[waves crashing]
[seagull squawking]
[female chanting playing]
[man] A lot of people say that an octopus is like an alien.
But the strange thing is, as you get closer to them,
you realize that we're very similar in a lot of ways.
You're stepping into this completely different world.
Such an incredible feeling.
And you feel you're on the brink of something extraordinary.
[upbeat orchestral music playing]
But you realize that there's a line that can't be crossed.
[tense music playing]
It's quite a long time ago now, that day when it all started.
[thunder rumbling]
[seagulls squawking]
This place on the tip of Africa is known as the Cape of Storms.
My childhood memories are completely dominated
by the rocky shore, the intertidal and the kelp forest.
We had this little wooden bungalow,
literally below the high-water mark.
So when those huge storms used to come in,
the ocean used to smash the doors down and fill up the bottom of the house.
So it was incredibly exciting as a child
to literally live in the force of that giant Atlantic Ocean.
Most of my childhood was spent in the rock pools,
diving in the shallow kelp forest.
That's what I most loved to do.
As an adult, I'd been separated from that.
And that was fine at first.
Until I went to the central Kalahari about 20 years ago.
I was making a film called The Great Dance with my brother.
And then I met these men
who were probably some of the best trackers in the world.
To watch these men...
go into the incredible, subtle signs in nature,
things that my eye couldn't even see,
and then follow them, sometimes for hours,
and find hidden animals in the landscape
was just extraordinary to witness.
I mean, they just were inside of the natural world.
And I could feel I was outside.
And I had this deep longing to be inside that world.
I went through two years of absolute hell.
[indistinct chattering]
I had been working hard for a long time,
I'd just worn myself out.
I hadn't slept properly for months.
My family was suffering.
And I was getting sick from all the pressure.
My mind couldn't deal with all that stuff.
And I didn't wanna see a camera or an edit suite ever again.
I couldn't even face that.
Your great purpose in life is now...
just in pieces.
And you've got this young child that's growing up.
Tom.
I just couldn't, in that state, be a good father to my son.
I had to have a radical change.
And I took inspiration from my childhood,
and I took inspiration from these master trackers
I worked with in the Kalahari.
And the only way I knew how to do it was to...
be in this ocean.
In the beginning, it's a hard thing to get in the water.
It's one of the wildest, most scary places to swim on the planet.
The water drops to as low as eight, nine degrees Celsius.
The cold takes your breath away.
And you just have to relax.
And then you'll get this beautiful window of time
for 10, 15 minutes.
Suddenly...
everything feels okay.
The cold upgrades the brain because you're getting this flood of chemicals
every time you immerse in that cold water.
Your whole body comes alive.
And then, as your body adapts, it just becomes easier and easier.
[gentle orchestral music plays]
And eventually...
after about a year...
you start to crave the cold.
[breathes deeply]
What's so amazing about this environment
is you're in a three-dimensional forest,
and you can jump off the top and go wherever you want.
You're flying, basically.
[piano music playing]
You might as well be on another planet.
You naturally just get more relaxed in the water.
You get to be able to hold your breath for longer.
Having a scuba tank in a thick kelp forest
is not optimal for me.
I want to be more like an amphibious animal.
Instinctively, I knew not to wear a wet suit.
If you really wanna get close to...
an environment like this,
it helps tremendously to have no barrier to that environment.
And I suddenly realized I've got energy to take images and film again...
and then picked up my camera again
and started doing the thing I love and what I know.
[piano music soars]
The animals are extremely exotic and strange.
It's, like, much more extreme than our maddest science fiction.
I remember that day when it all started.
I found this very, very special area
that is protected with a big piece of kelp forest,
'cause the forest itself actually dampens the swell.
And the whole forest around there
is absolutely murky, and you can't see a thing.
And in this little 200-meter patch, you can dive
and observe.
And it's an incredible place.
And I remember there was this strange shape to my left
and just going down...
and seeing this really strange thing.
[delicate piano music playing]
The fish even seemed to be confused.
And then, suddenly...
[gentle orchestral music plays]
At the time, I didn't know
I'd witnessed something extraordinary.
I'd come in at the end of a whole drama.
You think, "What on earth is this animal doing?"
