The Valley That Feeds a Nation

How tectonics, sediment, and water created one of the most productive landscapes on Earth.

Aerial view of California’s Central Valley, where Interstate 5 slices through a vast patchwork of irrigated fields, some of the most productive farmland on Earth, shaped by deep alluvial soils and Sierra Nevada snowmelt. (Photo: Erik Olsen)
Would you support us? Just a few bucks. We’d appreciate it!

I love California’s bizarre, complicated geology. For many years, I had a wonderful raised-relief map of the state on my wall made by Hubbard Scientific (it hangs on my son’s bedroom wall today). On the map, color and molded plastic contours reveal the state’s diverse and often startling geological formations. I loved staring at it, touching it, imagining how those landscapes came to be over geologic time.

There is so much going on here geologically compared to almost any other state that geologists often describe California as one of the best natural laboratories on Earth, a place so rich and varied that entire careers have been built trying to understand how all its pieces fit together. As the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) puts it, nearly every major force that shapes the Earth’s crust is visible here, from plate collision and volcanism to basin formation and mountain uplift. Some of my favorite writers, like John McPhee, have described California as a collage of geological fragments, assembled piece by piece over deep time, in a way that more closely resembles an entire continent than a single region.

But when we think about California’s geology, most of us probably imagine the Sierra Nevada’s towering granite peaks, the pent-up force of the San Andreas Fault, or the fact that Lassen Peak is still an active volcano. Those places grab our attention. Yet when it comes to a geological feature that has quietly shaped daily life in California more than almost any other, we should consider the Central Valley, arguably the state’s most important geological masterpiece.

Topographical and irrigation map of the Great Central Valley of California: embracing the Sacramento, San Joaquin, Tulare and Kern Valleys and the bordering foothills (Source: NYPL Digital Collection)

Sure, the valley is flat as a tabletop, stretching out for mile after mile as you drive Interstate 5 or Highway 99 (one of my favorites), but once you consider how it formed and what lies beneath the surface, the Central Valley reveals itself as a truly remarkable place on the planet, another superlative in our state, which, of course, is already full of them.

The Central Valley was formed when tectonic forces lowered a broad swath of California’s crust between the rising Sierra Nevada to the east and the Coast Ranges to the west, creating a long, subsiding basin that slowly filled with sediment eroded from those mountains over millions of years. For thousands of years, the southern end of the valley was dominated by Lake Tulare, a mega-freshwater lake that was once the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi. You might remember that just a few years ago, Lake Tulare briefly reappeared after a series of powerful atmospheric river storms. I went up there and flew my drone because I was working on a story about the construction of California’s long-troubled high-speed rail, which had halted construction because of the new old lake.

Lake Tulare reemerges in the southern San Joaquin Valley after powerful winter storms, flooding roads and farmland and briefly restoring the historic inland lake that once dominated this basin. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

On the other side in the west, the Coast Ranges rise up, hemming in the valley and basically holding it in place, forming something like a gigantic, hundreds-of-miles-long bathtub. One popular Instagrammer commented that it looks as if someone used a huge ice cream scoop to dig out the valley. As the surrounding mountains continued to rise, rain, snowmelt, and wind carried untold tons of silt and sediment downslope, steadily depositing them into this enormous basin over millions of years.

This process created what geologists call the Great Valley Sequence, a staggering accumulation of sedimentary material that, in some western portions of the basin, reaches a depth of 20,000 meters, or approximately 66,000 feet. Ten MILES.

Celebrate California’s wild side with our beautifully illustrated wildlife mugs, featuring the state’s most iconic birds and animals. Visit our store and bring a little piece of California nature to your morning coffee.

This long, slow process produced what geologists call the Great Valley Sequence, an immense stack of sedimentary rock built up over tens of millions of years as the basin steadily subsided and filled. In some western portions of the valley, that accumulated package reaches a depth of 20,000 meters in thickness, about 66,000 feet, or close to ten miles of layered geological history lying beneath the surface. That’s kind of mind-blowing.

Endless rows of pistachio orchards stretch across the Central Valley at dusk, a geometric testament to the deep soils and engineered water systems that have turned this ancient basin into one of the world’s great agricultural landscapes. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

It’s not just “dirt”; it’s a ridiculously deep, nutrient-rich record of California’s geologic history. There are the remains of trillions of diatoms, or microscopic plankton, whose organic remains were crushed into oil shales that are home to significant petroleum deposits. During the late Pleistocene and into the Holocene, the southern end of the valley was dominated by Lake Tulare, mentioned above, a vast freshwater lake that in wet periods spread across 600 to 800 square miles, making it the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi. As the water evaporated and drained, the valley floor became exceptionally flat, similar to what we see today.

Most valleys are narrow corridors carved by a single river, but the Central Valley is a vast, enclosed catchment shaped by many rivers, trapping minerals and sediments from surrounding mountains rather than letting them wash quickly out to sea. This mix created near-ideal conditions for agriculture. For the uninitiated, the Central Valley is typically divided into two major sections: the northern third, known as the Sacramento Valley, and the southern two-thirds, known as the San Joaquin Valley. That lower region can be further broken down into the San Joaquin Basin to the north and the Tulare Basin to the south.

Relief map of California showing the Central Valley standing out as a wide, uninterrupted green swath between the rugged Sierra Nevada and the Coast Ranges, its flat, low-lying basin sharply contrasting with the surrounding mountains that frame and define it.

Today, because of all that fertility, the Central Valley is one of the world’s most productive agricultural regions, growing over 230 different crops. It produces roughly a quarter of the nation’s food by value, supplies about 40 percent of U.S. fruits, nuts, and vegetables, and dominates global markets for crops like almonds, pistachios, strawberries, tomatoes, and table grapes. Truly a global breadbasket.

Of course, none of this would have been possible without water. The real turning point in California’s story was learning how to capture it, move it, and store it. From mountain snowpack to canals and reservoirs, controlling water has been the quiet engine behind much of the state’s success. When human engineering intervened in the 20th century through the Central Valley Project and the State Water Project, it essentially redirected a geological process that was already in place, replacing seasonal floods and ancient lakes with a controlled system of dams and canals.

Roadside cutout farmer holding bright green heads of lettuce at the edge of a Central Valley field, a playful nod to the region’s identity as one of the most productive agricultural landscapes in the world. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

Alas, this productivity is not without geological limits, and we’ve done a pretty good job over-exploiting the valley’s resources, particularly groundwater, to achieve these things. The same porous sediments that store our life-giving groundwater are susceptible to compaction. In parts of the San Joaquin Valley, excessive pumping has caused the land to subside, sinking by as much as 28 feet in some locations, causing the soil to crack and the landscape to physically lower as the water is withdrawn. How we deal with that is a whole other story. Recent storms have helped California’s water supply tremendously, but the state seems destined to remain in a permanently precarious state of drought.

