Listener supported WNYC Studios. Wait, you're OK? You're listening to Radiolab Radio from WNYC. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad. This is Radiolab and Danny McEuen. Yes, well, what are you got for me?

Well, first of all, Robert, let me just get the levels on, OK? I'm here.

We've got Robert. Robert, maybe you can tell, tell, tell.

I'm sitting in on this one with Annie. Just as many of you know, he retired from Radiolab not too long ago, but about 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. OK, let's go.

OK, so let's start with our main character. Excuse me. This is our hero.

Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Well, I mean. I mean storyteller.

I guess. My name is Bruce Robison, reaching out to you from Kaisa you at Monterey, California. California State University, Monterey Bay.

Well, you guys, you know, so Bruce is a deep sea explorer. I am 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 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?

Oh, how does it begin this story?

Well, one day. This is back in April of 2007. We're on a ship called Western Flyer, there are one of the runs checking out sealife and they're just off the coast over this giant underwater canyon, the Monterey Canyon, pretty much the the same scale and scope as the Grand Canyon in Arizona.

There's an underwater Grand Canyon in Monterey Bay that's right now.

And on this day, Bruce and his team got the 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 and then go down like maybe a few more floors, like maybe ten more floors of that Empire State Building. That's that move that makes me a little bit dizzy. The darkness is 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. Yeah, it seems like it's squeaking unless that's Robert.

Is that that's my imitation of a ship at sea. Well, it's not quite working for me. It sounds a lot like. No, no, it's not mine.

You're rocking. Well, I'll try not. Oh, yeah.

Anyway, they're down there in the darkness and they click on this little headlight in sweeping this cone of light around in front of them, they see the silky sea floor, a few rocky outcrops when into that cone of light wanders an octopus moving towards the rock across the sea floor.

Our hero using her arms to sort of pull and glide and roll herself along. She was kind of purposely gray, dark, mottled. There was a crescent shaped scar on one arm and a circular scar elsewhere.

Cool. Like tattoos. Yeah. Well, just so good sense of size.

Can you fit her on your lap or could you wear her as the mantle? The rounded part was as big as a healthy cantaloupe.

Oh. How long are the tentacles. Four and a half long. They're very stretchy.

Oh OK. Anyway, about a month later we went back.

A month later you see it animal heading towards a rock and you don't wait to see if she gets there because it would not take too long or we weren't really focused on that, that it was just an observation.

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? A hundred and sixty. 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 often wondered like, how long does it take for octopus eggs to hatch the 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 one zero six dash B, we just called her octo mom.

Octo mom. Beautiful. So whenever they were out at sea and had time in their schedule, they toss in the robot sub, drop down and have a look at octo mom.

They dropped out 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? No, no, no. What happens if a crab bites her? Yeah.

Or pinches her, she would squeeze the heck out of it.

OK, a couple of months after that, they're zooming in towards the rock and oh, there she is cleaning the eggs with an arm like la la la la la. And you can see the baby octopus inside the egg after a while next visit. Still there a couple of months after that. Um.

Oh, there she is. Same old spot, October still there. You bet. November, yes. Curled around her babies, cleaning them. Protecting them. Mm hmm. And it's now been around like 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 she's stuck to the rock with her jellyfish that entire time. Yeah. She hasn't moved.

So. 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 you and I know whatever voice is coming through the door, so yes, Juan, 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, a typically only bump's for a year.

Really? Yeah, that's it for an octopus. I know. Isn't that crazy? Out seems I mean, there was all the 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 got to 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 balloon 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 in a like way or in a foreign like and this is Sy Montgomery.

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 octo sex.

Let's see, the male might have 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 mail 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, huh?

Anyway, we can't know if that's what octomom experienced. She is a different species, after all. But what we do know is that when 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 for them.

So, yeah, she has to go do all of her favorite things one last time before she switched to lower cholesterol, her Rumspringa and.

Yeah, but when she decides the time is right, she'll find a safe spot and lay eggs. Then as the eggs are about to hatch, she dies.

Now, the shallow water species of octopus that Jen 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. Every three months. It was there wasn't a regular pattern. Uh, this was sort of bootleg science.

We were out there doing other things that 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 let's see.

Let's see. You're 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 rope 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 she wouldn't have anything to do with it.

