While we should certainly be leery of over-identifying with an animal so fundamentally other, from the octopus’ engagement with Foster, clinging to his arm even as he surfaces to breathe – it seems fair to say the fascination is mutual.If you’re not a marine biologist and you haven’t yet seen My Octopus Teacher, chances are good that you have no strong feelings about eight-armed cephalopods. The familiar view of My Octopus Teacher, hard won over years of sustained observation, makes for a compelling documentary that may move you despite yourself. Twelve scientific papers were published as a result of Blue Planet 2. Before the viewer’s eyes, the octopus adapts her crab-hunting strategy for lobster, evades a pyjama shark by climbing onto its back, shape-shifts to resemble seaweed and rocks, and otherwise applies her intelligence and creativity to survive.Īs Foster points out, we understand so little about octopuses that we tend to learn something new whenever we look. With a subject so captivating, narrative hardly seems important.Īlthough the specifics of cephalopod strangeness (wonderfully interrogated in Peter Godfrey-Smith’s book Other Minds) are glossed over, the day-to-day study of one animal’s life reveals its ordinary to be extraordinary. When Foster suggests their “lives were mirroring each other” as the octopus regrows a leg bitten off by a shark, you wonder if she would agree.īut one can excuse My Octopus Teacher’s occasional sentimentality for its intimate, absorbing view into an alien life. Indeed, his eagerness to find similarities can rather sell his subject short. But that back story is omitted in favour of a close crop on Foster’s personal relationship with the octopus, and what he learns on his daily visits to her world.Īlthough three expert advisers are credited on the film (including “octopus psychologist” Jennifer Mather, who flew from Canada to consult on the edit), Foster’s takeaways tend to be emotive, rather than scientific. The pair have spent many years documenting South Africa’s kelp forests (more recently, as part of the non-profit Sea Change Project) and are listed as joint directors of photography on My Octopus Teacher. The octopus and its protective “shell suit” featured in the “Green Seas” episode, explained by David Attenborough as never-before-seen behaviour.įoster collaborated on shooting the sequence with his friend, Blue Planet 2 cameraman Roger Horrocks. Viewers of the BBC’s Blue Planet 2 may recognise the footage. It transpires to be a common octopus, hiding in plain sight.
One day, he comes across an odd jumble of shells on the sea floor. Wanting to reconnect with nature after burning out with work, film-maker and naturalist Craig Foster starts freediving daily in the undersea kelp forests off Cape Town. That otherness is at the heart of our fascination with octopuses: can we even aspire to understand something so foreign? A new Netflix documentary, My Octopus Teacher, follows one man’s attempt.
In many ways, the octopus is a tough proposition: a soft-bodied mollusc that carries the bulk of its brain in its arms, that can render itself solid without a skeleton or liquid despite its beak, that evolved separately from nearly every other organism on Earth. My Octopus Teacher is available on Netflix from 7 September 2020
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