Ocean · plate 50 of 60
Octopus
Octopus vulgaris
Eight arms, three hearts, no interest in your party.
Only 1.1% of people are Octopuses. (estimated)
If you're an Octopus
You solve things. Locks, puzzles, people, in roughly that order of difficulty, and you do it alone, from inside a den you have arranged exactly to your liking. You are far more curious than social. You change your appearance to fit your surroundings without changing your mind about anything. People meet you once and talk about it for years.
About two-thirds of an octopus's neurons are in its arms, so an arm can taste, touch and decide things on its own.
The Octopus as a spirit animal
You are the cleverest person in most rooms and the least interested in being there, which is a difficult combination for everyone except you. You learn by touching, taking apart and quietly escaping. The flaw is that you shut the door of the den and nobody can tell whether you are thinking or gone. An octopus has no bones to speak of. It makes up for that with opinions.
Grounded in how the species actually lives; nothing borrowed from anyone's tradition. Why we put it that way.
How to get along with an Octopus
Do
- Give them a problem instead of a compliment.
- Let them explore the place before you expect a conversation.
- Accept the den: one space arranged exactly their way, not to be tidied.
Don't
- Don't put them in a group and expect participation.
- Don't lift the lid to check on them; they will have left through the gap.
When it goes wrong: A cornered octopus inks the water and vanishes; don't follow the cloud, wait by the den, and it comes back when the water clears.
The Octopus in a relationship
You do not love often, and you do not love casually. When you do, you give it everything, in the manner of a species that spends its final weeks tending the next generation and nothing else. Until then you keep your distance, arms folded, all eight of them, watching from the den.
Field notes
Every animal is placed on six personality traits derived from how the species lives. Your answers are placed on the same six, and the closest animal wins. How the scoring works
- Sociability
- 0
- Boldness
- 3
- Energy
- 5
- Curiosity
- 10
- Devotion
- 8
- Roaming
- 2
- It has three hearts and blue, copper-based blood.
- With no bones, it can squeeze through any gap bigger than its beak.
- A female common octopus guards her eggs for weeks without eating, and dies soon after they hatch.
Octopuses in literature
- The devil-fish — Toilers of the Sea, Victor Hugo (1866)
- The Kraken — The Kraken, Alfred Tennyson (1830)
- The polypus of Carteia — Natural History, Book IX, Pliny the Elder (77)
Characters from public-domain works. Company, not a verdict.
Closest personalities
The animals whose profiles sit nearest to the Octopus's. If you got Octopus, one of these was probably your runner-up.
Other ocean
Among the 60
The Royal Natural History, Richard Lydekker (1893). Public domain, viacommons.wikimedia.org.All credits
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