It seems like it's squeaking. Unless that's Robert. Is that you, Robert? That's my imitation of a ship at sea.

4:41It's not quite working for me. It sounds a lot like a chair. No, no, no. It's his fault. It's not mine. You're rocking. Well, I'll try not. Yeah. Anyway, they're down there in the darkness. And they flick on this little headlight. And sweeping this cone of light around in front of them, they see the silty seafloor, a few rocky outcrops. When, into that cone of light, wanders. An octopus moving towards the rock across the seafloor.

5:11Our hero, using her arms to sort of pull and glide and roll herself along. She was kind of purpley-gray, dark, mottled. There was a crescent-shaped scar on one arm and a circular scar elsewhere. Cool, like tattoos. Yeah, well, just a sense of size. Can you fit her on your lap, or could you wear her as a hat? Okay, the mantle, the roundy part, was as big as a healthy cantaloupe. How long are the tentacles? Foot and a half long.

5:42They're very stretchy.

Finding the brooding octopus

5:43Ooh, okay. Anyway, about a month later, we went back and dropped down. A month later? You see an animal heading towards the rock, and you don't wait to see if she gets there, because would that take too long, or why? We weren't really focused on that. It was just an observation. Oh, okay. Anyway. When they went back in the robot sub, a month later... That same octopus was up on a vertical face on the rock, sitting on a clutch of eggs. Her body covering the eggs, each of her arms... Curled in a little spiral, tucked into position. How many babies was she sitting on? A hundred and sixty.

6:14Are they jellybean-sized, or...? Yeah, that's a good approximation. And Bruce and his team were like, Oh! This is great! We know within about a month when the eggs were laid. And they'd often wondered, like, how long does it take for octopus eggs to hatch? Does science not know about the brooding period of octopuses? Not deep water ones. Oh. Which was a totally different species of octopus, and could have a totally different way of doing things, for all they knew. We know so little about life in the deep sea,

6:45that something like this can be very illuminating.

6:52Did you have a name for her, other than, like, 1006-B? We just called her Octomom. Oh. Octomom. Beautiful.

7:02So, whenever they were out at sea and had time in their schedule, they'd toss in the robot sub, drop down... And have a look. ...at Octomom. They dropped down in May, and there she is, a little figure huddled on the rock. A month or so later, there she is again, sitting on her eggs and warding off predators. Crabs and shrimps on the rock. Who would have loved to chow down on her eggs? So, let's say I'm a crab, and I see some lady sitting on 160 babies. So, I figure my odds are pretty good that I can scarf at least six of them.

7:32Not a chance. Oh. She is vigilant and relentless. Couldn't I bite her? Nope. Or what about... Nope. No. Yeah, what happens if a crab bites her? Yeah, or pinces her. She would squeeze the heck out of it. Okay. A couple months after that, they're zooming in towards the rock, and, oh! There she is. Cleaning the eggs with an arm. Like, la-la-la-la-la. And you can see the baby octopus inside the egg after a while. Next visit... Still there. A couple months after that... There she is.

8:06Same old spot. Ah. October, still there? You bet. November? Yes. Curled around her babies, cleaning them, protecting them. Mm-hmm. And it's now been around, like, six months? Something like that. And Bruce and his team start to notice that she was changing. She became very pale. She clearly lost weight. And you could see over time that her eyes began to get cloudy. I say the human counterpart might be cataracts.

8:38And according to Bruce, for an octopus, this is normal. Most octopuses that we know about do not feed while they're brooding. At all? At all. Oh, she's stuck to the rock with her jellybees that entire time? Yeah. She hasn't moved. So that would mean that she was starving. Yes. And not just starving, but starving to death.

9:06Octopus moms die after they reproduce. Who is this? Oh. This is Anne. I know. I'm just kidding.

9:16I was like, what's that? Whatever voice is coming through the headphones.

