Cephalopod Welfare Ethics and Cognitive Research: Meet Dr Jennifer Mather

MARGAUX MONFARED

Invertebrates are extremely diverse and abundant animals that make up 99% of the animals on Earth even though a large proportion are yet to be identified. ‘They are the little things that hold up the world’, revealed E.O. Wilson. However, despite their importance and crucial roles within an ecosystem, their welfare is often overlooked. Cephalopods, a group of marine Molluscs that includes squid, octopus and cuttlefish are a mysterious and intelligent assortment of invertebrates. Although cephalopods do not come to mind as the ideal laboratory specimen, their distinctive behaviour and intelligence has made them indispensable to research. Meet Dr Jennifer Mather, a University Professor in Psychology from the University of Lethbridge, Canada whose fascination with intelligence in the oceans has led her on an incredible journey into cephalopod welfare, ethics and cognitive research. Dr Mather has a remarkable history in Marine Biology with over 75 publications in the area, and describes her journey as ‘a straight path with distractions’. She began studying the octopus in 1972 in their natural habitat and has since been to Bermuda, Hawaii and Bonaire, as a result in 1984 she was one of few who truly acknowledged their intelligence. To name a few of her achievements, she has given an Idea City talk on whether squid make a visual language on their skin, and a TED talk on Cephalopod cognition, Co edited a book on ‘The Welfare of Invertebrate Animals’ and recently acted as a scientific advisor for the Netflix film ‘My octopus teacher’. If you haven’t already seen this movie it is a must watch! Most recently she detailed her work as a keynote speaker for the virtual conference, ‘Other Worlds – Octopuses in Interdisciplinary Perspective’, where she addressed what the world is like for an Octopus, touching on the differences in senses and modalities to that of our own experiences. She is an extraordinary woman that has uncovered some incredible obscurities of the octopus whilst advocating for their welfare, ‘we have to stop exploiting animals, period’, she said.

‘I really care about the students, especially in this time of COVID-19 and restrictions. But I’m also nuts about cephs, they are such intelligent animals, so fascinating to watch and yet because they are so different from us, so hard to understand. These two passions are what keep me working way after I could retire’, said Dr Mather. 

Continue below to find out more about her explorations and research. 

Dr Jennifer Mather, University Professor in Psychology from the University of Lethbridge, Canada whose fascination with intelligence in the oceans has led her on an incredible journey into cephalopod welfare, ethics and cognitive research.

You’ve built your life around the ocean. What drew you to it in the first place?

I grew up on the edge of the ocean, in Victoria, BC.  My parents had a summer place at the edge of the water, and I was forever messing around in the intertidal.  I started out collecting shells, then I realized there were animals inside those shells and I began looking at them.  I always expected to study sea animals, and I knew that I was interested in the whole animal, not the tiny pieces.  But it wasn’t until my fourth year of undergraduate that I took a course in animal behaviour, and I went “That’s it”. Why cephs? Of all the molluscs, they have the biggest range and most interesting areas of behaviour.

Your research focuses on invertebrates, ethics and care; can you describe the path you took to where you are now?

Well, it’s a pretty straight path, though with distractions.  I started out in Biology and then went on to do my Master’s in Florida State.  My professor said I cared so much about octopuses; I should do my doctorate with someone who also did.  That led me to Psychology, but the professor I worked with was kind of toxic, and got rid of me.  So I did my doctorate with another prof, working on human perception.  After that I got a five-year Canadian University Research Fellowship, and I decided that I would keep doing the octopus work ‘on the side’.  Gradually I drifted back to full time animal research, even though I teach more conventional Psychology courses.  It doesn’t hurt to have that wide and varied background, though I never would have chosen it.  Why ethics?  Well, when your sensitive and intelligent animals aren’t protected by any regulations about animal care and consideration (they still are not in the US), you can’t help but notice and get involved.

You have recently co-edited a book, The Welfare of Invertebrate Animals’; can you describe the importance of this research?

An easy way to start is to say that invertebrates make up 99% of the animals on the planet.  E.O. Wilson called them ‘the little things that hold up the world’. Our focus in welfare is almost all on 0.1 % of animals, notably mammals — I wrote an article in the journal Animals about that. Many invertebrates, like the cephs, are sensitive and intelligent, we can’t just treat them as ‘things’, they deserve care and they are important to us.  But we often don’t know how they function, whether they have consciousness, pain and suffering—or rather how and how much.  We can’t pretend that only humans and animals like us ‘matter’, look what that is doing to the planet. 

You also work closely with cephalopods; can you describe their intelligence?

One way to say it is that they succeed in pretty much any test of learning.  Possibly not social learning, they are mostly solitary animals.  But it’s more than learning, they explore, gather information and plan for the future.  They try out new things; they take things apart to see how they work (but they can’t put them back together), they play, though motor manipulation not social play.  I haven’t seen any evidence that they like each other very much, not like us.

An octopus ‘hiding in plain sight’! Can you spot it?

Our knowledge has advanced on the intelligence of cephalopods; can you tell us more about the cognitive octopus research you have been a part of?