And I think she was a little bit afraid of me,
so she lifted this incredibly slippery...
piece of algae that you can hardly hold with your hands
and just wrapped it in this extraordinary cloak around her
and then stared at me out of the little gap.
And then, boom, you know, she was gone.
It's a hard thing to explain,
but sometimes you just get a feeling,
and you know
there's-- there's something to this creature that's very unusual.
There's something to learn here.
There's something special about her.
And then I had this crazy idea.
What happens if I just went every day?
What happens if I... I never missed a day?
And, initially, she was clearly being affected by my presence,
so I thought, "I'll leave the camera there,
and then that will record her going about her business."
She sees this shiny new thing in the forest.
Coming at it with a shield,
just in case it attacked, and put up the shield.
This is something different. This is interesting.
Touching it, feeling it, tasting it.
If she was in a playful mood, you couldn't leave it there for too long.
She'd just pull the thing over.
It took going in every day to really get to know her environment better.
Initially, it all just seems like much of the same thing.
But then, after a while, you see all the different types of the forest.
You get the old-growth forest.
You get the forest with a lot of different algae growing in the bottom.
You get the misty forest.
As I started to map the environment around her den,
it was shocking to see small caves really close to her,
packed with pyjama sharks.
And they really are her most serious predator.
Their skin is striped. That's why they're called a pyjama shark.
They're not visual predators.
But they have an incredible sense of smell.
And they are particularly aggressive.
They can shove their noses into a small crack.
So they are deadly little octopus predators.
And I was thinking, "Well, how long before something happens with these animals?"
After visiting her more and more and more,
there was a definite moment where...
that fear had subsided tremendously.
She'd see big movement,
and she'd be slightly afraid and then look, "Oh, it's him."
And she'd come out and be very curious.
Very interested, very curious, but not taking stupid chances.
Keeping all the other arms attached to the den
and the suckers in place.
And then it just happens.
I put my hand out a tiny bit.
[gentle music plays]
Something happens when that animal makes contact.
But, at some point, you're gonna have to breathe.
So you've got to very gently
prize off those suckers
without disturbing her,
so that you can actually go up and take a breath.
By far the most powerful
is when it comes out the den
because that's when you know there's full trust.
There's no holding the arms back just in case I have to pull back.
It's like, "I totally trust this human,
and I'm coming out of the den,
and I'm gonna go about my business."
I started to see pretty extraordinary things.
They can look spiky. They can look smooth.
Grow horns on their heads.
They can match color, texture, pattern, skin.
It's beautiful.
Most of the time, she's jetting or crawling or swimming.
But occasionally,
two legs come out.
She walks.
And off she goes, striding away,
walking bipedally.
She puts her body into this strange posture that kind of looks like a rock.
And then two of those arms underneath slowly moving,
so the rock is just slowly moving away.
And then she changes
into this extraordinary, wobbly, flowy old lady in a dress.
Perhaps she's trying to mimic
kelp or algae moving in the swell...
and, at the same time, is slowly moving away.
And this is how she works.
This incredible creativity to deceive.
An octopus is essentially a snail that's lost its shell in evolution.
A very fragile, liquid, soft animal
that relies on tremendous intelligence.
She's got no mother or father to teach her anything. She's alone.
'Cause you've got all these different types of predators, all hunting her.
So, over millions of years, she's had to...
come up with the most incredible methods to deceive them.
And she's got to learn fast because
she's only got just over a year to live.
When you're diving alone, everything about my kit has to be perfect.
And I've gotta be prepared for all eventualities.
I can't be fiddling around. It's gotta be instinctive.
But, at that point, I was making a lot of mistakes.
One day, she was following me.
And that's the most incredible thing, is to be followed by an octopus.
You know, you're just backing away, moving backwards,
and this incredible animal is coming towards you.
And there's not a lot of fear in it at all.
It's curious, and there's trust,
and it's like this fantastic feeling.
[gentle piano music plays]
And then, bam!
I dropped one of my lenses,
and that thing falling quickly just startles that animal.
And then it turns and rushes, and it's got a huge fright.
And you just... you wanna kick yourself, because it's, you know...