How octopus reproduction works

9:20So, Yan Wong. I'm an evolutionary neuroscientist. She's a postdoc at Princeton, but she did her PhD research on reproduction and death in the octopus. Now, she studied a shallow water species of octopus, which tend to have a very short life. That typically only lives for a year. Really? Yeah. That's it for an octopus? I know. Isn't that crazy? That seems, I mean, there's all the attention they get as being these brainy creatures. I know. And to think they're so ephemeral. Now, the deep sea species like octomom

9:52probably live a little longer than that. We don't actually know exactly how long. But Yan told me that all octopuses have a sort of similar life story. Like when you're a kid, you're just growing. So you're just eating everything. Then you hit puberty. You got to find a mate that won't eat you. Apparently that's a big risk. And when you do finally find that mate, the male octopus reaches with one of its arms into the mantle. The big balloony part of his body. Reaches in there and removes a sperm packet.

10:23And he tucks it inside the female's mantle. Here you go. And that's it. That's their sex. Which sounded a little dry to me. Well, I once was describing this on a train, a commuter train, to a friend of mine. And I suddenly noticed the train was completely silent. In a porn-like way or in a horror way? In a total porn-like way. This is Cy Montgomery. She's the author of The Soul of an Octopus, as well as like 29 other books about animals.

10:53And one Valentine's Day at the Seattle Aquarium, she got to see octosex. Let's see. The male might have been up in the corner. Teeny digression here. And the female came out of the one tank and entered this tank and crawled. Towards him. As soon as he realized, my love has arrived. They both turned bright red and they flew into each other's arms and they covered each other with their suckers. Sixteen arms going on.

11:24And they're all very fast. But they stay together for a while afterwards. Sometimes hours. I mean, it was very romantic. The male often wrapped around the female.

11:42And frequently they both turn white, which is the color of a relaxed octopus. So that's when they're having the cigarette. Anyway, we can't know if that's what Octomom experienced. She has a different species after all. But what we do know is that once she used that sperm, that was the beginning of the end of her life. The female can essentially decide when she wants to fertilize her eggs.

12:12Because once she lays them, you know, she's not going to move them. So yeah, she has to go do all of her favorite things one last time before she switches over. Her last hurrah. Her rumspringa. Totally. Yeah. But when she decides the time is right, she'll find a safe spot and lay her eggs. Then, as the eggs are about to hatch, she dies. Now, the shallow water species of octopus that Yan studies, this sitting and taking care of your eggs phase, doesn't last that long. Only about a month. But with Octomom, since they knew virtually nothing about the species,

12:47the question was, how long would it go? How long would she sit on those eggs, not eating, slowly dying? How often are you visiting her every month or two or every three months? No, no, no. It was, there wasn't a regular pattern. This was sort of bootleg science. We were out there doing other things that we were supposed to do as part of our project up in the water column. And if we had a little extra dive time, we'd sneak down and check her out.

13:18Which they did month after month after month after month. If you keep counting, how far does it go?

Defending eggs from crab attacks

13:25Well, let's say, let's say year one. Year? Yeah. Oh, wow. Year one, they drop down. She's looking pretty rough. And there are all these crabs crawling around. And they're scientists, but they're also kind of having a hard time watching this octopus suffer, for lack of a better word. And one of the things that we tried was we went down once and broke a couple legs off a crab. With a robot? With the robot? Yeah. We have manipulator arms.

13:55We can do all kinds of neat stuff. So we broke off a couple of crab legs and offered them to her. She wouldn't have anything to do with it. We tried that, oh, two, three times. And one time in year two. Year two? They drop down. And they see that she is being circled by crabs. Looking as though they were trying to mass an attack, if you will. Like how many? Three or four. She's, like, very weak at this point. And these crabs are, like, circling her, like, you imagine, with pitchforks, like, around a witch.

14:25At a stake or something. Back, you devils. And Bruce and his team are like, oh, my God, like, what's going to happen? You know, could this be the end?

14:38And, all right, so we couldn't hang around and spend the day. Oh, man, you are not the kind of people. We would not hire you. If we were following somebody who was under attack by a group of crabs who had written, drawn a circle of death around her and said, no one shall pass, we would not go back upstairs. We would stay. We had other things on our agenda. Oh, come on. They just grabbed a crab last time. Just, like, shoo them away with the arms. That's what I know.

