Book review: In “Many Things Under a Rock,” David Scheel — an octopus researcher and professor of marine biology at Alaska Pacific University — shares his enthusiasm about the complex lives of octopuses and the many mysteries surrounding them.
By David Scheel; W.W. Norton, 2023; 307 pages; $28.95.
However, there was funding following the Exxon Valdez oil spill to study damages, and octopuses had been identified as important for Native subsistence harvesting. Scheel submitted the only proposal for octopus research and was funded. Thus began his education not only in octopuses and Southcentral Alaska’s marine environment but in Alaska Native cultures.
The reader follows along as Scheel and his research team meet with residents of Tatitlek and Chenega Bay, and later Port Graham in Kachemak Bay, and are guided to locations for scuba diving. He also hears and records plenty of stories, some of them wildly fanciful or meant as lessons, about truly giant octopuses and “devilfish.” He accompanies elders at low tide to learn the traditional way of finding octopuses by feeling into dens with alder sticks.
Octopuses also have an amazing ability to change the color and texture of their skin almost instantly to camouflage themselves or in response to meeting other octopuses, prey, or predators. They not only squirt water and ink for aggression or protection, but they grab up dirt and shell debris to throw at other octopuses — a use of tools. Their own body parts also act as tools — for drilling and chipping shells and pulling prey apart.
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