But when you talk geology, you talk deep time. You talk about eons and erosion, mountain ranges that rise and are slowly worn down, sometimes leaving behind something as breathtaking as the granite domes of Yosemite.Against that scale, the Central Valley can seem almost plain, but as I hope I’ve made the case here, when you look a little closer at even the most mundane things, you realize there is magnificence there, and few places on this planet are as magnificent as the state of California.

Would you support us? Just a few bucks. We’d appreciate it!

California’s Daily Tidal Wave of Life

A lobate ctenophore in the ocean twilight zone. (Photo: NOAA)

If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you already know I’m obsessed with submarines and undersea life. I believe we’re at the beginning of a new era of ocean discovery, driven by small personal submersibles, remotely operated vehicles (ROVS), and autonomous explorers (AUVs) that can roam the deep on their own. Add AI into the mix, and our ability to see, map, and understand the ocean is about to expand dramatically.

One phenomenon we are only beginning to fully understand also happens to be one of the most extraordinary animal events on Earth. It unfolds every single night, just a few miles offshore, in a region known as the ocean twilight zone about 650 to 3,300 feet below the ocean surface. Twice a day, billions of tons of marine organisms, from tiny crustaceans to massive schools of squid, traverse the water column in what researchers call the Diel Vertical Migration (DVM), the largest mass migration of animals on Earth. A heaving, planetary-scale pulse of biomass rising and falling through the dark.

Please check out our California wildlife shop for great gifts!

It happens everywhere, in every ocean. But California is special for several reasons. California’s cold, southward-flowing current and seasonal upwelling flood coastal waters with nutrients that feed dense plankton blooms. These blooms provide food for thick layers of migrating animals. California has one of the most robust and productive ocean ecosystems on the planet. (Take a read of the piece I did about life on some of our oil rigs.) When you add Monterey Canyon into the mix, which funnels and concentrates life, this global phenomenon becomes more compressed and visible. In fact, with Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) based at Moss Landing near the head of the canyon, Monterey Bay has become one of the most intensively studied midwater ecosystems on the planet.

Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) in Moss Landing, perched at the edge of Monterey Canyon, one of the deepest submarine canyons in North America. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

This “tidal cycle of shifting biomass” is not driven by gravity, but by the rising and setting sun. Animals rise by the trillions during the evening to escape predation, then settle during the day, when light would otherwise make them visible to hungry predators.

The discovery of this phenomenon reads like a Tom Clancy novel and took place just off our coast. During World War II, U.S. Navy sonar operators working off San Diego and the Southern California Bight began detecting what looked like a “false seafloor” hovering 300 to 500 meters down during the day, only to sink or vanish each night. The mystery lingered for years, until the late 1940s, when scientist Martin Johnson and others at Scripps Institution of Oceanography showed that the phantom bottom was not seafloor, but vast layers of living animals rising and falling with the sun. We now know this as the Deep Scattering Layer (DSL), so named because the gas-filled swim bladders of millions of small fish, primarily lanternfish which number into the quadrillions around the globe, reflect sonar pings like a solid wall.

The deep-scattering layer (DSL) graphed as an echogram, or a plot of active acoustic data. Warmer colors indicate more backscatter, meaning that more (or stronger) echoes were received back from the organisms at that depth. The red line indicates the remotely operated vehicle (ROV) trajectory as it performs transects throughout the layer. (Source: NOAA)

So let’s talk about those amazing lanternfish, aka myctophids, a species that many peole have likely never heard of. These small fish may make up as much as 65 percent of all deep-sea fish biomass and are a major food source for whales, dolphins, salmon, and squid. They use tiny light organs called photophores to match faint surface light, a camouflage strategy known as counterillumination that helps hide them from predators below. These are just one of the many different species that inhabit the twilight zone as part of the DVM. 

A lanternfish photographed in the ocean twilight zone, its body dotted with tiny light organs called photophores that help it blend into faint surface light as it migrates toward the surface at night. (Photo: NOAA)

Monterey Bay is arguably the world’s most important laboratory for DVM research, thanks to the Monterey Canyon, and several ground-breaking discoveries have come out of MBARI. For example, scientists at MBARI, including the legendary Bruce Robison, have used ROVs to document what they call “running the gauntlet,” when these migrators pass through layers of hungry, waiting predators. They encounter giant siphonophores with stinging tentacles, squids snag lanternfish, and giant larvaceans that build sprawling mucus “houses” that trap smaller animals. It’s like an epic battle scene out of Lord of the Rings, every single day.

This migration is also a key part of the ocean’s carbon cycle, which includes a scientific process known as the biological pump. When larger animals eat carbon-rich plankton at the surface, they eventually defecate all that carbon into the water, aka the “active transport” mechanism. Much of that carbon sinks to the bottom, sequestering it for decades or even centuries. In some regions, DVM accounts for one-third of the total carbon transport to the deep ocean. MBARI has a very interesting, long-term deep-ocean observatory called the Station M research site and observatory located nearly 12,000 feet below the surface off Santa Barbara. This site has been continuously monitored for more than three decades to track how organic matter produced near the surface eventually reaches the abyssal seafloor and feeds deep communities. I did a video about it for MBARI a few years ago.

Deployment of Mesobot, an autonomous midwater robot developed by Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, for exploration of the ocean twilight zone above Monterey Canyon, California. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

Other cutting-edge technology is being brought to bear as well to help us better understand what life exists in the deep waters off California. A UC San Diego study shows that we can now use low-volume environmental DNA (eDNA) to detect the genetic signatures of huge numbers of different animals, even if we can’t see them. This free-floating DNA moves with ocean currents and can be sequenced to identify species ranging from copepods to dolphins, allowing researchers to track who is participating in the migration even when organisms are too small, fragile, or fast for traditional nets.

All of this plays out each day and night off our coast, a vast symphony of animal movement and deadly combat that, until recently, was not only poorly understood but largely invisible to science. And it’s all happening right off our shores

Thanks for reading Was it worth a buck or two? If so, click here.

Measuring the Earth’s Tremors and the Development of the Richter Scale

Support California Curated with a small donation.
Seismometer measuring earthquake impact.

We all know California is known for earthquakes. AND most people probably know there’s a reason for that: California lies along the Pacific Ring of Fire, and it also sits at the boundary between the Pacific and North American tectonic plates, creating the San Andreas Fault and making it especially prone to seismic shaking. Even if you’ve lived here for just a short while, the chances are you’ve felt a tremble or two.

