Radiolab - Octomom

Episode Date: September 27, 2024

A mile under the ocean, we get to watch an octopus perform a heroic act of heart and determination.First aired back in 2020, this episode follows the story of an octopus living one mile under the ocean as she performs a heroic act of heart and determination.In 2007, Bruce Robison’s robot submarine stumbled across an octopus settling in to brood her eggs. It seemed like a small moment. But as he went back to visit her, month after month, what began as a simple act of motherhood became a heroic feat that has never been equaled by any known species on Earth. This episode was reported and produced by Annie McEwen. Special thanks to Kim Fulton-Bennett and Rob Sherlock at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate.  If you need more ocean in your life, check out the incredible Monterey Bay Aquarium live cams (especially the jellies!): www.montereybayaquarium.org/animals/live-camsHere’s a pic of Octomom sitting on her eggs (© 2007 MBARI), Nov. 1, 2007. We have some exciting news! In the “Zoozve” episode, Radiolab named its first-ever quasi-moon, and now it's your turn! Radiolab has teamed up with The International Astronomical Union to launch a global naming contest for one of Earth’s quasi-moons. This is your chance to make your mark on the heavens. Submit your name ideas now through September, or vote on your favorites starting in November: https://radiolab.org/moonSign-up for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)!Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today.Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [e-mail] support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Hey, it's Lethif. 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. It 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. I hope you enjoy. You're listening to Radiolab. From WNYC. Rewind. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. This is Radiolab and... Danny McEwan? Yes.

Well, uh, what do you got for me? Well, first of all, um, 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. I'm, I'm sitting in on this one with Annie.

As many of you know, he retired from Radio Lab 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. Okay, let's go. Okay, so let's start with our main character. Excuse me.

This is our hero? Oh, no, no, no, no. Well, our main storyteller, I guess. My name is Bruce Robison, reaching out to you from KAZU in Monterey, California, California State University, Monterey Bay. Whoa, thank you. Oh, you got it all in there.

No, that was very well done. So, Bruce is a deep sea explorer. I'm a Southern California beach kid who just kept going out deeper and deeper. These days, he works at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, and 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? I went, whoa! How does it begin, this story? Well, one day.

This 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. Wow.

And on this day, Bruce and his team drop a little robot sub down into the water. A little less than a mile down. Which doesn't seem like a lot, but imagine going down the length of the Empire State Building. And then go down another Empire State Building. Oh my God. And 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. And yet, it is punctuated by sparkles and twinkles and flashes all around.

The majority of animals that live there make their own light. And you can hear screeches and squeaks and thumps around you. Right. Oh, Bruce, I'm noticing that your chair is rather vocal., vocal. Yeah. It seems like it's squeaking, unless that's Robert, is that you? That's my imitation of a ship at sea. It'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. I'll. 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. Our 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 so a good 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. Oh, how long are the tentacles? Foot and a half long. They're very stretchy. Oh, okay. Anyway, about a month later, we went back and dropped down. A month later? You see an animal hitting towards a 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, OK. 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? 160. They jelly bean 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

that something like this can be very... ...illuminating. Did you have a name for her other than like 1006-B? We just called her Octo Mom. Octo Mom. Beautiful. So, 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 Octo Mom.

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. Not a chance. She is vigilant and relentless. Couldn't I bite her? Nope. Nope. No. Yeah, what happens if a crab bites her?

Yeah, or pinces her? She would squeeze the heck out of it. OK. Couple months after that, they're zooming in towards the rock and, oh! There she is. Cleaning the eggs with an arm, like, lalalala. And you can see the baby octopus inside the egg

after a while. Next visit? Still there. Couple months after that? Um... Oh! There she is. Same old spot.

Ah. October, still there? You bet. November? Yes. Curled around her babies, cleaning them, protecting them. And it's now been around 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. And 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. Octopus moms die after they reproduce. Who is this? Oh, this is Yann. I know. I was like, I'll talk to whatever voice is Yan. I know.

Whatever voice is coming through the head. So 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. It typically only lives for a year. Really? Yeah. That's it for an octopus? I know. Isn't that crazy?

That seems, I mean, all the attention they get is being these brainy creatures. I know. And to think they're so ephemeral. Now, the deep sea species like Octomom probably 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 gotta 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.

And 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. So, um... In a porn-like way or in a horror way?

In a total porn-like way. And a very curious, curious like way. She's the author of The Soul of an Octopus, as well as like 29 other books about animals. And one Valentine's Day at the Seattle Aquarium, she got to see octosex. Let's see, the male might've 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 and 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.

