Have you seen the movie “Remarkably Bright Creatures”? If you haven’t, I won’t ruin it for you, but it is a story about an octopus named Marcellus and a cleaning lady named Tova. The octopus is a giant Pacific octopus, which is the largest kind of octopus in the world. While most are about 10 – 15 feet tip to tip and weigh about 30 pounds, the largest giant Pacific octopus on record weighed in at 600 pounds and was 32 feet tip to tip.

A lot of things eat octopi, including humans. Each year, over three million tons of giant Pacific octopi are caught in a $6 billion a year industry. The giant Pacific octopus also eats a lot of things, mostly crabs and fish, but not humans. They have a “beak” which is sharp and can inflict a painful bite. They are also venomous, as are all species of octopi. Unlike the blueringed octopus, the venom of a giant Pacific octopus is painful, but not deadly.

Most species of octopi live only a year; however, the giant Pacific octopus can live up to five years, or until they reproduce. Then like other species of octopi, after mating both the males and females quit eating and slowly starve to death. The females will lay up to 400,000 eggs, which take about six months to hatch.

During that time she will protect the eggs from predators and squirt fresh oxygen-rich water over them.

She is so busy she can’t hunt, and thus just about the time the eggs hatch, she dies.

Octopi are Mollusks, and are thus related to snails, slugs, nudibranchs, and conches, which are called Gastropods, or “stomach foot”. They are also related to clams, oysters and scallops, the Bivalves, or two shells. The octopus along with squid and chambered nautiluses are called Cephalopods, or “head foot”.

I’ve seen a number of Caribbean octopi, which are much smaller than the giant Pacific variety, however I’ve never studied them. I did spend three years studying the clams of the Platte River and three weeks on a boat in the Bahamas studying the age difference between populations of Queen Conch in a marine reserve as opposed to open-water where they are harvested.

I have eaten octopus and conch, but I would never eat a snail, clam or oyster. Snails are just gross and if you cut a clam or oyster open the part you eat looks a lot like the inside of a used Kleenex!

While the giant Pacific octopus fishing industry is stable, the Queen Conch industry has issues. It takes a few years for a conch to reach maturity and they have been over-harvested such that a lot of juveniles are collected and used in the conch food industry. Taking out the juveniles limits the population’s ability to reproduce and replace the individuals harvested. The three weeks that I spent in the Bahamas, I went SCUBA diving every day collecting and counting conch as part of a larger effort by the Bahamian government to set size and age limits on the harvest of the conch.

The U.S. already has limits on collecting conch, and harvesting Queen Conch in the waters off the State of Florida is strictly prohibited.

Clams, snails, and conch are basically brainless.

The giant Pacific octopus, on the other hand, is very intelligent. It should be. It has nine brains. One at the base of each arm, and then a central brain. As I said, I won’t ruin the movie for you, but Marcellus shows his intelligence in the movie, and you can’t help but fall in love with him.