15:08But they would come right back. I mean, they can't guard her. But they leave her there in the dark being circled by crabs. Ugh. That was at the beginning of a week-long trip. So they're out at sea doing their research. And all the while, they're thinking, what happened to Octomom and the crabs? So on our way back home, we thought, let's go check. Let's see how things are. They drop in the sub. They drop down. They drop down, down, down, down, down, down. Biting their nails. As we try to find our way into the rock. And we're searching, searching, searching. And then there, a white blob in the darkness.

15:42It's like, ah, okay, good. There she is. There she is. Still there. And there are no crabs around her anymore. But there were crab parts all over the seafloor below her. So she killed them? Yes. So she, in her weakened state, torn them apart with her arms. Oh, my God. All the folks in the control room on the ship and the pilots were all going, yay! So you left for a week. And during that time, she fought, like, the battle of her life. That's right. Missed the whole thing. And they are counting the eggs every single time.

16:12And she is still at 160. We never saw any evidence that anybody had picked off one of the eggs. Not a one? Nope. This is heroic. It is heroic. She was wasting away and would eventually have to die. But it would have to be timed right with the hatching of the babies. Yeah. Because if she were to lose her grip and drift off of the eggs, then a crab could come and just, you know, have a huge brunch. I mean, there was this tension of her holding on until...

16:44They were ready. Yes.

16:47Well, doesn't it seem to you like there's, like, people, like, you know, say, I'm going to be dying tonight, but I'm going to wait for Johnny to come home. You know? And then Johnny bursts through the door and say, look, and exchange a glance, and then poof, mommy dies. It sort of feels a little bit like that.

17:04Let's move on to year three. What? She's still there. Three years? Yeah. This is... I know. She's getting worse. This is horrible and amazing at the same time. She has not eaten anything. They're, like, aghast. She is just, like, this titan. Year four. We move on to year four. Like, it's just, like, unbelievable time. Let me give you a sense of, like, what is happening. So, 2007. That's when they saw her. Boris Yeltsin dies. First iPhone release for sale in the USA.

17:36Big moments. 2008. 2008. The economy crashes. Obama is elected. Like, these huge things are happening. Right up, right upstairs from her. She's just still doing that same thing. 2009. Usain Bolt breaks the world record for the 100-meter dash. Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin happened somewhere in there. Bitcoin. Okay. 2009. Michael Jackson dies. Wow. 2010. Those Chilean miners were rescued after 69 days. Oh, my God. I don't know if you remember that. Yeah, of course. Wow.

18:06Haiti has a huge earthquake. The worst they ever had in 200 years. 2011. We're moving on to 2011 now. The Arab Spring. Oh, my God. Same-sex marriage is legalized in New York State. Amy Winehouse, Steve Jobs, and Osama Bin Laden all die. All the while, Octomom has been sitting there withering, but killing crabs that come for her babies. Like, not eating, but somehow remaining vigilant?

18:37It just seems so crazy to me. Like, why would evolution make an animal that needs to gestate her babies that long? Well, we don't know. Bruce and Yan both said that maybe it's because it's so cold down there that everything happens more slowly. Or maybe you need super-developed babies because it's such a harsh environment. But basically, it's still a mystery. Like, they don't even know if Octomom is, like, this crazy freak of nature or if she's ordinary.

19:08Like, she's the only octopus of this species that anyone has ever watched do this. Huh. But my question was how? How can she survive this? Like, how can she just sit there, not eating, for four years and not just, like, just die? It's just a totally bizarre thing, right? It sounds like magic. Lucky for us, this is exactly what Yan studied for her PhD. So, when we come back from a quick break, together with Yan, we're going to find out

19:38how she does it and how far she can go.

19:46Jad, Radiolab, back with Annie McKeown and Octomom.

Brain chemistry during starvation

19:50So, before the break, we had landed on the very simple question of how. How does Octomom manage to stay alive and defend her eggs, not moving, no food, for over four years? Right, so we just didn't know... Well, Yan says the answer lies in a very peculiar fact about the octopus's brain, which helps her pull off these last few deeply essential beats of her life.