That could have ended in the most incredible interaction and deep trust,
and you've ruined it.
Now, you know, have you ruined it forever?
Uh, is that animal ever gonna trust you?
Has that... has that experience freaked it out too much?
And then I approached her too fast.
And that's when she left the den and got a real fright...
and didn't come back to that den.
And I thought this was over.
She was gone.
I'd had this experience with these incredible San master trackers.
I just thought, "I wonder if anybody could ever track anything underwater?"
This animal has spent millions of years learning to be impossible to find.
I had to learn what octopus tracks looked like.
And that was very frustrating at first, so difficult to discern.
What's the difference between octopus tracks
and heart urchin tracks
and fish tracks...
and worm tracks?
And the predation marks.
The egg casings.
I needed to learn everything.
And then you have to start thinking...
like an octopus.
It's like being a detective.
And you just slowly get all your clues together.
And then I started to...
make breakthroughs.
"Okay, those are the animals she's killing."
So I'm looking at kills. I'm looking at little marks, diggings in the sand,
little changes in the algal patterns where she's been moving.
And then knowing, "Okay, this animal is very close now.
It's close. It's within one or two meters."
And then focusing on that small space.
And then, bang!
She's there.
Finally, after looking for her for a week, day after day,
there she was.
It's like a...
a human friend, like, waving and saying, "Hi, I'm excited to see you."
And I could feel it, like from one minute to the next,
"Okay, I trust you. I trust you, human.
And now you can come into my octopus world."
And she's moving towards me.
And my natural instinct is...
to gently back away.
And then I just wanted to keep still, so I held onto a rock.
She just kept coming...
and then covered my whole hand.
I'd been underwater for quite a long time,
so I just gently pushed for the surface, thinking she would move off my hand.
But she didn't. She just rode on my hand right to the surface.
[gentle orchestral music playing]
There I was, just staring into the eyes of this incredible creature.
It was difficult to imagine at first
that she was getting anything out of the relationship.
Why would a wild animal, doing its thing,
get anything out of this
strange human creature visiting?
And this is where it gets interesting.
I think quite stimulating for that huge intelligence.
Somehow, she realizes this thing is not dangerous,
so you go and you interact with this human.
And perhaps it does give you some strange octopus level of joy.
[delicate piano music playing]
When you have that connection with an animal
and have those experiences, it's absolutely mind-blowing.
There's no greater feeling on earth.
The boundaries between her and I seemed to dissolve.
Just the pure magnificence of her.
All I could do at the time was just think of her.
In the water and on land.
I mean, it just became a bit of an obsession.
You just want to visit her every day and see what's going on.
You can't wait to get back in the water.
What goes through her mind? What's she thinking?
Does she dream? If she dreams, what does she dream about?
She just ignited my curiosity in a way that I had not experienced before.
It's very useful to come back home
and try and read as many scientific papers as possible.
She's a common octopus.
Octopus vulgaris is the scientific name.
Two-thirds of her cognition
is actually outside of her brain, in her arms.
Her entire being is thinking, feeling, exploring.
She's got 2,000 suckers, and she's using all of them independently.
How do you do that?
Imagine having 2,000 fingers.
You can compare her intelligence to a cat or a dog
or even to one of the lower primates.
A mollusk shouldn't be this intelligent.
So many times I'd go and search through the scientific papers,
looking for the strange thing I'd seen.
And then you'd just come up absolutely blank. There's nothing.
You're going into a place that's under-studied,
and, almost on a weekly basis, you can find out something new to science.
According to the literature, octopus are supposed to be a nocturnal species.
Now, was she more active at night?
It was a little bit scary in the dark.
[whales moaning]
These incredible sounds of the humpback whales
coming through the water.
You're on hyperalert.
[whales hooting]
I couldn't find her. She wasn't in her den.
I'd kind of given up and was going back to the shore.
Something just made me veer slightly to the left.
And there she is...
right in extremely shallow water.
Can't see what she's doing.
These lightning-fast strikes.
Using her arm like this strange weapon.
Just rolling it up in this fraction of a second.
And I saw her catch three fish like this.
I'd never seen her catching a fish during the day.
