In our era of the climate crisis, we are increasingly aware of how people and the physical planet are intertwined. Their entanglement opens the opportunity to bridge long-standing disciplinary divisions among the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. How humans imagine, represent, and practice the physical environment enriches considerations for its stewardship, as I hope to suggest with this brief post reading for culture in a foundational naturalist text.

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Edward F. Ricketts’ field-changing manual of intertidal biology Between Pacific Tides, co-written with Jack Calvin, was initially published in 1939. Marking a paradigm shift from describing animals taxonomically to describing them holistically, in their habitats and in relation to each other, the book became a classic that went through numerous revisions and reprints, until the 1985 fifth edition that is still in print today. Across editions, the editors’ goals have been to keep up with the dynamic, expanding field of intertidal biology. Notably, marine biologist Joel Hedgpeth played a decisive role in updating “errors” so numerous that his 1968 Preface to the fourth edition offered the disclaimer, “I just don’t know all the mistakes that still lurk in these pages.”[1] The 1985 lead editor David Phillips also remarked on the challenge updating the text with proliferating knowledge, adding that so many have contributed that the book has become “a collective effort.”[2] Phillips explains his delicate task threading the needle in a work that is at once historical document and “still Ed Ricketts’s book,” yet at the same time aims to orient scientists and amateur collectors alike in the Pacific coast intertidal with the best up-to-date information.[3] 

What strikes me, amidst the extensive, valuable editorial work, is how passages registering cultural perspectives remain largely untouched. Consider, for example, the entry on the octopus. Information changed since Ricketts’ time addresses, among other issues, scientific nomenclature and species variety. I, in contrast, already pause on the first words used to introduce this creature in 1985 as in 1939. The entry begins by presenting “the much maligned octopus -- which, in the vernacular shares the name of devilfish with the giant ray of tropical waters.”[4]   

With the phrase “much maligned,” Between Pacific Tides references a view of the octopus as demonic dating in trans-Atlantic culture at least back to the Enlightenment. The devilfish figures memorably in Victor Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea (1866), as does the giant octopus in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1871). In the first part of the twentieth century, this view still prevails, indeed capturing the imagination of Hollywood. However, Ricketts goes on to challenge it in his entry. Finding the octopus “intelligent,” he notes that it “has eyes as highly developed as ours, and a larger and better functioning brain than any other invertebrate animal.” In his break with tradition, he precedes Jacques-Yves Cousteau, whose famous works helped publicize octopus intelligence, culminating in the episode “Octopus, Octopus,” in The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau (first aired December 21, 1971). By 1985, the octopus is known as a clever, shy tool user.

Ricketts’ remarks crediting the octopus’ “relatively high degree of intelligence” for “its survival in the face of persistent collecting as food” are another cultural observation that remains unchanged from 1939 to 1985. Ricketts goes on to observe that “Italians and Chinese justly relish the animals . . . as does an occasional American.” “And you say that people eat these things?” asks an unnamed “lady” on the Monterey wharf in a 1935 column from the Monterey daily.[5]  “Sure,” her gentleman friend replies, “The Japanese and Italians say they are great eating.” By 1985, American tastes were changing. A 1984 article from The New York Times describes oceanography professor Gilbert Voss’s efforts to popularize octopus meat in the US as “heaven”: “Marinara, char-broiled, vinaigrette, in a salad.”[6] Ricketts gives his 1939 readers advice that its delicious “flesh is . . . decidedly tough and rubbery, and the meat grinder treatment is recommended.” Along with “the meat grinder treatment,” Phillips adds the recommendation of “thin slicing,” with a subtle nod to shifting tastes in a passage he otherwise leaves untouched. 

By the twenty-first century, the octopus in the US and indeed across the globe is regarded as a creature of great intelligence and sentience. This vision is publicized in general audience books and films, such as Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed’s My Octopus Teacher (2020). In a related but different development, octopus became well-established on the American menu, notably in fusion and ethnic cuisines. Moreover, “cephalopod stocks [are] . . . growing in importance” around the globe, both as food and as prey for other catch.[7] How to satisfy this demand is a challenge for fisheries, and octopus farming has been proposed as a solution. Yet the octopus inspires such awe among many that animal rights groups supported by members of the public have objected they should not endure aquaculture’s inhumane conditions. 

In September 2024, Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law the bill OCTO: “Oppose Cruelty to Octopuses,” making California the second state in the US after Washington proactively to prohibit octopus farming. While such legislation is framed at the intersection of science and policy, unacknowledged cultural shifts shape it as well, both shifts in imagination and in practice. OCTO signs into law a contextually located view of the octopus that is dynamic and may yet change again. Surfacing submerged history, we are in the domain of the interpretive humanities, which helps explain present perspectives and can offer counsel for the future.

Notes

[1] Hedgpeth, “Preface,” Edward Ricketts and Jack Calvin, Between Pacific Tides, rev. Joel Hedgpeth (UP Stanford, 1968), x.

[2] Phillips, “Preface,” Ricketts, Calvin and Hedgpeth, Between Pacific Tides, rev. David W. Phillips (UP Stanford, 1985), xxiii.

[3] Ibid., xix.

[4] I quote from the more easily available 1948 edition of Edward Ricketts and Jack Calvin’s Between Pacific Tides, where this passage is unchanged from the 1939 edition. The passage I discuss is found on page 95 in the 1948 edition of Between Pacific Tides (UP Stanford) and on pages 173-174 in the 1985 edition.

[5] Albert Campbell, “Along the Waterfront,” Monterey Peninsula Herald, August 23, 1935, 3. 

[6] “Cultivating Octopus for US Tables,” The New York Times, March 13, 1984, 6.

[7] Gillian Ainsworth, Pablo Pita, Christina Pita, et al. “Identifying Sustainability Priorities among Value Chain Actors in Artisanal Common Octopus Fisheries.” Rev Fish Biol Fish. 2023 Mar 4:1-30, 671.