Dive deep into the wonderful and mysterious world of the octopus!
On Tuesday, February 11th, multi-talented award-winning author Mark Leiren-Young is releasing a kids book titled, Octopus Ocean: Geniuses of the Deep—introducing their habits, biology, habitats, and the mythology surrounding them.
This fascinating book will also highlight the existing threats to the octopuses’ survival, including warming oceans, over-fishing and pollution.
Using the latest research and real-world examples, Leiren-Young brings young readers a truly captivating profile of these wondrous creatures.
Victoria Buzz had the honour of speaking with Leiren-Young about this latest project as well as the previous works that brought him to this topic.
“[Octopus Ocean] was a wild thing to write,” he said.
“We were finding something new about them almost everyday. I’d be fact-checking something and then a new study would come out.”
Overall, the process in writing this book took around a year. Leiren-Young said that, unlike his other projects on sharks and orcas, he came into this one completely cold, which required a lot of attention and time.
His interest in octopuses is what drove him to the topic, but he didn’t know much about them before he started—hence interviewing scientists and receiving fact-checks, observing octopus behaviour when he could and doing his own research.
Additionally, he went to Central Middle School on the island and asked his audience of grade 6’s and 7’s what they already knew about octopuses and what they would want to see in the book.
“I really wanted to know what would make a kid go ‘wow!’”
“I did this before I even started the book…I thought, how else am I going to get the perspective of the actual reader for this book? So, I kicked it off that way…it was such a joy.”
One of the biggest requests was more on their unique anatomy, including their three hearts and their absolutely unreal ability to disguise themselves, which Leiren-Young compared to a superpower you’d read about in a comic.
“They change their colour, texture and shape…it sounds like you’re making it up…but it’s real and it’s beautiful!”
When asked what some of Leiren-Young’s favourite discoveries included, he laughed and said that octopus are known to go fishing with other fish, and if they’re unsatisfied with how the other fish is going about it, the octopus will express its distaste and punch the fish.
More seriously, he added that their intelligence, which scientists are still trying to figure out, is beyond fascinating.
Unlike other intelligent creatures, when octopuses emerge from their eggs, they don’t have any guiding hand; there are no parents or siblings to show them how to exist in their world, the knowledge is just there.
And to have such intelligence, only to exist for approximately five years or less (the average lifespan for the longest living octopuses is five years), is also something that Leiren-Young is captivated by.
“They’re not learning from copying, they’re not learning from parents…they’re somehow moving along and going ‘if I put on that shell, I look like a threat…or ‘yeah, that looks like a weapon’ or ‘yeah, that looks like a good place to hide.’”
He added that in a lot of the conversations he was having with scientists, there’s a general consensus that you want/need the elders around to pass on that knowledge of survival, but octopuses just don’t have that.
“It’s a phenomenal level of intelligence from birth.”
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Leiren-Young is an award-winning author, screenwriter, playwright, podcaster, and filmmaker. He has authored books such as Orcas Everywhere: The Mystery, History of Killer Whales, Orcas of the Salish Sea and Big Whales, Small World.
He has written TV shows for young viewers for Netflix, CBC, ABC, BBC Kids and PBS. He wrote, directed and produced the award-winning documentary The Hundred-Year-Old Whale.
To name a few, he has won the Leacock Medal for Humour for his book Never Shoot a Stampede Queen and the Science Writers and Communicators Award as Canada’s best science book for The Killer Whale Who Changed the World.
This particular project arose after he’d completed his work on sharks when Orca Book Publishers asked him if he wanted to do anything else, and he expressed interest in octopuses.
“It’s such a treat completely nerding out on something new,” he said.
“My experience with octopuses consisted of being vaguely obsessed with them as a little kid…but I had no knowledge of them.”
He was able to hang out at the Salish Sea Centre in Sidney and observe the resident octopus at the time, which are never kept for long to ensure they don’t get too used to humans.
Leiren-Young said he did the ‘journalist thing’ where he visited like any other visitor, but paid close attention to the other visitors—noting what people’s kids were asking their parents, what they were most fascinated by and what would hold their attention the longest.
Using this and tactics mentioned above, he was able to piece together Octopus Ocean: Geniuses of the Deep, which will be released to local bookstores and is also available to order online.
Already it has received praise from acclaimed voices such as Craig Foster, who is an octopus researcher, and the producer and star of famed feature film, My Octopus Teacher.
“Mark Leiren-Young’s Octopus Ocean gives young readers a wonderful sense of many aspects of the world of octopuses in a very clear, concise and interesting way. It makes the reader think, and it educates without preaching,” Foster’s blurb reads.
“This book is a door to the magnificent world of the octopus—a door that, if opened and explored, will bring much joy and connection.”
Check it out for yourself and discover something new about these fascinating creatures!