We tried that two, three times and one time in year two, year two, they dropped down and they see that she is being circled by crabs, looking as though they were trying to mass and 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, like a random steak or something back, you devils and Bruce and his team are like, oh, my God. Like, what's going to happen? You know, could this be the end?

And all right, so we couldn't hang around and, oh, man, yeah, the kind of we would not hire you if we if we were following somebody who was under attack by a group of crabs would written a drawn a circle of death around and said, no one shall pass.

We would not go back upstairs.

We would stay where we had other things on our agenda. Oh, come on.

They just they they did a crab last time, just like threw them away with the 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.

Oh, that was the beginning of a week long trip. So they're out at sea doing the 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, biting their nails as we try to find our way into the rock. And we're searching, searching, searching. And then they're a white blob in the darkness. OK, 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 sea floor below her.

So she killed them.

Yes, yes, yes. In her weakened state. Torn them apart with her arm.

Yeah. All the folks in the control room on the ship and the pilots were all gone. Yay! So you left for a week.

And during that time, she fought like the battle of her life.

That's right. Miss 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.

Now, 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, it doesn't seem like there's like people like, you know, say I'm going to be dying, but I'm going to wait for Johnny. Oh, and then Johnny bursts through the door and say, look, in exchange for grandson in Miami dies, it sort of feels like that. Let's move on to year three, what she's still bears, yeah, Lissa's I know she's getting worse and this is horrible and amazing.

At the same time, she has not eaten anything. They like a aghast. She is just like this. Titan, you're four. We move on to your for 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.

A 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 100 meter dash bitcoin.

I think Bitcoin happened somewhere in Bitcoin. OK, does nine. Michael Jackson dies 2010. Those Chilean miners are rescued after 69 days. Oh, but if you remember that groundworks.

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 marriage is 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 here.

Babies like not eating, but somehow remaining vigilant just seems so crazy to me.

Like, why would why would evolution make an animal that needs to gestate her babies that long?

Well, we don't know. Bruce and Diane both said that maybe it's because it's so cold down there that everything happens more slowly. Or maybe you need a super developed babies because it's such a harsh environment. But basically, it's still a mystery. Like they don't even know if Octomom is like this crazy freak of nature or if she's ordinary, like she's the only octopus of this species that anyone has ever watched do this. But my question was how how can she survive this?

Like, how can she just sit there not eating for four years and not just just die?

It's just a totally bizarre thing.

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 going to find out how she does it and how far she can go.

Hi, I'm Bay. I'm calling from Osaka, Japan. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. For information about phone at w w w Sloan that works science reporting on Radio Lab is supported in part by Science.

Sandbox is Science Foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science. Jad Radiolab, back with Andy McEwan 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.

So we just didn't know.

Well, Yan says the answer lies in a very peculiar fact about the octopus brain, which helps her pull off these last few deeply essential beats. Every 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 brain as different sections in an orchestra, you know, like.

The brass is going to take care of, like vision or something like that. Or, you know, the strings are taking care of motor functions and things like that. Maybe the bases 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 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 quiet in here? 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 and a full orchestra.

OK, 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, the 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 its 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. And Bruce, I want to remind you about the chair thing.

I am sorry. No, no problem.

All right. Dylan's offering me a a better chair, let's say a more silent chair.

So let me pick up my butt out of this one. OK, move it over to another one. Thank you, Dylan. Did you have did you have moments where you were out buying eggs, bicycling, you know, cleaning the car and just had this moment? 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. OK, 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.

Is that the world record for longest brooding period on on planet Earth?

Yeah, it is. Well. We had 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. We dropped down and 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. Wait, wait, what does that mean?

Does that mean we knew we were at the right place, we could see the the patch on the rock and there were all of these tattered egg cases just in the spot where she had been tested.

Cases means that the babies had been born.

Well, the first thing we did was search. Are there babies on the rocket?

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 may see baby here and a little baby, their little octopuses crawling around. He'd been feeding and growing and it was pretty clear that they were hatchlings from that clutch of eggs that we had, they look like her like all the same, the crescent shape and sadly, no. And there were quite a bit small, but it was clear that they were the same species.

And did you see her?

Now, I'm certain that she had been consumed by some scavenger. Oh, my God. But you just want you just want to give her a moment just to see it.

Yeah, well, we kind of 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 could you must have gone out for a hamburger.

