Two weeks ago, late to the zeitgeist as ever, I watched My Octopus Teacher, the Oscar-winning documentary about a relationship between a human and a cephalopod. Probably you’ve seen it (and if not, you should!), but, in brief, it’s about the yearlong friendship filmmaker Craig Foster strikes up with a female common octopus who lives in a South African kelp forest. The fascination (and, dare I say, affection) is mutual: The film’s most stirring shots depict the octopus clinging to Foster’s hand and sprawling against his chest, a pose that’s hard to describe as anything other than “cuddling.” It’s a gorgeous movie, and, as an octopus-loving diver myself, I watched it with a lump in my throat, both admiring and envious of Foster’s interspecies connection.
That said, there were two scenes that left me dismayed, and have continued to rankle since I watched the film. I’m talking about the shark attacks, and, specifically, Foster’s refusal to protect the octopus.
For the uninitiated (spoilers to follow), the kelp forest is also inhabited by packs of pyjama sharks, beautiful little black-and-white predators with a sense of smell that would awe a bloodhound. The sharks are the greatest threat to the octopus’s survival; they’re constantly sniffing around her rocky lair and trying to pry her out. Twice, they nearly succeed in killing her. The first time, one seizes her in his jaws, goes into a death roll, and rips off one of her arms. The octopus survives, but on death’s door (happily, she recovers and eventually regrows the arm). During the second attack, the film’s most astonishing sequence, the octopus reaches deep into her bag of tricks to escape: She crawls on land, camouflages herself beneath shells, and, incredibly, rides on the oblivious shark’s back. The scene has the vibe of Jerry outwitting Tom; all she needs is a falling anvil.
In the end, the octopus endures the attacks and lives long enough to breed. No harm, no foul, I guess. Still, I was disturbed that Foster never chased away the sharks. (Pyjama sharks aren’t exactly great whites; he could’ve run them off at no personal risk.) His friend, or at least his playmate, was assaulted, and he did nothing to save her.
Foster’s logic for non-intervention is flimsy. In the film, he cites his role as objective observer: He’s a documentarian, there to watch nature in all its tooth-and-claw redness. “The first instinct is to try and scare the sharks away,” he tells the camera. “But then you realize that you’d be interfering with the whole process of the forest.”
But that argument collapses under scrutiny. Foster’s film isn’t a BBC-ish examination of wild cephalopod behavior — it’s very explicitly about a relationship. (The title is My Octopus Teacher, not The Subject of My Octopus Documentary.) From the day he meets the octopus, he attempts to woo her and win her trust: He reaches out to touch her, invites her onto his hand, exploits her curiosity. He is an active participant in her life, not a distant chronicler of it. He doesn’t seem to have many compunctions about distorting nature when he’s holding her against his bare belly. And, when you deliberately befriend a wild animal, the social contract changes. Friendship implies reciprocity and obligation, not cold removal.
Because I’m apparently incapable of having a private thought, I recently tweeted this opinion. That elicited strong and divergent reactions from Emma Marris and Brandon Keim, two of the journalists who’ve thought most deeply about human-wildlife relations. Emma, like me, was outraged that Foster had hung his friend out to dry; her kids were so appalled they’d chucked popcorn at the screen. But protecting the octopus, Brandon pointed out, would have meant depriving the sharks of a meal. What’s more, treating the sharks as villains would have contributed to the societal demonization of predators, creatures who deserve as much as love, respect, and empathy as any others. Sharks are people, too.
Later, Brandon pointed me toward an interview he’d conducted with Foster for the magazine Nautilus, in which Foster had elaborated on his decision not to interfere. In the film (which, granted, only provides so much room for explanation), he’d portrayed his choice as a straightforward one — there was a line he couldn’t cross (even if, in my opinion, he’d already blurred it). But, in conversation with Brandon, his views were more nuanced.
Those sharks are very dear to me. I’m very close with them as a species; I’ve watched them very closely for a long time. I know one or two intimately… They’re certainly not the bad guys or anything like that. Their lives are very fragile—quite a lot more fragile than the octopus, actually, because they mature very late and only lay two eggs… The frustrating thing about a film is that you’ve only got 85 minutes. What you don’t see is that I have watched those pyjama sharks for years. I’ve watched them lay eggs in the kelp forest, I’ve watched the eggs slowly mature and those tiny little sharks maturing inside. I’ve watched them, a few of them, actually hatching out of the egg. I’ve watched most of them being predated and killed by whelks and by sea stars, and I see how incredibly fragile they are. I see them sleeping in their caves. I’m incredibly close to that species of shark.
Although Foster’s film focuses on a single, central relationship, it’s more broadly about the power of closely observing nature, and the outrageous amount of time it takes to truly understand the workings of even the smallest ecosystem (the cinematic equivalent, it now occurs to me, of David Haskell’s The Forest Unseen). I have the utmost admiration for Foster’s discipline and rigorous study. And it makes sense that he’d come to care deeply for the sharks, to comprehend them as individuals, to be concerned for their sustenance and wellbeing. Given that deeper context, his decision seems more justifiable.
Even so, I wish he’d stepped in. I’ve been on hundreds of dives, and I’ve seen an octopus out of her lair during the day exactly once — yet Foster has hours of footage of his octopus friend gallivanting around in broad daylight. I can’t help but wonder whether, in coaxing her out of her den to interact with her, he exposed her to risk. (Foster himself speculates briefly about this possibility.) What’s more, we know that marine communities are rife with cross-species cooperation; groupers and moray eels, to name one famous example, have been observed collaboratively hunting. It doesn’t strike me as far-fetched that the octopus assumed that she could safely play outside her burrow because Foster, her buddy, had her back. He makes much of earning her trust, but, in that light, his noninterference may have been a form of betrayal. And it means that chasing away the sharks wouldn’t have been an unwarranted intervention in nature, but a corrective to his initial meddling.
To Foster’s credit, all of these thoughts seem to have crossed his mind. In the end, he does express remorse for his possible role in the attacks; he even attempts to feed the octopus a mussel while she’s recuperating from her lost arm, like he’s bringing over a Bundt cake to an ailing neighbor. It’s one of the film’s most human moments — an acknowledgment that connecting to wild animals can involve reciprocity as well as removed observation.
Thank you so much for this! I was completely horrified (yep, horrified) that he would justify not intervening in his octopus friend’s mutilation after handling her, bringing her food, etc. Our mere presence in an animal’s life is interference, there is no objective observation – they are aware of our presence no matter what we do. Was it a shock factor to balance out all the love? Would the movie have gotten as much promotion if there wasn’t conflict, a battle/murder scene involving the subject?
On the other hand, I do appreciate that he loves the little sharks.
And at least he didn’t glue a 3 lb. camera on her head for POV shots.