And 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. Because 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 rum springa. 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, the 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. 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. Which they did month after month after month after month. If you keep counting, how far does it go? Well, 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. We 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 two, three times. And one time in 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 she's like very weak at this point and these crabs are like circling her like you imagine with pitchforks They're like a random. Oh, I got a cake or something back you doubles And Bruce and his team are like, oh my god, like what's gonna happen? You know, could this be the end? like, what's gonna happen? You know, could this be the end? And all right, so we couldn't hang around and, and, uh, Oh man, you are not the kind of people we would not hire you. If we, if we were following somebody who was under attack by a group of crabs,

who had written a 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 heard, they grabbed a crab last time. Just like shoo them away with their arms. That's what I know, but 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. It's like,

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 has, below her. So she killed them? Yes. So she in her weakened state torn them apart with her arm. 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 and 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. 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... They were ready. Yes. Well, 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. I'm going to be dying tonight, but I'm going to wait for Johnny to come home. Oh, yeah. You know? And then Johnny bursts through the door and says, look and exchange a glance, and then poof, mommy dies.

It sort of feels a little like that. Let'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. I know. She has not eaten anything there, like a ghast. 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 released for sale in the USA. Big moments. 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 remember that. Do you remember that? They're talking underground. Yeah, of course, wow. Haiti has the 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 marriages legalized in New York State. Amy Winehouse, Steve Jobs, and Osama Bin Laden all die. All the while, Octo Mom has been sitting there withering, but killing crabs that come from her babies. Yeah, like not eating, but somehow remaining vigilant. 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. They don't even know if Octomom is this crazy freak of nature, or if she's ordinary. 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? How can she just sit there not eating for four years and not 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 gonna find out how she does it and how far she can go. Jad Radiolab, back with Annie McEwen and Octomom. So 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, Jan 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. If 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 vision or something like that.

Or the strings are taking care of motor functions and things like that. Maybe the basses 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. But as she lays her eggs, there'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. Except 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.

So 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. Okay, 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. Things like steroids and it's 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. On the outside she looks like a very old lady. Pale skin, cataracts, flabby muscles. A little pale blob in the darkness, all alone. But on the inside, she's very much alive. Alive 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. I am.

Oh, sorry. No, no problem. No problem. All right. Dylan's offered 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. Did you have, did you have moments where you were like out buying eggs, bicycles, move it over to another one. Thank you, Dylan. Did you have, did you have moments where you were like 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. Okay, so we are at year four, or is that where we are? So we're at year four and a half. Four and a half years. Shh. 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 we're flying in towards the rock. He's watching the screen up on the ship, just seeing darkness. Then there's the rocky outcrop. There's her spot.

And she wasn't there. We couldn't see her. What 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. Are 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 little baby here and a little baby there.

Little octopuses crawling around. 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 and the... Sadly no. And they were quite a bit smaller. But it was clear they were the same species.

And did you see her? No. I'm certain that she had been consumed by some scavenger. Oh my god. But you just want to give her a moment just to see it. Yeah. Well, we kind kinda 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?

Or what? We 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, they are devoted moms. 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. It's over. You did your job. So 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, hold on one second. I have to just put it into this madness. Yeah, yeah, yeah, go for it. Emil, Tage, don't come in here, I'm working. Oh my God. You know what I think about is the, it's so interesting, this is like the absolutely wrong soundtrack to the story that you're telling.

Oh, the kids getting dirty. You're talking about a mother 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. No, you know what I think? I think about it like it's so beautiful

and heroic and poignant. But 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 I did 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 but but then if you think about the experience of that shit it can feel frightening and lonely and dark you

know Thanks, Annie. You're welcome. Thanks, Annie. You're welcome. This story was reported and produced by Annie McEwen with musical help from Alex Overington. Thanks to Kyle Wilson for playing the 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.

Yeah, thank you so much, Bruce. I really appreciate it. Okay. Again, I think we got everything. Yeah, I think we did. So yeah, your squeaky chair and all, it was perfect, though. Oh, you don't want to do a whole lot of rock on the chair a tiny bit? Oh, actually, it might be useful.

Maybe you should. It might be useful. In terms of mixing purposes. All right, I'll wheel the other chair over. Yes, and then just doodle with your body. A little dance routine. Oh, okay, there. Oh yeah, go ahead.

Oh, I guess, yeah. Right. So don't say anything, just make squeaks. Okay. Sort of reminds me about what she might hear under the water. Whales communicating. Okay. Okay, that's fine. Okay.

I'm Jad Abumrad. Thanks for listening to the show. I'm going to Abumrad, thanks for listening. Radiolab will be back with you next week. Hi, I'm David and I'm from Baltimore, Maryland. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design.

Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bresler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Nyanam Sambandhan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Valentina Powers, Sarah Kari, Sarah Sandbach, Ariane Whack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton. Hi, this is Ellie from Cleveland, Ohio. Leadership support for Radiolab Science Programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, Assignments Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.