The Hippo with Toothache (22 page)

Ollie had survived the early adjustments and lived apparently comfortably in his exhibit for nearly a year before he suddenly stopped eating. He then became listless, tearing at himself and opening the wounds we weren't able to heal. We made a number of advances in octopus medicine while trying to diagnose and treat Ollie, just not enough of them.

In veterinary medicine, blood samples often help us make a diagnosis, and I take pride in being able to get blood from even the most challenging of patients. I had figured out how to draw a blood sample from an octopus using landmarks I noted while dissecting the bodies of the less fortunate earlier animals in our collection. To take a sample from Ollie, one aquarist would hold on to a tentacle and pull it out of the water, while another tried to keep the animal from climbing up
and biting with his strong beak, which is capable of cracking a crab shell with ease. When I inserted a needle directly into the vein supplying the tentacle, I could withdraw several milliliters of clear, slightly bluish blood. In relative terms, getting a blood sample wasn't that hard. Unfortunately, the analyses weren't very informative. No one had published what the blood of a normal giant Pacific octopus should look like. Nor was there any obvious pattern of change in the chemical composition or cell types when comparing the samples taken over the many weeks that Ollie refused to feed.

As his condition deteriorated, I found an article published many years before in the journal
Science
about a smaller species of tropical octopus being used in research. The paper described two large orange glands adjacent to the optic nerves that appeared just as the smaller octopi reached sexual maturity. If the glands were removed surgically, the article reported, the octopi could be induced to live longer and survive the reproductive stage of their lives. When Ollie died, we found those orange glands at the necropsy. We hadn't seen them in any of our earlier animals.

Could surgical removal of those glands save Bertha, or at least extend her life? Normally I'm willing to try radical measures to help a patient in crisis, but I hesitated to perform what amounted to delicate brain surgery on an animal whose illness consisted, so far, of missing a few meals. Besides, I had my own doubts about the supposedly “lethal” nature of the orange optic glands, despite the prestige of the journal
Science
. It seemed unlikely that this large, magnificent, and intelligent animal should be doomed to a single reproductive cycle and then senescent death.

On the other hand, I wasn't going to simply watch and wait. When working with any new species, my instincts tell me it is better to get on the case sooner rather than later. Bertha continued to refuse her crabs and any other tasty treat Doug could find to tempt her. Were her optic glands in fact enlarged? It was time for some creative diagnostic testing like octopus radiography to try to see the glands.

It wouldn't be easy. As far as I knew, no one had ever tried to anesthetize and position a thirty-five-pound water-breathing mass of muscle and intellect for an X-ray. The aquarium's small portable X-ray unit wouldn't be able to penetrate Bertha's body mass and give us the detail we would need to see if the glands were enlarged. That's why having a faculty appointment in the radiology department of a world-class medical school comes in handy. Time to call my friend Elliot and arrange for a CT scan.

Tall and blond, with a bristling mustache and dark-rimmed glasses framing his face, Elliot always seems to be in motion. While nurses and technicians efficiently put his human patients into the CT machine and generate images at a dizzying pace, Elliot choreographs it all and dictates incessantly into his recorder, interpreting the images and making life-impacting diagnoses. He is amazingly skilled but, more important, he is curious, and always makes time for my nonhuman patients. And his CT machine is fast. We would only need to keep Bertha still for a few minutes to collect many images of her.

I had learned a valuable lesson that would help me safely anesthetize Bertha from the wild ambulance return of the not-yet-dead octopus years ago. To protect the expensive CT
equipment, we would anesthetize Bertha lightly, just to the point where she could no longer grab with her eight arms. Then we would put her in a plastic bag with some water, place her in the scanner, and quickly acquire images of her head region. Special software that Elliot and his research team had developed would allow us to reconstruct the images into a three-dimensional view. This would compensate for our inability to position Bertha precisely.

Over a period of nearly thirty minutes, we carefully induced Bertha's anesthesia. Then it was splash, zip, zap, and we had the images. Helping my technicians to extricate Bertha from her bag, I called to Elliot, “What do you see?”

“A bag full of Jell-O with banana slices all through it,” Elliot called out over the intercom.

Sure enough, the CT scanner, which is very good at many things, didn't find enough differences in the density of Bertha's tissues to make useful images. Her powerful, muscular suckers showed up like big slices of bananas against a uniform gray background. Only her strong beak was discernible. We would have to try something else, maybe MRI—magnetic resonance imaging. MRI works on an entirely different principle than X-rays or CT scans, and provides a much better view of soft tissue structures. But it takes longer to make the images, and Bertha could not move during the imaging. Bertha would have to be under anesthesia for a longer time.

The challenges of applying MRI technology to an octopus might have been more intimidating, but for years I had been a member of the research team that was developing better methods of using the big magnets for diagnosing a wide range
of conditions in humans and in animals. I knew the images we could obtain with the equipment would be far better for what we needed to see than CT, but I worried about subjecting Bertha to the longer and deeper anesthesia we would need to get those images. I had hoped the faster CT would do the job. Should we just take Bertha back to the aquarium and watch her behavior? Or should we try to keep her anesthetized in the bag long enough for an MRI?

Blackie, my wiry and very humorous British teammate on the MRI group, made the call. “Aw right now, in she goes, where she stops nobody knows. Just don't spill any water on me magnet.”

Back into the bag went Bertha, this time with a bit more water. Blackie wasn't kidding. Any spill would ruin the multimillion-dollar research instrument. On top of that, the saltwater would dampen the signals in the machine. Luckily, our MRI development team had done something like this before. To improve the image quality for marine creatures, we'd built several special acquisition coils to collect signals from other animals that lived in saltwater. (They don't teach you this stuff in veterinary school!)

