The Jar

On the second morning, Chiara brought a glass jar to Pasta's tank. The jar had a screw lid. Inside was a live crab.

Chiara held the jar above the water. Pasta watched. One arm uncurled and stretched along the side of the tank.

Chiara dropped the jar into the water. It sank slowly. Pasta did not lunge. Octopuses, Chiara said, are not lungers. They are observers first.

Polly perched on the tank rim. The crab scuttled against the glass inside the jar. Pasta touched the jar with one arm. Her suckers had two hundred sensory cells each. "An octopus arm tastes everything it touches," Chiara said.

Pasta gathered the jar with a second arm. The two arms turned it slowly. A third arm came around the back to explore the lid.

Octopuses have been opening screw-top jars in labs since the 1950s. The first time, it usually takes ten or fifteen minutes. They are not thinking in steps. They are letting the suckers feel the threads and turning the lid the way the threads pull.

Pasta turned the lid one half-rotation. Then another. The lid popped free. The crab scrambled out into the open water.

It did not get far. Pasta's fourth arm was already curled at the jar's mouth. The crab disappeared into the octopus's beak.

Chiara wrote something on a clipboard. "Three minutes forty-two seconds. She is getting fast. The first time we gave her a jar, it took her eleven minutes."

Pasta returned to her coil of pipe. Her arms wrapped around herself.

Octopuses are very strange, Chiara told Polly. They are more closely related to a snail than to anything with a backbone. They have three hearts. Their blood is blue, because it carries oxygen with copper instead of iron. They live only three to five years in the wild. Pasta was already two. She would learn everything she would ever know in the time she had left.