This story is excerpted and adapted from Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind, published in November 2020 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Wandering on scuba across a sandy plain populated by scallops during an exploratory dive in 2008, off the east coast of Australia, diver Matt Lawrence came across a small area where thousands of empty scallop shells were piled up and about a dozen octopuses were living. Octopuses have generally seemed very solitary animals, but this site showed that octopuses can, in some circumstances,…