Blackie ran the instrument with skill and speed, as always. He initiated the data collection sequence almost before we could set Bertha on the gantry. As soon as we had data from the region between Bertha's eyes where we hoped to see the glands, I had her out of her bag and back in her traveling barrel.

Good news: Bertha hadn't moved, and we'd gotten good images. There were no signs of enlargement along the optic nerves. We could see these structures running from the
backs of her eyes and into her brain. There would be no reason to perform brain surgery on our girl, which made me very happy. The bad news was that we were no closer to understanding why she wasn't eating.

After an uneventful ride back to the aquarium, sans sirens, Bertha, still a bit groggy from her double bag experience, slid into her exhibit and bunched herself up in her broken-crockery hiding spot. A few days later, while we were making our weekly medical rounds past the octopus exhibit, Doug offered Bertha a delectable small blue crab. The crab had barely taken two steps sideways after drifting to the bottom of the exhibit before Bertha unexpectedly zoomed out of her crock, engulfed the crab in her tentacles, and began to feed. We joked that maybe the powerful magnet had realigned her appetite, or that somehow the two anesthesia events had calmed her nerves, but the most likely explanation was that she had managed to get over a mild digestive upset on her own with no help from us. Bertha continued to feed and thrived under Doug's care for almost another year without any signs of rapid senility syndrome. Unfortunately, she eventually died from a rapidly progressing bacterial infection.

The quest to successfully maintain giant octopi and rear them in captivity continues today. Several years after Bertha's adventures, my suspicions were supported by important discoveries made by marine biologists working with these animals in the wild. We now know that their life span is much greater than three years. Scientists continue to conduct interesting research about the lives of giant octopi in the cold waters of the Pacific Northwest. As we learn more about these
fascinating creatures, we find new ways to help them live longer and better lives in captivity, ensuring that they remain a part of our world for a long time to come.

Michael K. Stoskopf is a professor at North Carolina State University. He received his veterinary degree from Colorado State University, earned a PhD in toxicology from Johns Hopkins University, and is a diplomate in the American College of Zoological Medicine. In the course of his varied career, Dr. Stoskopf has run an unusual ambulatory practice in the mountains of Colorado, served as the veterinarian for the Overton Park Zoo in Memphis and the Baltimore Zoo, and taught on the faculty of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He was the founding chief of medicine for the National Aquarium in Baltimore before taking on the challenges of teaching at a veterinary college. He and his wife, Dr. Suzanne Kennedy-Stoskopf, live on a small farm outside Raleigh, North Carolina, where they devote much of their energy to providing the next generation of veterinarians the knowledge and the skills necessary to make the world a better place for wildlife, people, and their domestic animals.

I TRAINED INTENSIVELY
to become a wildlife veterinarian in Africa—something I'd wanted to be for as long as I can remember, back to the time when I was six or seven years old watching (the original) Mutual of Omaha's
Wild Kingdom
. After veterinary school, I had purposely sought out a small animal internship in medicine and surgery in order to help me reinforce the top-notch way of doing everything. I wanted to make sure that when I did find myself out in remote bush someday, I'd be able to extrapolate and do my best with locally available materials.

When the government of Botswana hired me in 1991 to establish the Department of Wildlife and National Parks (DWNP) Wildlife Veterinary Unit, my childhood dream became a reality. At the same time, Botswana increased its
efforts to curtail poaching. A new Anti-Poaching Unit had begun to patrol remote areas of northern Botswana. These long-overdue forays into the bush firmly established that rhinos had for years been slaughtered for their horns. Botswana was on the verge of losing all of its white rhinos—again.

Between 1967 and 1982, South Africa had helped restock Botswana's then poacher-depleted rhino population by translocating ninety-four animals into protected areas in the northern part of the country. Had these rhinos been adequately protected from that time on, there indeed should have been
hundreds
in the wild by the early 1990s. But new surveys revealed evidence of
only seven white rhinos
. Twelve poached carcasses were identified in 1992 alone. By 1993, emergency measures were clearly required.

In an all-out effort, a group of concerned citizens in the large town of Serowe (birthplace of Sir Seretse Khama, the beloved first president of Botswana) established the Khama Rhino Sanctuary in close collaboration with the DWNP. Located in the central part of the country, far from the poaching threat in the north, the locally managed sanctuary would provide the land, staff housing, and care for any rhinos that had to be brought into captivity to protect them. While several of us in the DWNP would provide the logistics support for capture, we didn't have the experience or equipment to carry out such a massive operation alone.

At my urging, the Botswana DWNP asked South Africa's Natal Parks Board Rhino Capture Team to assist us. We had two goals: to save the remaining white rhinos (and any black rhinos we might find), and to train a DWNP team in the challenging art and science of rhino capture and translocation.

The middle of the rainy season is the worst time of the year to be hauling heavy trucks through the bush and mud. Of course, this was when we found three sets of rhino tracks leading to two rhinos—a cow and a calf shot dead by poachers. From the tracks, it looked as if one rhino had gotten away. With little time left to save the country's last wild rhinos, the DWNP's Cessna went out on reconnaissance.

On February 12, a rhino and calf in thick bush were spotted from the plane. The helicopter with the darting team was quickly guided into the area, and the capture trucks headed to a feasible rendezvous point. Radios crackled and tree branches cracked as the ground team rushed to the coordinates called out from the aircraft. Anesthetic darts shot from the helicopter found their marks: a thirty-year-old cow and her nine-month-old calf. The animals were successfully loaded into special rhino crates brought in from South Africa, and transported to the sanctuary
bomas
(pens) in Serowe.