Quotes from Sy Montgomery

I have always loved octopuses. No sci-fi alien is so startlingly strange.

When I would visit my octopus friend, Octavia, at New England aquarium, usually she would look me in the face, flow right over to see me, and flush red with emotion when she took my arms in hers. Often when I'd stroke her she'd turn white beneath my touch, the colour of a relaxed octopus.

I heard one story about an octopus in a home tank who would get out, cruise around the house, take knick-knacks, and drag them back to its tank. Like a dog! They're so smart that there are octopus enrichment handbooks so you don't bore your octopus. I've seen them play with Legos, Mr. Potato Head, you name it!

I have thought for a long time that one day, if I finally got to deserve it, I would love to write about the minds of invertebrates.

To get to know someone so different from myself as an octopus, and to know that the individual recognised me and even enjoyed my company, was an enormous privilege. The octopuses I came to know were strong but gentle, and the suction of their suckers tasting my skin pulled me like an alien's kiss.

Octopus can fish for prey while deciding what color and pattern to turn, what shape to make their bodies, be on alert for predators and aware how far away their dens are.

Anthropomorphism is such an interesting concept. It means projecting human thoughts and emotions onto an animal. Which implies that thoughts and feelings belong to humans alone. Of course, if you believe in evolution, or if you believe in the Bible, that's not so. Both evolution and the Bible tell us that we're part of a family.

Experiments at Seattle aquarium prove that octopuses can tell individual humans apart - even when the people are dressed identically - just by looking up at them through the water.

It's an important time to be writing about the connections we share with our fellow creatures. It's a great time to be alive.

We split from our common ancestor with the octopus half a billion years ago. And yet, you can make friends with an octopus.

I wonder: Can a brainless animal feel curiosity? Does it want to play? Or does it only "want" toys or food the way a plant "wants" the sun? Does a sea star experience consciousness? If it does, what does consciousness feel like to a sea star? Clearly, I have entered a world I cannot

In his classic The Outermost House, American naturalist Henry Beston writes that animals "are not brethren, they are not underlings" but beings "gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear." They are, he writes, "other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.

The ability to ascribe thoughts to others, thoughts that might differ from our own, is a sophisticated cognitive skill, known as "theory of mind.

Adult gorillas will fight to the death defending their families. This is why poachers who may be seeking only one infant for the zoo trade must often kill all the adults in the family to capture the baby.

This is the gift great souls leave us when they die. They enlarge our hearts. They leave us a greater capacity for love.

But perhaps, in a world "older and more complete" than ours, there is a love that does not demand a reciprocal debt of need.

The word compassion means "with suffering." To have compassion is to willingly join in suffering—to show those you love that you will not let them suffer

The study of a language . . . allows its students to hear a people's 'interpretation (or misinterpretation) of messages from environment to human.' The spoken word reveals, upon reflection, that to which its speakers first chose to listen, then ponder, then live by.

Our kind has surely accomplished brilliant feats during our short time on this earth as a species. But before we poison, pollute, degrade and murder every other creature on the planet, we must learn to limit our numbers and our greed. This is the lesson that humans so desperately need to learn at this turning point in human history.

The sight of a slender young woman sitting in the anaconda exhibit with a 13-foot-long, predatory reptile snuggling in her lap, the tip of a tail coiled lovingly around one leg, provided dramatic evidence of what Scott and Wilson already knew: "Just about every animal," Scott says—not just mammals and birds—"can learn, recognize individuals, and respond to empathy." Once

A far worse mistake than misreading an animal's emotions is to assume the animal hasn't any emotions at all.

Assessing the mind of a creature this alien demands that we be extraordinary flexible in our own thinking. Marine biologist James Wood suggests our hubris gets in our way.

At the Seattle Aquarium, Sammy the giant Pacific octopus enjoyed playing with a baseball-size plastic ball that could be screwed together by twisting the two halves. A staffer put food inside the ball but later was surprised to find that not only had the octopus opened the ball, it had screwed it back together when it was done.

There was a tank of special flounder about fifteen feet away from the octopus tank," he said. The fish were part of a study. But to the researchers' dismay, the flounder started disappearing, one by one. One day they caught the culprit red-handed. The octopus had been slipping out of her tank and eating the flounder! When the octopus was discovered, Scott said, "she gave a guilty, sideways look and slithered away.