20:20If we were to think about the nervous system as, say, like, an orchestra... To understand how this works, Yan says you can think of all the different parts of the octopus's brain as different sections in an orchestra. You know, like, the brass is going to take care of, like, vision or something like that.

20:49Or, you know, the strings are taking care of motor functions and things like that.

20:57Maybe the bass is regulating heartbeat, the woodwinds taking care of memory. And as she swims along, living her octopus life, the whole orchestra is playing, all the instruments doing their job.

21:15But as she lays her eggs...

21:19There's a shift. A shutting down of processes that are normally functioning to keep the body going. Every instrument in that orchestra starts to hush. Everybody going quiet.

21:38Except... There's this one section of the orchestra. Yeah, the optic glands. These are, like, two really tiny, they're kind of the size of, you know, a grain of rice. They sit right between her eyes. They have their solo at this point. And would that be the opera singer? Or who is that? Who is everyone quieting to hear? Well, let me think about this. It would not be, you know, a very common instrument. It's not a huge part of the brain.

22:09So it wouldn't really be a string. I don't think it would be, like, a wind instrument. Or maybe it would be a weird one, you know, like a bassoon or something like that. One where there's just one or two in a full orchestra.

22:24Okay, I like that. So, as all the other parts of the nervous system begin to drop away, the bassoon, these tiny grains of rice, have their moment. They're playing a very complicated chemical song that Yen is only just beginning to piece together. But she knows that part of the work they're doing is triggering a bunch of different chemicals.

22:54Things like steroids and its insulin that enable it to stay alive without additional food intake. And so, all the while she's down there, years and years being visited again and again by this robot. But on the outside, she looks like a very old lady.

23:20Pale skin, cataracts, flabby muscles. A little pale blob in the darkness, all alone. But on the inside, she's very much alive.

23:43Alive in this incredibly centered, focused way. Year after year, after year, after year, she's playing her heart out. Bruce, I just want to remind you about the chair thing.

24:16Oh, sorry. No, no problem, no problem. All right. Dylan's offering me a better chair. Let's say a more silent chair. So, let me pick up my butt out of this one. Okay. Move it over to another one. Thank you, Dylan.

24:36Did you have moments where you were out buying eggs, bicycling, you know, cleaning the car, and just had this moment like, oh, she's there, I know exactly where she is, she's doing her job. Like, these little moments of you living your life and her just constantly working as a mother. Yeah, I thought about her all the time.

24:58Okay, so we are at year four, or is that where we are?

The hatchlings emerge

25:03So, we're at year four and a half. Four and a half years. Is that the world record for longest brooding period on planet Earth? Yeah, it is. Whoa. We had been there a month before, and she was still there, looking pretty haggard, I've got to say. But she was hanging in there. And then, one day, we dropped down, and we're flying in towards the rock.

25:39He's watching the screen up on the ship, just seeing darkness.

25:48Then, there's the rocky outcrop. There's her spot. And she wasn't there. We couldn't see her. What does that mean? Does that mean? We knew we were at the right place. We could see the patch on the rock. And there were all of these tattered egg cases, just in the spot where she had been. Tattered egg cases means that the babies had been born? Well, the first thing we did was search.

26:20Are there babies on the rock? Are the babies still here? Or did any of them survive? Or was it some sort of apocalyptic demise at the hands of all those hungry-looking crabs? So, they're frantically sort of searching around the rock. Searching and searching and searching. And then, they begin to see little babies that are her species. And they see a baby here and a little baby there. Little octopuses crawling around.

26:51Oh. They'd been feeding and growing. And it was pretty clear that they were hatchlings from that clutch of eggs that we had observed. Did they look like her? Like, all the same? Well, there's the crescent shape.

27:08Sadly, no. And they were quite a bit smaller. Yeah. But it was clear they were the same species. Yeah. And did you see her? No, I'm certain that she had been consumed by some scavenger.