Of course, the biggest earthquake most people are aware of in California was the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, which shook the city hard and led to a massive, all-consuming fire that together destroyed more than 28,000 buildings, killed an estimated 3,000 people, left roughly a quarter million residents homeless, and reshaped the city’s development and building practices for decades afterward. (Here’s a story about one particularly important building). One of my favorite books on the subject is Simon Winchester’s Crack at the Edge of the World, which is filled with wonderful facts and stories about California’s precarious geology and what happened that day in San Francisco.

More recent events continue to underscore the ever-present threat of significant temblors. In December 2024, a 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast near Eureka, prompting tsunami warnings and evacuations. More recently, in March 2025, the Bay Area experienced a series of minor tremors along the Hayward Fault. While these quakes caused minimal damage, there is always the looming threat of ‘The Big One’, a potentially catastrophic earthquake expected along the San Andreas Fault, well, any day now . Scientists warn that the southern section, overdue for a major rupture, could trigger widespread destruction, with estimates suggesting a magnitude 7.8 event could result in “significant casualties and economic losses”.

Damage to Interstate 880 in Oakland, CA, after it collapsed during the Loma Prieta earthquake In October 1989.
(Photo: Paul Sakuma/AP)

But what about that number, 7.8? Where does it actually come from, and what does it mean?

When we talk about measuring earthquakes: their size, their energy, their destructive potential, most of us still instinctively think of the Richter scale. It’s now shorthand for seismic strength, although, ironically, scientists today rely on other, more modern magnitude systems. We’ll get to that shortly. But the Richter scale remains one of the most influential ideas in the history of earthquake science.

The story of how it came to exist starts in a lab at a world-renowned scientific institution in Pasadena: the California Institute of Technology (CalTech). It begins with a physicist named Charles Richter.

In 1935, working with German-born seismologist Beno Gutenberg, Richter laid the groundwork for modern earthquake study and quantification. Their breakthrough work helped transform vague and subjective observations into precise, quantifiable data. Scientists could now better assess seismic risk and ultimately help protect lives and infrastructure. So the effort not only changed how we understand earthquakes, it laid the foundation for future advances in seismic prediction and preparedness.

Charles Richter studies a seismograph log that records the earth’s movements.
(Credit: Wikipedia and Gil Cooper, Los Angeles Times)

At the time, existing intensity-based earthquake measurements relied on subjective observations and the so-called the Mercalli Intensity Scale. That means that an earthquake’s severity was determined by visible damage and how people felt them. So, for example, a small earthquake near a city might appear “stronger” than a larger earthquake in a remote area simply because it was felt by more people and caused more visible damage. For example, the 1857 Fort Tejon earthquake, estimated around magnitude 7.9, ruptured hundreds of miles of the San Andreas Fault, but because it struck a sparsely populated stretch of desert and ranch land, it caused relatively little recorded damage and few deaths.

Like any good scientist, Richter wanted to create a precise, instrumental method to measure earthquake magnitude. He and Gutenberg designed the Richter scale by studying seismic wave amplitudes recorded on Wood-Anderson torsion seismometers, an instrument developed in the 1920s to detect horizontal ground movement. Using a base-10 logarithmic function, they developed a system where each whole number increase represented a tenfold increase in amplitude and roughly 31 times more energy release. This allowed them to compress a wide range of earthquake sizes into a manageable, readable scale. So, for example, a magnitude 6 quake shakes the ground 10× more than a magnitude 5. Also, a magnitude 7 quake releases about 1,000× more energy than a magnitude 5 (i.e. 31.6 × 31.6 ≈ 1,000).

How the Richter Magnitude Scale of Earthquakes is determined from a seismograph. (Credit: Benjamin J. Burger)

The innovation allowed scientists to compare earthquakes across different locations and time periods, significantly improving seismic measurement and research.

Once the Richter scale came into being, it not only changed how scientists described earthquakes, it changed how we all thought about them. Earthquakes were no longer defined only by damage or casualties, but by a single, authoritative number. And so by the 1960s and 1970s, “the Richter scale” had become standard language in news reports and scientific writing. Even today, long after researchers have moved to newer magnitude systems, you still occasionally see it in news reports.

Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Map (https://databasin.org)

The Richter Scale, and Richter himself, became so well known on campus, that one of Caltech’s great comic writers and performers, J. Kent Clark, actually wrote a song about them:

“When the first shock hit the seismo, everything worked fine. It measured:

One, two, on the Richter scale, a shabby little shiver.

One, two, on the Richter scale, a queasy little quiver.

Waves brushed the seismograph as if a fly had flicked her.

One, two, on the Richter scale, it hardly woke up Richter.”

Alas, Richter, according to Clark, was so “morbidly shy” that he never showed up to any of the performances. At first, he didn’t like the song, reportedly calling it an “insult to science”, but later in life he came to appreciate its good humor. There’s a YouTube reading of the song here.

Unfortunately for Richter, over time it became clear that the Richter scale had a fundamental flaw: it couldn’t measure the largest earthquakes accurately. Because it relies on seismic wave amplitude, very powerful quakes tend to “saturate” on the scale, making different events appear similar in size.

Since the 70s scientists have come up with another way to measure earthquakes called the Moment Magnitude Scale. Developed by Hiroo Kanamori and Thomas Hanks the Moment Magnitude Scale calculates how much energy an earthquake actually releases by examining the size of the fault that slipped, how far it moved, and the physical properties of the surrounding rock. The method works reliably for both small tremors and the planet’s largest earthquakes, which the original Richter scale struggled to do.

A striking view of the Palmdale roadcut, showcasing layers of exposed rock that tell the geological story of Southern California. Located just a short distance from the San Andreas Fault, this site provides a vivid snapshot of tectonic activity, where Earth’s shifting plates have shaped the landscape dramatically over millions of years. (Credit: Erik Olsen)

Of course, neither the Richter scale nor the Moment Magnitude Scale have done much to help us actually predict earthquakes. That remains an elusive dream. That said, ShakeAlert, the state’s early-warning system, doesn’t predict quakes, but it can detect them as they begin and send alerts before the worst shaking arrives. Those seconds can be enough to drop to the ground, slow trains, or shut down sensitive systems. The system has also had misfires and missed alerts, so we’re not there yet.

Dr. Lucy Jones, who helped champion early earthquake warning in California, has said that ShakeAlert usually works exactly as intended. It is “tuned” to avoid sending alerts for minor shaking, because otherwise people would be getting notifications all the time, creating a kind of Chicken Little problem where warnings start to lose their impact.

