Today, 8 October, is World Octopus Day, and I have one small request: spend a few minutes thinking about the other minds we share this planet with.
If you need a nudge, watch Remarkably Bright Creatures on Netflix. It’s Olivia Newman’s adaptation of Shelby Van Pelt’s bestselling novel, and it follows Tova (Sally Field), a lonely widow who forms an unlikely bond with a giant Pacific octopus at the aquarium where she works. That octopus is Marcellus, voiced by Alfred Molina, and he is dry, impatient, observant, and far more perceptive than the humans shuffling past his tank.
It’s fiction, but the premise isn’t much of a stretch. Octopuses have around 500 million neurons, most of them in their arms. They solve puzzles, use tools, escape from tanks, and can tell individual people apart (and hold grudges against some of them). They do all this with three hearts, blue blood, and a body plan that parted ways with ours over 500 million years ago. An octopus is arguably the cleverest being on the planet, and at the very least the closest thing we have to meeting an alien intelligence.
And yet most of us rarely stop to consider them as someone rather than something.
What the film gets right is the looking. Tova looks at Marcellus, and Marcellus looks back. That’s the whole invitation of today: notice that there is somebody in there. A sentient being with preferences, curiosity, and a short, strange, brilliant life.
So, hey world: have you considered the octopus today?