Super dangerous out in the deeper forest at night,
so this incredibly clever animal retreats to the shallows,
where it's difficult for these sharks to get to,
and takes advantage of all the wonderful food available there.
The first instinct is to try and scare the sharks away.
But then you realize
that you'd be interfering with the whole process of the forest.
She was out of the den, moving around near the edge of the forest.
I noticed...
the shark.
Body was slightly hunched forward and was following the scent trail.
This is not good.
I think, "Thank God she's safe. She's right under the rock."
These things are coming right into that crack.
And the next minute, the shark is actually clamped down on one of her arms,
doing this terrifying death roll.
And I can clearly see...
her severed arm in its mouth.
[gasps, sighs]
You had that terrible feeling in your stomach.
And thank God she managed to get really deep in that crack.
She was moving very badly, slowly, very weak.
She's bleeding. That smell's in the water.
There's quite a distance to the den.
Are these sharks gonna pitch up again?
I thought about helping her back physically to the den.
But, luckily, I didn't need to.
I didn't know...
what was gonna happen to her or if this would make her weak and vulnerable,
and they'd finish her off that night.
And I couldn't help feeling...
had I been responsible for this?
Was she out because I was there?
I felt very vulnerable.
As if somehow what happened to her had happened to me in some strange way.
And then this almost felt, psychologically, like I was...
going through a type of dismembering.
You start thinking about your own death and your own vulnerability,
worried about your family, your child.
I hadn't been a person that was overly sentimental towards animals before.
I realized I was changing.
She was teaching me to become sensitized to the other.
Especially wild creatures.
A scary feeling, going into the water early the next day.
I was very relieved that she was alive, breathing.
She's so weak that she can't make those vibrant colors of a healthy octopus,
and she's just dull and white.
And now I'm worried, "How is she getting food?"
You are crossing a line
when you interfere in the lives of animals.
But I was just too overcome
with my feelings for her.
I don't think it really helped.
And she's right at the back of the den, you know, just not moving much.
I was just checking every day to see if she was okay,
wondering, "Is this the last day? Am I not gonna see her?"
The big relief came a week or so later,
and I could see it had sort of healed over pretty fast.
And then the most amazing thing, to see this...
tiny little miniature, perfect miniature arm...
starting to grow back.
And it gave me a strange sort of confidence
that she can get past this incredible difficulty.
And I felt, in my life, I was getting past the difficulties I had.
In this strange way, our lives were mirroring each other.
My relationship with people, with humans was changing.
My son, at this stage, was very interested in everything underwater.
[soothing orchestral music plays]
And every day, I'd tell him the stories.
He'd seen her. He'd met her.
I'd taken him so many times.
The arm becomes pretty functional,
even when it's half grown.
And then, slowly, as the arm grew, she grew her confidence back.
Eventually, about 100 days later, that arm had fully regrown.
An amazing feeling to think that this animal is capable of that
and can withstand such an attack and fully recover.
After a while, she was just carrying on with her normal activities,
so I then started a whole new development
of seeing even deeper into her world.
It was a nice, calm, clear day.
She comes around a corner and spots a crab.
The problem when you're a crab,
you're being now hunted by a liquid animal.
She can pour herself through a tiny little crack.
And the crab seems to sense her
and goes and hides underneath a big, poisonous anemone.
And then she waits and hides.
[tense orchestral music plays]
And then the crab thinks, "Okay, everything's all right,"
and makes the mistake of leaving that anemone.
[dramatic music playing]
She's quite a messy eater.
Bits going everywhere. The smell's going out.
And then you just look around, and you see these brittle stars,
surprisingly fast, just being drawn to her.
Just a mass of them sort of overwhelm her,
and she doesn't seem sure of what to do or how to deal with them.
So I thought, "Yeah, this is like a real problem now.
She's always gonna have this problem of brittle stars taking all her food."
Not that long in the future,
she's thought, "Okay, brittle stars are stealing my food,"
and has this amazing method of just picking them up with her suckers
and gently just throwing them out the den.
Now she's completely the boss.
She initially adopted the same method to crab hunting with lobster.
You just suddenly see...
lobsters just shooting out of the reef.
I'm thinking now, "She's definitely gonna catch this one."