According to experts involved with the system, ShakeAlert is designed to send alerts for earthquakes in L.A. County with a magnitude of at least 5.0, or for quakes anywhere that are strong enough to produce “light” shaking in the Los Angeles area. But according to news reports, that sometimes leaves people feeling disappointed or confused. During the 2019 Ridgecrest quakes, for example, Los Angeles didn’t receive a public alert because the shaking there was below the warning threshold, although many people felt it. Jones has said the real challenge isn’t just the technology, but making sure alerts are communicated in a way people understand and trust.

If there is ever a “Big One,” and scientists say it’s a matter of time, we can only hope we’ll get even a small amount of early notice.

Support California Curated with a small donation.

When Muybridge Made Motion Visible in Palo Alto

Eadweard Muybridge’s ‘Animal Locomotion’ was the first scientific study to use photography. Now, more than 130 years later, Muybridge’s work is seen as both an innovation in photography and the science of movement.

Eadweard Muybridge, detail of ‘Bouquet’, Galloping, 1887. (Source: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands)
Would you support us? Just a few bucks. We’d appreciate it!

I love digging into California’s technological past. Long before Silicon Valley became the engine we think of today, the state was already a proving ground for industrial innovation. Oil, agriculture, mining, and, perhaps not surprisingly, but significantly for us here, cinema. But I’m not talking about the 1930s or 1950s, not even the 20th century. The technological roots of the movie industry in California go back much further, to a dusty track in Palo Alto.

It was the summer of 1878, and a horse was caught doing something humans had argued over for centuries. For a fraction of a second, all four of its hooves left the ground at once. Not in the way painters had long imagined, legs flung forward and back in an airborne sprawl, but gathered neatly beneath the body. That brief, invisible instant, preserved by a camera, helped give birth to cinema and changed how scientists would come to understand motion in living things.

Let me explain. 

This is how painters used to depict horses at full gallop, with legs spread out above the ground. Derby at Epsom by Théodore Géricault, 1821, oil on canvas, 92 x 116 cm (Musée du Louvre)

The horse was a Thoroughbred mare named Sallie Gardner. The man who wanted the answer was Leland Stanford, a railroad magnate and former California governor. He would, of course, go on to lend his name to one of the great educational institutions in history. But before that, Stanford was fixated on a practical problem. As a serious horse breeder, racer, and betting guy, he wanted to know whether a galloping horse ever had all four hooves off the ground at once. It was a question with real implications for training, speed, injury, and breeding at a time when elite horse racing was big business. 

Artists had painted images of horses at full gallop for centuries, and they often had the horse fully splayed out above the ground. You’ve probably seen those paintings in wealthy people’s homes or at your local country club. Or maybe not. Anyway, it turns out that the gallop is too fast, and beyond the capabilities of human. Stanford wanted the answer, and Muybridge accepted his offer to find out using pioneering new technology. 

Eadweard Muybridge, The Horse in Motion (“Sallie Gardner,” 1878. (Source: Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.)

Muybridge had been into cameras for a long time. He first drew attention in 1868 for his large historical photographs of Yosemite Valley, California, well before Ansel Adams, who did not begin photographing Yosemite seriously until the 1920s. 

In the case of horse motion, Muybridge’s solution was not a single camera; it was more of an elaborate system. At Stanford’s Palo Alto Stock Farm, which would become Stanford University, he set up a line of cameras along a track, each one triggered by a trip wire as Sallie Gardner ran past. The result was not a blur, but a sequence of sharp, discrete instants, time broken into measurable slices. Muybridge’s images revealed something unexpected: The horse does leave the ground, but not when its legs are fully stretched. The airborne moment comes when the legs are tucked beneath the body, a moment that the human eye hadn’t seen before.

What Muybridge actually demonstrated was that motion itself could be turned into evidence. The camera was no longer just a tool for portraits or landscapes. It became a machine for understanding reality.

Muybridge in 1899 (Wikipedia)

I guess you could say in a way that Sallie Gardner really was something like the world’s first movie star, though they didn’t call it that. The photographs did show motion on screen, per se, but they allowed you to see movement in stages. Within a year, Muybridge developed the zoopraxiscope, a projection device that animated sequences of motion using images painted or printed on rotating glass discs, often derived from his photographs. 

It wasn’t a modern movie projector, and it didn’t project photographic film in the way later cinema would. But it was among the first devices to project moving images to public audiences, establishing the visual logic that cinema would later put to use. It is believed that the device was one of the primary inspirations for Thomas Edison and William Kennedy Dickson‘s Kinetoscope, the first commercial film exhibition system.

The zoopraxiscope disc, circa 1893 by Eadweard Muybridge, considered an important predecessor of the movie projector.

So, key to the effort was not only that Muybridge kind of overturned centuries of artistic convention, but he also, in a way, laid out the basic grammar of cinema: break time into frames, control the shutter, sequence the images, then reassemble them into motion. Hollywood would later industrialize all of this in Southern California, though the first experiment took place in Northern California.

Muybridge’s technological advances mattered as much as his images (he would go on to do many other animals including humans). He pushed shutter speeds and synchronized multiple cameras. These were a few of the problems early filmmakers confronted decades later. Long before movie studios, California was already solving the physics of film.

Plate from ‘Animal Locomotion’ Series, 1887 (by Eadweard Muybridge)

There was also a scientific payoff. Muybridge’s sequences transformed the study of animal locomotion. For the first time, biologists and physiologists could see how bodies actually moved, not how they appeared to move. A gait could be compared with another, giving insight into biomechanics. 

Scientists, particularly those in Europe took notice. Physiologists such as Étienne-Jules Marey built on Muybridge’s work, dropping poor cats upside down and making motion photography into a formal tool for studying living systems. It was a way for biology to see life in a new way.

Falling Cat by Étienne-Jules Marey

Of course, today, moving imagery is essential to understanding how bodies move because motion is often too fast and complex for the naked eye. High-speed video and motion capture are used to analyze animal locomotion, study human gait and injury, improve athletic performance, and reveal behaviors in wildlife that would otherwise be invisible. Several institutions in California have been harnessing this power for years. Caltech researchers use high-speed video to fundamentally revise how scientists understand insect flight. Stanford’s Neuromuscular Biomechanics Lab identifies abnormal walking patterns in children, helping, for example, kids with cerebral palsy. At Scripps Institution of Oceanography, scientists found that fish use nearly twice as much energy hovering as they do resting, contradicting previous assumptions.

