The Octopus Who Escaped to the Sea

The story

One morning, in an aquarium in New Zealand, the staff discovered something was wrong with one of their tanks.

It was missing its octopus. Inky was gone.

Inky was a common New Zealand octopus with a wrinkly face and a reputation for mischief. Fishermen had found him caught in a crayfish pot and brought him in scarred and battered, and the aquarium in the seaside town of Napier had taken him in and made him a star. Visitors loved him. Keepers said he was a curious one, always exploring, always testing things with his eight clever arms.

So where was he? The staff searched and found the clues, and the clues let them piece together an incredible story. The night before, a small gap had opened at the top of Inky's tank. Perhaps the lid was left ajar, or perhaps Inky nudged it himself, nobody is sure. Just a gap, mind you, not an open door. But for an octopus, a gap is an invitation. An octopus has no bones at all. No skeleton, no stiff frame. Its main hard part is its small beak, and that means it can pour itself through more or less any opening its beak can fit through, like thick honey sliding through a keyhole. Inky, whose body was about the size of a rugby ball, could squash himself astonishingly flat.

Here is the escape the clues described. Out through the gap, up and over the edge, and down the side of the tank. Then the truly cheeky part: a damp trail led across the aquarium floor to a small drain hole. And that drain was not just any hole. It was the mouth of a pipe about fifty metres long that ran down to the sea. The staff concluded that Inky had squeezed through the gap, crossed the floor arm over arm, slipped into that pipe, travelled its whole dark, wet length, and slid free into the great Pacific Ocean. He was home.

The keepers said they were sad, and a little surprised, to lose him. But octopus experts only smiled, because everyone who works with octopuses knows what they are like. Octopuses are famous among scientists as some of the cleverest creatures without a backbone in all the sea. In aquariums around the world they have learned to open jars, they have taken apart bits of their tanks, and they have squeezed through gaps nobody believed possible. Keepers must build their tanks like puzzle boxes, because an octopus treats every lid as a question and goes looking for the answer.

Inky was never identified again, and the keepers took comfort in the best explanation they had: their curious octopus had found a path back to the wild sea, and taken it.

So remember Inky of Napier. Curiosity is a kind of key, and a curious mind, in a tank or in a classroom, keeps testing until it finds the way through.