Could you just in your mind's eye, imagined the last moment here like she was she dusting the eggs over the eggs beginning to hatch?

Well, we suspect that she stayed there until the last one had hatch.

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. So she would feel this activity that was new underneath her and then know that it was time to finally let go. Right. OK, relax, mom, it's OK. You did you did your job. So close, like handing off the baton of life. Yeah, yeah. I love thinking about this story right now because we're all a 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 I mean, it's, you know, it would hold on one second.

I have to just put an end to this madness. Yeah.

Go for it the other day. Don't come in here and work. Oh, my God, um, you know, what I think about is the, um, it's so it's so interesting. This is like the this is like the absolutely wrong soundtrack to the story that you're telling.

Oh, the kids you're talking about a mother sort of lovingly suffering and 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 like when 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 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 jellybeans in a way, but but then if you think about the experience of that, it can feel frightening and lonely and dark, you know?

Thanks, Andy. You're welcome. This story was reported and produced by Annie McEuen 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 Balliett, who provided the soundtrack for octo mom's darkest hours and finest moment. And, of course, thanks to Bruce.

OK, well, we've kept you, so we let you go. Thank you.

I really appreciate it. OK, again, I think we got everything. So we got your squeaky chair at all.

It was perfect that you don't want to do a like rock on the chair of a tiny bit. Oh, maybe. You sure. Might be useful in terms of mixing purposes. All right.

Oh, I'll wheel the other chair over and. Yes. And then just doodle with your body.

Little dance routine. OK, go ahead. Oh, yes. Yeah, because don't say anything, just make squeaks.

OK.

Sort of reminds me of what she might hear under the water, whales communicating and thinking, OK, that's fine.

I'm Jad Abumrad, thanks for listening, Radiolab will be back with you next week. All right. This is Paul Larson from Poplar Bluff, Missouri. Radiolab is created by Kevin Rudd with Robert Krulwich and produced by Sean Wheeler. Keith is our director of Sound Design. Suzy Luxenberg is our executive producer. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Erica Bressler, Rachel Cusack, David Gevo. That'll have to Tracy Hunt, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Jeff Nassir, Sarah Corey, Erin Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster with help from Cima, Wieldy W.

Harry Fortuño, Sarah Sanba, Melissa O'Donnell, Todd Davis and Russell. Great. Our fact checker is Michelle Harris.

So hi, my name is Anna McKewon, I'm a producer at Radiolab, and I wanted to talk about this thing we do at Radiolab because I like it and we have this thing. It's a newsletter, big surprise. Every show has a newsletter, but ours, I think it's pretty fun. Oh, it's so fun. Matt, KDDI. Hello, producer Pheidippides at Radiolab.

What is your favorite part of the newsletter?

My favorite part of the newsletter is first it's getting it and seeing it in my inbox and then second, it's opening it and then third is just hitting page down on my keyboard till I get to the very bottom of the email.

That's good.

You know, it's at the bottom of the email where, you know, staff picks stuff fix at the bottom, which is like, how great is that? It's great. It's just like stuff. Stuff that we like. Stuffed reindeer. What are your favorites? Some of his staff picks. There was the one video where it was like 17 babies on a hamster wheel. Really the article about the guy at 17 burritos, nothing real.

OK, what's your favorite subject? My favorite one ever. Well, it's hard to say.

One of my favorite ones ever was Robert talking in delightful detail about the great sausage duel of 1865, classic classic Mollie's bedbug pajamas.

Oh, yeah.

That was a scary time treacy's pasta recipe, which I did not make because I don't really cook, but I'm just proud of her. Actually, it's it's really simple.

This is online is a 28 ounce canned tomatoes, five tablespoons of butter, a pinch of salt, an onion, and you cook it in a pan for 45 minutes. All right. Thank you, Tracy.

I'm telling you, everybody is loving this positive. Oh, I do. Definitely. That woman. This guy for sure. Oh, I think it's wonderful. Very tasty. Pasta every day.

Not. Yeah. Helping anyway. A newsletter as like cools off in it like stuffed picks. It also tells you when an episode is dropping, it's free. It's free. Um, so we're just kind of here to just say, like, you should sign up, sign up and you can sign up in about 30 seconds at REGN newsletter or text RL News, as in Radiolab News two seven zero one zero one. That's our little news two seven zero one zero one.

And thank you.