Hollywood would later perfect illusion, narrative, glamour, let alone bring digital technology to bear to give us aliens and dinosaurs, but it started in Palo Alto with a horse named Sallie Gardner, and yes, a rich guy and a curious, talented inventor. Muybridge went on to produce over 100,000 images of animals and humans in motion between 1884 and 1886.

There is a plaque that marks the site of Muybridge’s experiments. It’s California Historical Landmark No. 834, located at Stanford University on Campus Drive West, near the golf driving range. You might walk past it without knowing. But you could argue that this is one of those nondescript places where movie-making began. And of course, it happened here in California.  

Would you support us? Just a few bucks. We’d appreciate it!

Recommended California Science & Nature Videos

Today’s newsletter is a little different. Instead of one big story focused on a single topic, I put together a short list of some of my favorite California science and nature videos. I keep a long, slightly chaotic bookmark folder of things I come across online and save for later, often pulling ideas from it when I am stuck or just need a spark.

As a long-time nonfiction video producer, there are a few things I always look for when I watch a video story. First and most simply: did I learn something? It sounds obvious, but it’s also kind of rare. If a video teaches me a new idea, fact, or helps me see the world differently, I’ll often bookmark it. Then, since I shoot and edit myself, I look for production value. There are so many approaches now, from lavish documentaries with gimbals, sliders, drones, and RED cameras, to clean explainers built entirely out of motion graphics. Some people go in the opposite direction and keep things crude and minimal, and sometimes that works, too, as you’ll see in one of my recs below. Getting both the substance and the storytelling right is difficult, and only a small fraction of what I watch pulls it off.

All of this is to say that California is overflowing with incredible science and nature stories, many of which are perfectly suited to video. I have been back here for nearly a decade after working as a video producer in Berlin and NYC, and I was born and raised in California to begin with. Even so, I feel like I have barely scratched the surface and new stories emerge every day. (One documentary I am looking forward to is Out of Plain Sight, a film about the long-hidden dumping of chemical waste off the coast near Catalina Island and the slow, unsettling process of uncovering what was left behind on the seafloor, but it has not yet come to streaming.)

So today I am turning things over to a few people who, in my view, have done an excellent job telling stories of discovery, curiosity, and place in California, and doing it through video in a way that works well.

I hope they spark the same sense of wonder in you as they did for me!

The Farthest – PBS and Crossing the Line Productions

The Farthest is one of those rare science documentaries that nails both of the things I mention above almost perfectly. It tells the story of the Voyager missions, the tiny spacecraft launched in the 1970s that are still traveling through interstellar space today, carrying with them a record of who we are/were (remember the golden records?) and an example of humanity’s aspirations to understand not just nearby planets, but what lies beyond them. Much of the film unfolds at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, one of those quietly extraordinary places in California where we bring to bear science and technology to hurtle past the limits of the known world. I have visited several times, and, in fact, it’s quite close to my home. The documentary is thoughtful, beautifully produced, and deeply nourishing in the best sense. It leaves you with a feeling of awe, not just at the vastness and mystery of the universe, but at the human curiosity, innovation and persistence that help us understand our place within it. I loved it and have gone back to watch parts of it a few times.

Wolves v California – Source: The California Department of Fish and Wildlife / Independent Documentary 

This is a gripping look at an important conservation story that many people are probably unaware of: the return of gray wolves to California after nearly a century of absence (spoiler: we were not nice to them). The documentary is interesting because it examines the history of wolves in the region, but also the human side: the tension and the hope shared by ranchers, scientists, and environmentalists. It’s well-shot and explores how a top predator’s presence can reshape an entire ecosystem and what “coexistence” looks like in the 21st century.

JPL and the Space Age (16 episodes) – Source: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) 

As I mentioned above, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is one of the most important scientific institutions in the world, and is nestled in the foothills of Los Angeles near the Arroyo Seco in La Canada Flintridge. The breadth of work that goes on there is mind-blowing, and the place uniquely deserves its own documentary series. And so, Voila!  

Produced by JPL itself and the legendary Emmy Award-winning documentarian Blaine Baggett, it uses rare archival footage to document the early, high-stakes days of space exploration. There are a lot of episodes and some are better than others. You can start with the first one about the origin story of JPL, or perhaps better, watch the one on Mars. Depending on your specific interests in space exploration you will probably find cool tidbits in all of them. Spread them out, watch one while eating lunch or in your downtime. The series is fascinating because it conveys the incredible ingenuity and the “fail-fast” mentality of engineers in La Canada and Pasadena (CalTech) who have turned science fiction into reality. It’s as much a human drama as it is a strict science documentary.

This Toxic, Drying U.S. Lake Could Turn Into the ‘Saudi Arabia of Lithium’ – Source: The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) 

The Wall Street Journal provides a sharp, investigative look at the Salton Sea, a place often associated with environmental disaster, that may now hold the key to the green energy revolution. (Spoiler…or maybe not: we’re going to need a LOT of lithium). The story of how the Salton Sea came to be is kind of bizarre. The doc explains how “white gold” (lithium) extracted from geothermal brine could transform the U.S. battery supply chain, making it essential viewing for anyone interested in the intersection of climate change and global business, and California is once again a key player. It is also nicely shot and produced, providing a powerful sense of the desolation and weird beauty of the place. 

Lost LA: Wild L.A. – Source: KCET / PBS 

“Lost LA” is an excellent series for understanding the layers of history beneath our feet, even deep history. This specific episode on “Wild L.A.” is a particularly interesting to me because it reminds us that Los Angeles was not always a sprawling concrete jungle. I’ve written a few pieces on LA’s distant past, and am always fascinated by the diverse flora and fauna that used to live here. All sorts of crazy animals. The video explores how the city was built over incredibly diverse ecosystems and how wildlife like mountain lions and hawks still cruise around this urban sprawl. The production quality is also top-notch, blending expert interviews with narrative visuals that let you see the city in a new light.

Fire Among Giants: What Happened after the Redwoods Burned?  – Source: Parks California / Save the Redwoods League 

After the devastating wildfires of recent years, many wondered if our ancient giants, like the redwoods and sequoia, would survive (check out our story on them). This video provides a scientific, but also emotional, look at what’s at stake. If you’ve ever visited either of these superlative trees in California, as I have (I’ve even climbed one of the largest sequoias in the world), it’s mind-blowing to think that after all the time they’ve lived, humans could be the cause of their demise (or maybe not). That said, it’s a great watch because it focuses on resilience; it shows the fascinating ways redwoods have evolved to live with fire. The footage of new green growth sprouting from blackened trunks is moving, hopeful, and provides a necessary perspective on the regenerative power of California’s most iconic forests.