Time and time again, they just evade her.
And then, a couple of weeks later,
watching her coming round the side,
corralling me so that
she can then get between the lobster and myself.
Using me as part of her hunting strategy.
And instead of that messy lunge...
throwing her web over the top.
And then there's nowhere for it to go.
This is an animal that is strategizing
and working out very quickly how best to hunt a very tricky prey.
A lot of her intelligence is built
from the sheer number of prey that she has to catch.
All sorts of animals.
All the mollusks she is capturing, they're quite easy to catch,
but they've got these incredibly hard shells.
Now, how the hell does she kill and eat them?
At the base of all those arms,
there's a drill that can drill through hard shell
and then drop venom in there, like a snake,
and see how that mollusk reacts.
But some of these mollusks will only relax
if that drill is precisely in the apex of the shell,
on the abductor muscle.
She basically has to do geometry
to work out exactly the precise spot where she needs to drill that shell
in order to get her food.
This is high-level invertebrate intelligence.
Her ability to learn and remember details.
And it hit me how she was teaching me so much.
You just can't wait to get up in the morning, 'cause there's so much to do
to understand every little tiny mark,
every little behavior,
every species and what they're doing, how they're interacting.
People ask, "Why are you going to the same place every day?"
But that's when you see the subtle differences.
And that's when you get to know the wild.
So when these thousands of threads going off from the octopus
to all the other animals, predator and prey,
and then this incredible forest,
um, just nurturing all of this.
And now I know how the helmet shell is connected to the urchin
and how the octopus is connected to the helmet shell.
And as I draw all these lines,
all these stories are just being thrown up.
It's almost like the forest mind.
I really could feel it. That big creature.
It was thousands of times more awake and intelligent than I am.
This is like a giant underwater brain operating over millions of years.
And it just keeps everything in balance.
Everything seemed, at this point...
sort of perfect in the forest.
And, of course, you know...
[chuckling] ...you've forgotten...
those predators are ever present.
[ominous music playing]
Just have this...
burnt in my memory, this, like, huge shark just suddenly approaching her.
She kept still and tried to hide.
Then you just saw the shark swimming on the periphery, picking up her scent.
And I thought, "Oh, no, this is this whole...
nightmare happening again."
[suspenseful music playing]
[tense, propulsive music plays]
She jets up in the canopy,
and she's wrapping many leaves of kelp tightly around her body
and then just peering out.
All the smell's on the kelp,
so the shark's now biting and snapping at the kelp.
She's shot out the back.
[heavy breathing]
She just climbs out over a rock, leaves the water, and I was like...
I just, you know... almost can't believe my eyes.
But the problem is, of course, she's gotta come back.
On the other side, the shark picks up her scent again.
And this crazy chase is on.
[suspenseful music playing]
And then, I see her,
in a very quick movement,
picking up maybe close to 100 shells and stones...
and then folding her arms
over her vulnerable head.
And in that moment,
I realized, "This is this crazy thing I saw...
so long ago."
Next minute, the shark grabs her.
[suspenseful music playing]
But I had to breathe.
Rush to the surface as fast as you can.
Straight back down again.
And it's like, "Okay, now, this is too crazy."
Somehow she's managed to maneuver herself into the least dangerous place,
and that's on the shark's back.
The shark tries to shake her off and is swimming away.
Takes a few seconds to figure out,
"What the hell's going on here?"
But you can immediately tell
she's now got the upper hand.
[mellow music playing]
As the shark goes near some of the thick kelp...
she just pushes off the back...
drops the remaining shells
and jets away.
And the shark, it's just been completely outwitted.
The shark comes, does one pass,
but she's completely safe. There's nothing it can do.
And it leaves.
How she can think that quickly and make those life-and-death decisions,
uh, it's just, yeah, pretty, pretty incredible.
I was around for a good 80 percent of her life.
Each moment is so precious because it's so short.
There was this one incredible day.
A big shoal of dream fish.
Fairly shallow water.
Suddenly, she's...
reaching up for the surface like that.
Initially, I thought...
"She's hunting the fish."
Then I was like, "Hold on.
When she hunts, she's strategic, and she's like...
focused.