Well, octopuses have distinct personalities, I was working on that before people even admitted that there’s such a thing as animal personality, though everyone knows now. They play; Roland Anderson and I discovered that they did a marine equivalent of bouncing a ball.  They have a flexible funnel for breathing out that lets them shoot jets of water at things like pesky scavenging fish and annoying researchers an example of tool use and one of the octopuses at the Seattle Aquarium used jets of water to shoot out a light that it didn’t like having turned on over its tank.  They can recognize individual humans, we don’t know if they can recognize individual octopuses.  No one has tested this; I bet they can, but rather by chemical cues than visual ones.  When they have a clam, they try a bunch of different techniques to open it up, and they follow the adage ‘when at first you don’t succeed, try another way’. They plan ahead, a researcher found that octopuses took coconut shell halves out over the mud bottom with them, to use as shelter later when they needed it.

An annoyed octopus doing a ‘Hood display’

Can you describe some of the various behaviours you have seen an octopus portray and how it links to a different from of intelligence?

I don’t know that it is a different ‘form’ of intelligence, just the same ability used in different situations and with different cues.  Like us, they can navigate around their environment using visual cues and coming back to a central shelter by remembering where it is. But they don’t seem to recognize themselves in a mirror, vision isn’t used for self-monitoring. There is no overlap of generations, so they never learn from parents and especially never teach their young. It’s ‘every octopus for him or herself’, they may see others doing something and try it out, but they don’t care about the welfare of other octopuses. But they’re perennially curious, sort of like a five-year old child.  How does this work?  What happens if I do this? Oh, I can use that tomorrow….

A beautiful example of an octopus in camouflage displaying skin patterns and texture, not looking like an octopus, let alone like an animal.

How do you think we might be able to prevent the exploitation of cephalopods in the future?

First we need to understand them. See, PETA sent me a video of a restaurant that had mollusc stir-fry at the table. The octopus was trying to crawl out of the wok as they steamed it to death. It was horrible to watch.  If we understood that the animal feels, we would never allow that to happen. In a way bigger sense, we have to stop exploiting animals, period.  We’re not lords of the planet but one of many species. It’s not there for us to exploit, to keep a fishery going until we have used up all the animals of a species. It’s not there for us to dig up for resources we don’t really need, like underwater gold nuggets, until we have messed up the whole fabric of ecosystems. It’s not there for us to dump our trash in; it can’t absorb it all and should not have to.

Whose work has influenced and inspired you?

When I was young, it was Marie Curie. I still think she’s a pretty good role model. See, she was really dedicated to science and she worked very hard in what was probably a shabby lab, not really caring about money.  But she believed in family too, she had two daughters and the whole family took every August off for vacation and went to the country. I think we have lost that balance in science. But I have never seen anyone for whom I could say, “I want to do what you are doing”, I have always wanted to go my own way intellectually. It’s a good path, just not always easy.

What is one thing you wish someone had told you/taught you a long time ago?

Nothing ‘they’ could have told me, really, though when I wanted to go into Conservation in the 1960s, the head of the graduate program said, “No, we don’t take girls”. So I wish he hadn’t said that, but more that he didn’t mean it.  And I went into traditional academia, though later, and I’m probably a better fit for more theoretical work, so perhaps that is a good thing. I wish that Western science in the 60s and all the way to now was less stereotypical masculine, less money and power driven, more inclusive and supportive.

What has your experience as a woman in ocean science been like?

Except for that first time, no overt discrimination.  Women aren’t taken as seriously as men but it’s not always obvious. And I don’t know to what extent my approach, the patient watching that is the method of ethology, also contributes to my relative obscurity. I don’t push, I’m not into debating and blogging and showing up others, so I have never had a lot of research money, and no doubt I could have done more with more money. But the cephalopod research community is world wide, you just have to look at the web site FastMoll.  You find a more inclusive research community in relatively obscure areas such as Malacology (the study of molluscs), and people do notice expertise, eventually.  Although yes, I did work for recognition of women in science mostly through union activities, and I’m still working for inclusion of ‘different’ people.

How has the recent COVID-19 Pandemic affected (or not) you and your research?

Well, I have been relatively lucky.  The major project I was invited to collaborate in, a huge data base search to look for ecological, brain and behavioural characteristics predicting intelligence in different cephalopods, is data-based. I’m working on a couple of papers and lots of reviewing. I’m a widow living by myself so I don’t have the major demand of family that many of my female colleagues have. Teaching at a distance is hugely demanding and siphons off a lot of our time and concern. I miss travel--oh, I miss travel. I was supposed to go to a conference in Naples and another in Cologne last spring, and I was going to take a vacation in between. But I’m employed, I have important and interesting work to do, and I’m getting paid. That is more than a lot of people can say.

Where do you go from here?

Likely more of the same! I will keep it up until I can’t do it, or until something more interesting comes long. 

My advice to women (and men) in science would be “Find something you are passionate about and just do it, keep persisting and doing it”, exclaims Dr Mather.