EARTH FOCUS: San Clemente Island – Source: Link TV / Earth Focus 

We kind of ripped this one off for a recent article and video we did, but I am posting it anyway because it’s far more comprehensive than ours. The video, part of another PBS SoCal series called Earth Focus (many of them are quite good), is a rare look at a place most people will never get to visit. 

San Clemente Island is owned by the U.S. Navy, but as this documentary reveals, it’s also a laboratory for some of the most successful conservation work in the country. The video is intriguing because it shows the surprising partnership between the military and biologists to save species found nowhere else on earth. It’s a study of island biogeography, “accidental” wilderness and the high-tech methods used to track island ecology.

More Than Just Parks – Death Valley, Joshua Tree, and the Redwood – Source: The Pattiz Brothers 

If you are looking for pure, cinematic escapism, this is good. These are three separate videos from a pair of filmmakers called The Pattiz Brothers. The brothers are masters of time-lapse photography and 4K cinematography. These aren’t traditional documentaries, heavy with narration; instead, they are lyrical, visual poems that capture the light, movement, and scale of California’s National Parks like Death Valley, Joshua Tree, and the Redwoods. They are perfect for relaxing and appreciating the physical beauty of our state’s diverse terrain. The soundtrack is great, too, but you could honestly just put these up on the TV in a loop and chill to them. 

Listers – Source: Independent Film / Nature Culture 

While not California-focused, I consider this one of the best documentaries I watched last year, and it’s got a nice section on California birds. Also, as a full-length doc, as opposed to the other shorter vids listed here, it’s free and not on some streaming service. 

“Listers” takes you inside the quirky, obsessive, and high-energy world of competitive birdwatching. The guys behind it are hilarious: two stoner wannabe birders who cross the country to win the American Birding Association Big Year, chasing rare sightings, blowing their savings, and slowly realizing that the real prize isn’t the trophy but the strange subculture, friendships, and birds they fall in love with along the way. It’s a great watch because it explores the “why” behind the hobby: why people spend thousands of hours and miles to check a specific bird off a list. And unlike many of the other videos I’ve mentioned here, production values are not high. The pair shot most of the film using a comsumer-grade camcorder, but that rawness lends the film a personal, low-tech quality that actually works really well.

Ok, that’s it. I hope this gave you a few good ideas for things to watch in your spare time and a reminder of the unmatched diversity, curiosity, and sense of wonder wrapped up in California and its natural world. I am constantly adding to my bookmarks as I watch, so I may do another list like this down the road. As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words, and video is just thirty of them every second. Let me know in the comments if anything here really stuck with you, or if you have your own favorite California-focused videos to recommend.

Ancient and Poisonous Cycads Are the Prehistoric Plants of Southern California

Cycad at Descanso Gardens in La Canada Flintridge. (Photo: Erik Olsen)
Would you support us? Just a few bucks. We’d appreciate it!

If there’s one thing our increasingly digital world has pushed me toward, it’s a desire to reconnect with the natural one. At a moment when AI, deepfakes, and synthetic media blur the line between real and artificial, I find myself drawn more strongly to things that are undeniably, stubbornly real. So I spend a lot of time turning away from screens and paying closer attention to the world around me, searching for things in nature that are touchable, tangible, and timeless.

It turns out California is full of those opportunities, and I want to call your attention to just one: a plant.

Thermal image of a male cone of the cycad Zamia furfuracea during pollen release. (Photo by Wendy Valencia-Montoya)

The New York Times ran a fascinating piece recently about a type of plant that is both ancient and highly unusual, and one that I suspect most people know very little about: cycads. Many cycads resemble palm trees at first glance, but that’s misleading. Cycads are only distantly related to palms, belonging instead to one of the oldest surviving lineages of seed plants on Earth, the gymnosperms. Palms, by contrast, are angiosperms, or flowering plants, making them evolutionary newcomers compared to cycads, which were already thriving long before flowers existed at all. In fact, cycads and palms diverged from a common ancestor approximately 300 to 350 million years ago. Their apparent similarity in form is not a sign of close kinship but a classic case of convergent evolution, in which unrelated organisms independently arrived at a similar form because of adaptation in similar environments. 

Cycad cone (Dioon edule) at Descanso Gardens. Built for an ancient world: Cycad cones are among the largest and oldest seed structures on Earth, evolving long before the first flower bloomed. Their rugged design helped cycads thrive alongside dinosaurs — and survive into the modern day. (Erik Olsen)

I have always found cycads really cool, in part because they are some of the closest living things we have to connect us to the era of the dinosaurs, and because they just look — and feel — incredibly bizarre compared to most other plants. And the Times piece made clear that we are still actively learning how they work, which I find fascinating. 

The Times piece explains that cycads attract insect pollinators not through color or flowers, but by heating their cones at dusk and emitting infrared radiation. The process is known as thermogenesis and its rare in plants. (It turns out the female Skunk Cabbage, for example, warms up to melt away snow in the winter.) Specialized beetles, equipped with infrared-sensing antennae, detect this warmth and are guided from male cones to female cones (more on this in a sec) in a precisely timed sequence that ensures pollination. The relationship is so ancient, stretching back hundreds of millions of years, that some researchers now suspect heat-based signaling may lie at the very foundation of pollination, long before flowers evolved petals, color, and scent. However, this is controversial.

A Zamia cycad, one of roughly 66 cycad species growing at Descanso Gardens. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

Fascinating, right? That’s just the beginning. 

My interest in cycads grew out of the many visits I have made to two major botanical gardens in Southern California that I return to again and again: Descanso Gardens and the Huntington. While The Huntington features a world-renowned, massive scientific collection of over 1,500 plants sprawling across a specialized hillside Cycad Walk, Descanso Gardens offers a boutique, immersive “Ancient Forest” experience that replicates a prehistoric Jurassic environment beneath a canopy of redwoods. Both are really excellent to walk through. And these collections, unlike most museum encounters you might encounter with ancient life (i.e. dinosaur bones), consist of live plants you can actually walk among and touch. 

Cycad leaves are thick and very rigid, much different from most other plants. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

One of the most remarkable features of cycads is the toughness of their leaves. They are much stiffer and heavier than other plants. Almost plastic and fake. It turns out cycads invest in a thick, waxy cuticle that has some key benefits: it reduces water loss, reflects harsh sunlight, and protects them against insects and grazing animals. In other words, they are both survivors and a difficult meal, offering a key evolutionary advantage during a time when giant plant-eating dinosaurs roamed the Earth. 

