The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness

The final chapter mostly covers the death of Octavia in the spring and a summer scuba diving expedition Montgomery makes to Mooréa, an island near Tahiti. One day in April, Montgomery arrives at the aquarium to see Octavia’s eyes bulging and cloudy. The octopus soon abandons her eggs as well and wanders the floor of her tank. Senescence has set in. Meanwhile, Karma has grown and is soon pushing the boundaries of her small tank, just like Kali before her. Wilson argues for switching the two, while other staff and volunteers are against it.

Because Octavia was no longer tending her eggs, the main reason for keeping her in the larger tank was gone. With her wandering, a smaller tank might be safer and less disorienting. Then again, the stress of the move might kill her. Bill is torn, feeling like neither option is a good one. The next day, however, he finds that Karma had begun using her beak to chew through the ties that secured the mesh over the top of her tank—and was now beginning to work on the mesh itself. Fearing a repeat of what happened to Kali, he decides he must switch the two octopuses. Together with a volunteer, Bill prepares the space and then tries to catch Octavia with a net. She evades them several times and ends up wedged in a crevice. Bill reaches in and is just able to touch the suckers on one arm, urging her into his net. She goes in on the first try.

Fortunately for both animals, it turns out to be the right decision. Octavia goes calmly and, once in the smaller tank, does not search for her eggs as they feared she might. Karma seems thrilled as she explores her larger home. The switch also allows Montgomery and her friends to say goodbye to Octavia, an opportunity they didn’t think they’d have. The first time Montgomery and Wilson visit her, she surfaces to touch them both, gently wrapping her arms around theirs. It’s been almost a year since they interacted like this, but she remembers them. She even lets Wilson gently stroke her exposed beak without biting him. Four weeks later, in May, she dies.

That summer, Montgomery is thrilled to see octopuses in the wild again, as she joins a team of researchers studying their personality and behavior. The leader of the expedition is Jennifer Mather, who has devised a survey to determine an octopus’s personality (bold or shy) from its behavior. The research gets off to a slow start when the team is unable to locate many octopuses. Searching in both shallow and deep water, they’ve not had much luck by the time just three days remain on the trip. Then they are finally able to follow an octopus as it hunts, and this seems to change their fortune. In the final two days, they find three new octopuses at the same site; overall, they study 18 different ones, enough for the data they need.

The book ends with Montgomery back in Boston, visiting the New England Aquarium on a Wednesday in September. She meets Wilson as usual, and they feed Karma as some of the visitors watch them and ask questions. She ponders her own unanswered questions that remain, even after so much researching octopuses and spending time with them. Of one thing she is certain: She has loved them and they have changed her life by giving her “a deeper understanding of what it means to think, to feel, and to know” (241).