Filmmaker Craig Foster’s 2020 documentary, My Octopus Teacher, won an Academy Award in its category for Foster and directors Pippa Erlich and James Reed. I can see why. It’s beautifully filmed, touchingly narrated, with a clear message about humans, animals, and how they’re all tied together on this planet we share.
It’s the diary of an obsession. Foster comes to it in a state of severe burnout, under serious personal stress. He’s come to his childhood home to find himself again. What he finds is much larger than that.
Books and films about the octopus often stress how difficult it is to study the animal in its native environment. To really do it right, you have to travel to obscure parts of the world and spend significant amounts of time under the sea.
Foster has the resources and the will, and the luck to have been raised on the Western Cape of South Africa, also called the Cape of Storms. It’s a wild environment, with cold and turbulent seas crashing into a rocky shore, and along that shore, a shallow kelp forest full of sea life.
He lives near one such forest, some two hundred square meters of magical underwater world. He trains himself to tolerate the cold, and makes the choice not to wear a wet suit or a scuba tank.
Swimming with a pair of trunks and a snorkel means he can only stay down for ten or fifteen minutes before he has to come up for air. It also means he can engage directly with what he finds, including, one life-changing day, a strange globular agglomeration of shells.
He’s never seen anything like it. When he researches it later, he doesn’t find anything in the literature. Inside the shells, wrapped in them, then bursting out as he watches, is an octopus.
She’s a common octopus, Octopus vulgaris, but to him there’s nothing common or ordinary about her. She fascinates him from the first moment. He falls in love. And he decides to come back every day to visit her and observe her and interact with her.
He goes back for a total of 324 days. That, he calculates, is about eighty percent of her life. Her whole life span is about a year. He knows how short her life will be, and how, barring accident or predation, it will end. As he says, it’s the octopus way. Live fast, die young.
She makes every day count. She has her den, from which she ventures to hunt for food—and, at least once that he observes, to play. The den is surrounded, to his fascination and horror, by holes and crevices full of small aggressive sharks, striped hunters called pyjama sharks, with poor eyesight but a keen sense of smell. They’re particularly partial to a nice dinner of octopus.
She’s a predator herself, completely self-taught, and she learns from her mistakes. He watches her go after lobsters (which I’ve read are quite intelligent). At first she’s unable to catch them, then she figures out how to use her whole body to envelop one, trap it and eat it.
At one terrible point, a shark catches her and rips off an arm. She escapes, but she’s severely weakened. Foster is devastated. He’s sure she won’t make it. But after a week he sees a tiny, perfect arm growing from the wound. It takes a hundred days, but at the end, she’s a fully eight-armed octopus again, just as good as new.
The next time a shark hunts her down, she has a whole set of strategies for escaping it. She conceals herself in the forest of kelp, spreads her scent over the plants so that the shark goes after them instead of her. Then, to Foster’s amazement, she fashions a ball of shells with herself inside. It’s exactly the same structure he found on the first day, and now he understands what it is. It’s a defensive maneuver.
The shark attacks it, lashes it around and around in a death roll (yes, Jules Verne, you got it right after all). Foster has to head for the surface to breathe, but when he comes back down, the ball of shells is on the shark’s back, and the octopus is riding it into a dense part of the forest, where she lets go and leaves the shark baffled and without its dinner.
That for Foster is proof (one of many) of her intelligence, and her ability to use it to protect herself as well as to hunt and feed. She learns; she strategizes. The heart of it, he says, is the sheer number and variety of her prey. She has to learn how each different creature can be caught. Even stationary mollusks require a strategy, a means to penetrate their hard shells and extract the creature inside.
At first, he tries to be just an observer, leaves his camera near her den to record her, but even on that first day he can’t resist making contact. Over time she learns to trust him, to accept his presence and to investigate him and his equipment with evident curiosity. On day 52 he drops a lens and startles her badly, shattering that trust; she flees.
He’s sure he’s lost her forever. But Foster keeps looking, uses techniques he learned while filming a documentary on the San people of the Kalahari Desert, and teaches himself to track her. After a week he finds her—and somehow she’s back. She trusts him again, or still.
From then until the end of her life, he observes her and marvels at her and, every so often, shares a moment with her. She’ll wrap around his hand, or he’ll cradle her to his chest. He can’t do it for very long before he has to breathe, which means he has to be very careful and very gentle in disengaging from her suckers.
He knows when the end is coming, when he finds her together with a large male octopus. That’s the moment her dying begins.
We never find out what happens to the male—he’s not really relevant. She’s what matters. She’s the center of this world, the reason Foster comes down every day, maps out every inch, studies every form of life, observes how it all fits together.
It’s a revelation. The kelp forest, and by extension the whole of the sea itself, is a single organism, a huge creature “thousands of times more awake and intelligent than I am. This is like a giant underwater brain operating over millions of years.” The octopus is his point of contact with it, and he perceives the whole of it as it relates to her.
What strikes me through all of his obsession and his deep love for this creature is that he never names her. Foster doesn’t try to humanize her, or claim her by hanging a human word on her. He sees her through the lens of his own needs and preoccupations, but he never loses sight of the fact that she is a distinct and individual creature, very different from him.
He can’t ever truly understand what it’s like to be her. Some lines, he says, we can’t cross. But she’s not completely alien, either. She’s as much a part of this world as he is.
And that’s the lesson. We’re all interconnected. We’re all equally vulnerable. “What she taught me was to feel that you’re part of this place, not a visitor.” You belong to it. Just as it belongs to you.