(That said, there is evidence that some dinosaurs actually did feed on cycads. There are telltale signs of cycad cellular material in dinosaur coprolites, or fossilized poop, but scientists don’t think it was common.) 

And then there are the cones. 

A cycad in full cone, displaying one of the largest and most unusual reproductive structures in the plant world. These massive cones can weigh many pounds, grow for months or even years, and play an active role in pollination, sometimes heating up and releasing strong odors to attract specialized insects. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

Cycad cones are among the strangest reproductive structures in the plant world. They are often massive, sometimes weighing many pounds, tightly packed, and so symmetrical they look almost engineered, as if they were 3D printed. They are also unusual because each individual cycad plant is strictly male or female, a condition known as dioecy. A male cycad will only ever produce pollen-bearing cones, while a female will only produce seed-bearing cones. Pines and firs, which are also gymnosperms, typically produce both male and female cones on the same plant. Cycads do not. There is no overlap between the sexes, no ability to self-fertilize, and no natural fallback mechanism if a partner is missing. (Cycads can be “bred” using off-shoots or pups, which is how many of the plants in these gardens came to be.)

That odd rigidity is on display at The Huntington in San Marino, which has one of the earth’s few specimens of Encephalartos woodii, often called “the loneliest plant in the world”. Only a single wild male was ever found, in South Africa in the late 1800s, and no female has ever been discovered (although scientists are using drones and AI to find one). There are a few other specimens alive today outside the Huntington, but they are all clones propagated from that one original plant. There’s a great Instagram from the Huntington on this.

Male cones of Encephalartos woodii at the Huntington (Photo: The Huntington)

So, the male cycad cones produce pollen and the female cycads make seeds. In several species of cycad, those seeds are big and glossy and plump and bright red or orange. They look temptingly like fruit, although remember that true fruits didn’t evolve until much later, with flowering plants. They do have a fleshy outer layer called a sarcotesta that looks and feels fruit-like, but it’s not. That’s weird. 

In another bizarre twist, those seeds are loaded with potent toxins that are very dangerous to animals, including humans. They can damage the liver and the nervous system, and even kill. (So even though I urged you to touch the leaves, maybe don’t handle the seeds…or at least wash your hands afterwards, and certainly don’t try to cook and eat them.) 

Cycad with large cone at Descanso Gardens in La Canada Flintridge. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

Why make a seed dressed in bright, attractive colors if it’s toxic? That question has long puzzled scientists. Bright colors usually signal an edible reward, but in cycads the fleshy outer layer of the seed, the sarcotesta, is not toxic and does contain nutrients. The toxins are concentrated deeper inside the seed, suggesting the sarcotesta may have served as a non-fruit mechanism for seed dispersal, encouraging animals to handle or partially consume the seed while the embryo itself remained protected.

Awesome California wildlife merch on our Etsy store.

Cycads are not indigenous to California. In nature, they are found almost entirely in tropical and subtropical regions, growing in parts of Africa, Australia, Asia, and the Americas, often in warm, stable landscapes that long predate California’s modern climate. That said, Southern California turns out to be an unusually good place to grow cycads. We have mild winters, dry summers, and a long growing season, which mimic the conditions in which cycads evolved across Africa, Australia, and parts of the Americas. That made the region attractive to collectors early on in the 20th century, when botanical gardens were expanding their missions from display to preservation.

“We are in a actually in a biodiversity hot spot here in California,” Sean C. Lahmeyer Associate Director, Botanical Collections, Conservation and Research at the Huntington told me. “Because of our climate in California we’re able to grow so many different types of plants. If you were to compare this garden to, say, one in England or at Kew, they have to grow things inside of greenhouses.”

A cycad in the genus Dioon, an ancient seed plant often mistaken for a palm. Its stiff, feather-like leaves and armored trunk reflect a lineage that dates back more than 250 million years, long before flowers. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

At The Huntington, cycads arrived largely through early plant collecting and exchange. Henry Huntington’s gardeners were building a world-class botanical collection at the same time as explorers and botanists were (controversially) bringing rare plants back from around the globe. Over decades, the Huntington expanded its cycad holdings, recognizing both their horticultural appeal and their scientific importance. Today, it houses one of the most significant cycad collections anywhere, including that famous Encephalartos woodii.

Descanso Gardens’ story, meanwhile, is more personal and more recent. In 2014, local residents in La Canada Flintridge, Katia and Frederick Elsea donated their private cycad collection, more than 180 plants representing dozens of species, to the garden. Many were rare, endangered, or extinct in the wild. Descanso said yes, of course, and built the Ancient Forest around them, and suddenly one of the most important cycad collections in the country was open to the public in La Cañada Flintridge. 

A mature cycad, its trunk layered with old leaf bases and topped by a crown of stiff, palm-like fronds. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

Cycads are not all rare. You may even notice certain common specimens growing in people’s yards around California. But precisely because they are so ancient and so different from most plants we’re used to, I’d urge you to see them in person at places like Descanso Gardens and The Huntington. Touch the leaves. Study the symmetry. Marvel at the massive cones. (Just don’t put anything in your mouth.) Take a moment to consider just how unusual these plants are. And if you feel the need to pull out your phone to learn more, go ahead, but then put it away and spend a little time with the plants themselves.

Would you support us? Just a few bucks. We’d appreciate it!

California’s Two-Spot Octopus is the Alien Mind Off Shore

Would you support us? Just a few bucks. We’d appreciate it!

I have a deep passion for octopuses. I have made several short documentaries about them and even traveled twice to Indonesia with one of the world’s leading octopus scientists to film them in their natural habitat. My home office is packed with octopus imagery and iconography, and years ago I made a personal vow never to eat octopus. Squid and other mollusks still get a pass in my book. If you want to debate the ethics of this, fine.

The octopus is a singularly unique creature in the animal kingdom. They are essentially related to clams and abalone and snails, yet they possess an intelligence (let alone a body form) that is so strange and alien, it is unsurprising that sci-fi movies like Arrival feature creatures that are both very intelligent and octopus-like. If you have ever spent an hour alone on the seafloor with an octopus (as I have….just looking eye to eye), you know that they are something different. While most other fish swim away, an octopus will often linger and even engage in what might be considered play.

In fact, we’ve learned that octopuses rely heavily on learning rather than instinct. Unlike many animals that follow hardwired behavioral scripts, octopuses explore, test, and improvise. For that reason and others, it’s hard not to think of them more like other familiar mammals, like a dog or a dolphin.

And then you consider evolution and it gets really weird.

