The scientist you interacted with was probably a very nice person-but just didn’t seem to think that the animals they experimented on were very sentient and probably in enormous distress. It’s what I call a cooling of the heart towards wild nature. My first sense from this story is of disconnection from the personal lives of wild animals. It was about the relationship as well as the natural history. And so for me-and a great many people-that’s what was so wonderful about My Octopus Teacher. It was an example of what I think is a widespread habit in how we look at wild animals: almost in terms of tech specs, looking at the surface and not thinking about the minds and inner lives and relationships that other nonhumans have. The researcher was a nice, thoughtful person, but there really seemed to be a lack of empathy towards the octopuses themselves. Eventually they could reverse-engineer a map that correlated brain activity and arm coordination. They would put electrodes into an octopus’s brain, run an electric current, and see how they moved. Part of what sent me on that path was an article I wrote a decade ago about researchers trying to understand how octopuses control all eight of their legs simultaneously. I write a lot about nature and biology and ecology, but in the last few years I’ve focused on the minds of animals and how we think about them. Nautilus talked to Foster about his octopus teacher and how getting to know her changed the way he thinks about nature. And though her own feelings were left for viewers to interpret, the film’s indelible impression was of nature populated by species who are not only beautiful and exquisitely evolved and ecologically important, but highly sentient, too. It embraced Foster’s feelings for the octopus, which over the course of a year evolved from curiosity to care-even to love. Yet while most writing about octopuses emphasizes their ostensibly alien, unknowable nature, and serious, science-minded nature documentaries elevate concern about biodiversity over sentiment for a single animal, My Octopus Teacher defied convention. Best-selling books like The Soul of an Octopus and Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness had whetted public curiosity about these uncannily intelligent creatures with whom humans last shared a common ancestor 600 million years ago. Audiences exhausted by lockdowns and unrelenting 2020-ness were primed for escape into the undersea fantasia of South Africa’s kelp forests, where Foster met her. Released in September 2020, it arrived at the perfect moment. Known simply as “her,” she would become the star of My Octopus Teacher, the Oscar-nominated Netflix documentary and surprise pandemic hit that told the story of Foster’s unlikely relationship with that eight-armed mollusk. It all started with an odd pile of shells: a pile that, upon closer inspection, fell apart like a flower losing its petals, introducing a burned-out nature documentarian named Craig Foster-and, in time, the world-to the octopus hiding cleverly inside.
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