“I’ve always been fascinated by animals. That’s part of who I am. I was meant to be a zoologist.”
Janet Voight grew up in Iowa, far from the ocean. Yet as a young adult, she found her way to the study of marine organisms, especially the cephalopods: that strange and wonderful system that includes snails, clams, squids, nautilus, and octopuses. In this episode, we discuss the incredible intelligence and fascinating lives of octopus.
Janet conducts her research not just in a lab, but one–mile deep in the ocean. Sixteen times she’s journeyed down in a strange, deep-ocean vehicle that holds only three people and looks as if it would be at home in outer space. On the East Pacific Rise, she examines the creatures that live around the hypothermal vents at the bottom of the sea.
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Octopus are only of the organisms Janet Voight is fascinated by. “I’ve named 20 species of wood-boring clams,” she writes in her Field Museum blog. “You wouldn’t think there’s 20 species of wood-boring clams in the world. Trees fall in the forest and some of them wash out to sea. The wood that sinks to the bottom of the ocean is colonized by clams that bore into it. They just spend their lives scraping away at wood that sunk to the bottom of the ocean. And this group of species can only survive on the sunken wood.”
Janet appears in a terrific video about the sequencing of the octopus genome, a team she was part of. Here’s another article about this breakthrough.
The video and Janet’s colleague Cliff Ragsdale’s alien metaphor was the source for that portion of the narrative in this podcast episode. The episode was also informed by this article in Scientific American by Peter Godfrey-Smith; you may also want to check out his book, “Other Minds: The Octopus, The Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness.”