27:28Oh, my God. But you just want to give her a moment just to see it. Yeah. Well, we kind of asked Bruce, like, can you help us imagine what that moment might have been like for her? Since you don't know, because you missed it, as usual, the actual big moment. I must have gone out for a hamburger or something. Could you just, in your mind's eye, imagine the last moment here? Like, was she dusting the eggs? Or were the eggs beginning to hatch?

27:59We suspect that she stayed there until the last one had hatched. You mean watching them? Maybe not watching them, but feeling them. Guarding them. Oh, my gosh. That's amazing. They are devoted moms. So she would feel this activity that was new underneath her. And then know that it was time to finally let go. Right. Okay. Relax, Mom.

28:29It's over. You did your job.

28:40So cool. It's like handing off the baton of life. Yeah. Yeah. I love thinking about this story right now, because we're all, like, kind of, I don't know, just needing to, like, hold on. There's this, like, sense of holding on. Yeah. And waiting and being patient and just, like, I don't know, having faith and that kind of thing. You know, just kind of, like, being still and holding on that she is just, like, giving us such a great model for. Wow. It's, you know, it would, uh, hold on one second. I have to just put an end to this madness.

29:11Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go for it. Amil, Tej, don't come in here. I'm working.

29:18Oh, my God. You know what I think about is the... What? It's so interesting. This is, like, the, this is, like, the absolutely wrong soundtrack to the story that you're telling. Oh, the kids getting crazy. You're talking about a mother sort of lovingly suffering and then dying on behalf of her jelly beans, and I have these kids who are just, like, literally running around like savages right now because they're stir-crazy. Um, no, you know what I think? I think about it, like, it's so beautiful and heroic and poignant.

29:50But then I think about, like, she's not telling, like, if you take the story away and you just imagine her experience, she's in the darkness for five years. And, like, I wonder if she, I wonder, she has no conception of anything except that somehow, the disconnect between the experience she's having and the story we're telling about it is everything that I need to think about right now. Because we're all trying to protect our jelly beans in a way.

30:21But, uh, but then if you think about the experience of that, it can feel frightening and lonely and dark, you know? Thanks, Annie.

30:56You're welcome. This story was, uh, reported and produced by Annie McEwen with musical help from Alex Overington. Thanks to Kyle Wilson for playing the, uh, sexy saxophone for us. And a very big thank you to our bassoon player, Brad Balliette, who provided the soundtrack for Octomom's Darkest Hours and Finest Moment. And, of course, thanks to Bruce. Okay, well, we've kept you, so we should let you go. Thank you so much, Bruce. I really appreciate it, um, yeah, again.

31:27I think we got everything, so. Yeah, I think we did. Yeah, your squeaky chair and all, it was perfect, though. Oh, you don't want to do, like, rock on the chair a tiny bit? Uh, oh. Maybe you should. It might be useful. Actually, just in terms of mixing purposes. All right. I'll, I'll wheel the other chair over and. Yes. And then just doodle with your body.

31:48A little dance routine. Oh, okay. Oh, yeah. Go ahead. Oh, I guess. Yeah. All right. Just make a bunch of squeaks? So don't say anything, just make squeaks. Okay. Okay. It sort of reminds me about what she, she might hear under the water. Whales communicating. Shut up.

32:20Okay. That's fine. Okay.

32:28I'm Jad Abumrad. Thanks for listening. Radiolab will be back with you next week.

32:50Hi, I'm Maya, and I'm from London. And here are the staff credits. Radiolab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser. Soren Wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah Sambak is our executive director. Our managing editor is Pat Walters. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Jeremy Bloom, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Nainasambandan, Matt Keelty, Mona Maudgauka, Alex Neeson, Sarah Kari, Natalia Ramirez, Joanna Strogatz,

33:25Anissa Vitsa, Anissa Vitsa, Ariane Wack, Molly Webster, and Jessica Young, with help from Laura Karpas and Maya Appleby-Mulamid.

33:36Our fact-checkers are Nora Belblidia, Hilary Elkins, Rachel Gross, Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Natalie Middleton, and Sophie Samayi. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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