Sturdy Ladders and Lanterns

By Malka Older

As a freelance marine behavioral researcher most of Natalia’s jobs went something like this: She swam around in some large but controllable environment with a cephalopod, paying attention to its body language and her own. She tried to make the octopus or squid feel as comfortable as possible, so that its behavior in response to stimuli might approximate what it would do in the wild. It wasn’t what she had expected when she trained as a marine biologist, but frankly she preferred it to dissection, experimentation by electric shock, or even anything that required interacting with animals captive in tiny tanks.

This particular job started out only slightly unusual. For most jobs she was given a specific research interest. Sometimes they told her exactly what to do to elicit the behaviors they wanted to study, and sometimes they let her design the approach, but either way it meant some narrow focus for her attention. Natalia always tried to give the cephalopod some play time around their interactions – if challenged on this, she told her employers that it led to more natural responses than repeating the same cues over and over again – but their time was very much directed by research.

On this job, they told her just to play with the octopus.