The common octopus (Octopus vulgaris) in Indonesia. (Photo: Erik Olsen)

That’s the thing. When we talk about smart animals, we tend to think of vertebrates: dolphins, whales, dogs, horses, elephants. They all share a long evolutionary lineage with us, shaped by natural selection into social, communicative, problem-solving creatures whose minds we recognize because they work in ways familiar to our own. But octopuses are not like that. They diverged from our lineage hundreds of millions of years ago. The last common ancestor humans share with an octopus was a simple wormlike creature. From that fork in the tree of life, vertebrates developed one path toward cognition while invertebrates followed others, some of them evolving remarkable abilities (spiders anyone?!), but rarely what we traditionally call intelligence.

Somehow, the octopus broke that pattern. It built a mind through a completely different architecture, with neurons spread throughout its arms, distributed processing, and behaviors that suggest curiosity, play, memory, strategy. They’ve developed these complex behaviors because they are essentially large blobs of protein moving about the seafloor. When exposed, they are very vulnerable, and so millions of years of evolutionary pressure have compelled them to become, well, smart. What makes this even stranger is how short their lives are…usually just a year or two. All of that intelligence compressed into what, in the grand scheme of things, is just a brief flash of existence.

Seeing eye to eye with an octopus in Indonesia (Photo: Erik Olsen)

Alongside them, their closest cousins, the cuttlefish, have evolved similarly striking cognitive abilities, but they don’t quite equate with the octopus. Still, together they show that intelligence is not a single climb up one evolutionary ladder but something nature can shape in entirely different ways. Convergent evolution.

So, if you were searching for meaning and purpose and trying to understand the process of intelligence itself, you could hardly find a better creature to study than the octopus. Short of discovering another intelligent life form somewhere in the universe, the octopus is one of our best bets to grasp what intelligence is and how it evolves.

Awesome California wildlife merch on our Etsy store.

Scientists are doing precisely that right now. And there is one species they turn to the most: our own California two-spot octopus (Octopus bimaculoides), one of the most remarkable animals on the planet. (They get their name, obviously, from the attractive blue spots on their sides.) The California two-spot octopus spends its days tucked into small crevices and hunting right off our shores. You can see them up and down the coast. I have only encountered a few in the wild, but each time it’s special, like a Christmas gift.

California two-spot octopus in a lab (Photo: Erik Olsen)

What’s especially cool is that the California two-spot octopus has gone from a coastal curiosity — an animal long seen, admired, and loved by divers — to a full-fledged scientific model, teaching us new things about neuroscience, genomics, and behavior. In 2015, researchers published the first complete genome sequence of the California two-spot octopus, and it marked a watershed moment in the study of cognition. For the first time, scientists could look directly at the genetic architecture behind an intelligence built on an evolutionary branch completely separate from our own. The two-spot became the go-to organism for this work because it is abundant in local waters, manageable in laboratory settings, and displays a level of problem solving that can be tested and observed in controlled conditions. I guess they make great pets, too, because several folks on Instagram have them and make pretty entertaining videos with them.

The genome of the two-spot octopus turned out to carry a treasure trove of evolutionary surprises. One of the most striking discoveries was the massive expansion of protocadherin genes, which guide how neurons connect and communicate. Vertebrates like humans have them, too, but octopuses have many more. This genetic abundance appears tailored to their unusual nervous system. Roughly two-thirds of an octopus’s neurons are not in its central brain but distributed throughout its arms. Each arm can process sensory information and make decisions locally, while still coordinating with the rest of the animal.

According to Roger Hanlon, who I have worked with, octopuses are colorblind, and yet they have this remarkable ability to change color to fit their surroundings. It may be the most remarkable camouflage ability in the animal world, and yet we still understand surprisingly little about how it works. In addition to neurons, their skin and arms appear to contain opsins, light-detecting cells, raising the possibility that octopuses do not just see with their eyes, but with their bodies as well.

I mean, does it get more alien than that? That’s the stuff of serious sci-fi.

The author filming a cuttlefish in Indonesia. (Photo: Hergen Spalink)

The genome also revealed a wide set of genes involved in learning, neural flexibility, and sensory perception. Many of the same kinds of genes that support cognition in vertebrates appear in octopuses too, but they have been expanded and reworked, suggesting that evolution arrived at intelligence using a very different blueprint.

Perhaps the most surprising discovery is the octopus’s heavy reliance on RNA editing. RNA editing is the process by which cells deliberately alter RNA after it has been copied from DNA. If DNA is the master blueprint, RNA is the working set of instructions, and in octopuses that working copy can be extensively rewritten, especially in the nervous system. While other animals can do this on a small scale, this unusual molecular flexibility in the octopus may help their nervous systems adapt and respond with a level of speed and sophistication that maybe helps explain their problem-solving abilities and behavioral creativity, even if scientists are still working out exactly how it all works.

We’re really at the beginning of an effort to better understand this animal’s remarkable abilities and how it compares with our own unique intelligence. What we have learned so far is that octopus intelligence is real, measurable, and deeply unusual. In experiments, octopuses can solve puzzles, open jars, navigate mazes, remember solutions over time, and learn by watching others. Stories of octopuses escaping their tanks, squirting water at people they recognize, or slipping away from handlers they seem to dislike are surprisingly common. When I was a summer docent at the National Museum in Washington D.C. many years ago, there was an octopus that would greet me by draping an arm over the edge of the glass whenever I came in. Walking up to the tank felt less like approaching an exhibit and more like being welcomed by a friend.

Yes, I know, there is real danger in anthropomorphizing animals.

California two-spot octopus in a lab (Photo: Erik Olsen)

Many of my friends who are aware of my love for these animals beseeched me to watch My Octopus Teacher, the Oscar-winning documentary film. I’ve seen it twice, and I have to say that while I love many of the shots and scenes in the film, I feel like the movie goes way overboard making these animals seem like they have human emotions. I’m not sure they do. Something else is going on, I’m just not sure what it is.

If you’d like a good book on the subject, I’d recommend Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith. It’s got more actual science in it than Sy Montgomery’s The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness, which, like My Octopus Teacher, kind of annoyed me.

All of this is to say that we are blessed here in California to have such an amazing species in our local waters. The California two-spot octopus is more than an interesting coastal species; it is a window into how minds can form in ways we never imagined. Its genome offers clues to the very nature of intelligence, demonstrating that cognition can arise from wholly different evolutionary routes. In that sense, studying this unassuming little animal on our shoreline may be the closest we come to understanding an alien mind without ever leaving Earth.

Would you support us? Just a few bucks. We’d appreciate it!