This behavior doesn't feel predatory to me."
It took a long time to actually, like, process it.
But I couldn't help thinking,
"She's playing with the fish."
[gentle piano music plays]
You see play often in social animals.
Here's a highly antisocial animal playing with fish.
It takes that animal to a different level.
Oh, then she completely lost interest in the fish,
rushed over...
grabbed hold of me.
And that was the last time we had physical contact.
[thunder rumbling]
If I think back,
and I remember it was a very rough day, very turbulent.
Sediment everywhere.
Go down and whoa,
there's another big octopus right next to her.
It's very, very rare to see two octopus close together.
"Oh, my God, what's going on?"
And then seeing that both animals are pretty relaxed
and realizing, "Okay, and then the mating is beginning."
By this stage, I knew quite well the stages of an octopus's life.
So while I was very excited that this mating was beginning,
there was a sort of...
this dread in the bottom of my stomach.
She wasn't coming out of that den.
There was no more feeding, no more hunting.
A huge part of her body is actually given to those eggs.
So she drops in weight, and she loses an enormous amount of strength.
The eggs are laid right in the back, in the dark.
It's impossible to see them.
I just keep going every day and just check.
She's oxygenating the eggs with her siphon, looking after them.
She's just slowly dying
and timing her death exactly for the hatching of those eggs.
I mean, it struck home so hard for me.
Here's an invertebrate, essentially a mollusk,
sacrificing her own life
for her young.
All those eggs hatched.
They're tiny, and they go into the water column.
Hundreds of thousands of them.
And the next thing I saw, she's washed out the den, barely alive.
[gentle, moving music playing]
And the fish, you know, feeding on her.
A lot of the scavengers coming to feed on her.
It was just heartbreaking.
A part of me just wanted to hold her and chase them away.
But I didn't do that.
The next day...
a big shark came...
and just took her away, you know, into the misty forest.
Often, I go to the place of her main den.
[sighs]
And I just float above it and feel her there.
[choking up] Of course I miss her.
Um...
[sighs]
But, um...
I mean, in some crazy way, it was a relief.
It was a relief, because the intensity of going every day and tracking her, um...
and trying to capture, it was...
It was tough in a way.
I mean, I sort of slept, dreamt...
this animal.
I was... You know, I was...
in my mind, thinking like an octopus.
And... and it was all so taxing, in a way.
Um...
[delicate, reflective music plays]
But underneath that,
this incredible pride for this animal
that's been through impossible odds to get to this place.
I mean, an unimaginable life.
[ethereal vocal music playing]
One of the most exciting things ever in my life, taking my son,
walking along the shore
and just showing him the... the wonders of nature
and the details
and the intricacies.
I was getting so much from the wild, and I could actually now give.
I had so much energy to give back.
He's like a little marine biologist now. He knows so much.
And very powerful swimmer.
And as he gets older, he seems to want to do it more and more.
To see that develop,
a strong sense of himself...
an incredible confidence,
but the most important thing,
a gentleness.
And I think that's the thing
that thousands of hours in nature can teach a child.
A few months later, after she'd died,
he actually found this tiny little octopus.
[gentle piano music playing]
It's very rare to see an animal that small.
They have up to half a million young. A handful survive.
So it's a pretty tough road they have to walk.
But that's their strategy, live fast and die young.
We kind of imagined that it might be one of her young.
It was kind of the right size, the right time.
And it was joyous. It was like, "Well, there she is."
She'd made me realize
just how precious wild places are.
You go into that water...
and it's extremely liberating.
All your...
worries and problems and life drama just dissolve.
You slowly start to care about all the animals,
even the tiniest little animals.
You realize that every one is very important.
To sense how vulnerable these wild animals' lives are,
and actually, then how vulnerable all our lives on this planet are.
My relationship with the sea forest and its creatures deepens...
week after month after year after year.
You're in touch with this wild place, and it's speaking to you.
Its language is visible.
[orchestral music grows]
I fell in love with her
but also with that amazing wildness that she represented
and... and how that changed me.
What she taught me was to feel...
that you're part of this place, not a visitor.
That's a huge difference.
[ethereal vocal music playing]
[gentle piano playing]